Barton's argument about "Textual Practices of Erasure" seems to only be able to tangentially include any of the PETA ads. She says that United Way ads have continued "the binary representation of the disabled as objects of pity or fear and of donors as compassionate members of the able-bodied community [who] offer help to those Others" (184). For this argument to apply to PETA we would need to swap the "Others" and the "disabled" for the animals in the ads and the "compassionate members who offer help" for the reader-gone-vegetarian. In the photograph of the pig on the factory farm, the viewer is treated with the caged and forlorn face of a pig along with the message "BAN FACTORY FARMING: Go Vegetarian." It certainly instills pity in the viewer but not really any fear. The picture of the chicks saying "We are not nuggets!" achieves a similar effect. It's easy to see how the PETA ads via their careful word selection erase "the complexity of disability in favor of the evocation of pity and fear" (184). Here again "disability" must be swapped with the idea of "animals." In the ad that says "Did your food have a face?" the grotesque picture of a dead cow's head erases complexity. But it doesn't actually erase the complexity of the subject of the ad. Instead it erases the complexity of a consumer of meat.
Here is where I think Barton's argument finds it's limit. It seems that the viewer of the ads is the "compassionate donor" as well as the "disabled" in that they are non-vegetarian. This is because the PETA ads erase their complexity. A parent trying to feed his or her family can be very complicated. Their is the huge issue of cost of food that is totally ignored and the issue specific nutrition needs is ignored as well. It seems that in the end PETA retains all of the agency in the whole process. They create a black and white situation where becoming vegetarian is simple and then those "compassionate donors" "cure" themselves by becoming vegetarian. The United Way ads at least grant some of their agency to the donors but PETA only ads to their agency by producing converts.
1 comment:
I would say the ad with the forlorn-looking pig also creates a sort of false dilemma (is that the phrase I'm looking for?). The banning of factory farming and vegetarianism are not really related, but the ad implies that meat-eating in general is the cause of factory farming. The false dilemma created here is that one must either A) Not eat meat, or B) Eat cruelly-treated factory-farmed animals.
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