Gazing at PETA and United Way

When I think about the PETA advertisements, I obviously compare them to the United Way ads that we saw in Ellen Barton's essay. As I compare them side by side, I think of something that I am hesitant to verbalize for fear that people are going to take it the wrong way... But here it goes. I would like to present the idea that in the world of advertising, animals and people with disabilities are both victims of the same thing.

I would once again like to call upon my Gender and Sexuality class to explain the concept of the gaze. As Ellen Barton mentioned, "More subtly, however, the ads allow, even encourage a binary opposition identifying a separate group in society--the less than human Others--diseased, disfigured, or disabled--subject to "our" voyeuristic gaze." (Barton 175) To elaborate on this concept a bit more, I will define the gaze as we discuss it in Gender and Sexuality: As consumers of pop culture and advertisements, we have the power of gazing. That is, we can look at the people in advertisements as sort of feminized objects. We can stare at them and scrutinize their every feature. We can look shamelessly without the threat that these objectified people will stare back at us, and we can assign them attributes or lifestyles that may be entirely inaccurate.

Here's the connection: When we look at the disabled people in United Way ads or the animals in the PETA ads, they are a victim of our gaze. We can look at them, judge them, even project ideas on them that may have absolutely no truth to them. So what does this mean? I think it means that they are experiencing a sort of crisis of agency. We can't really say for sure what an animal wants. And we also can't really say what these disabled people in these ads really want because perhaps they do not even know. They are so young that maybe they do not know what kind of influence they want to have. And rather than explain themselves to their viewers, they are stuck being captured images, ours for the gazing. They represent what we want them to represent, and their influence only reaches as far as we let it. Is there agency in that?