White Femininity Is Still the Poster Girl for American Capitalism 

The Sweeney campaign shows how capitalism still packages whiteness as purity and sells it as Americana.

Popular culture and capitalism have always sexualized women. Add white supremacy into the mix, and what do you get? Sydney Sweeney’s latest advertisement with American Eagle.

In July, the clothing brand released a jeans campaign with Euphoria actor Sydney Sweeney, and there’s a lot to unpack. The ad is her clad in a Canadian tuxedo, while her gestures and mannerisms indicate a level of seduction.

Marketing to the male gaze sells—and it is used as a persuasive attempt to influence consumerism—but it does not stop there. Her blonde hair and blue eyes are the selling point and center of this advertisement, with the punchline, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” This (not so) subtle play on words becomes explicit when she describes how genes are passed down by “offspring,” affecting things like eye color that make her “jeans blue.”

The polarizing language regarding good, connotes the existence of bad. Or, black and white. Donald Trump used the same rhetoric a year prior when referring to immigrants as having inherently “bad genes.” The president has even voiced his support for the ad.

With conservatism on the rise, latent racism is becoming more mainstream—which prompts the questions: Who is the targeted audience of this ad, and what narrative is it telling? 

More than simply poor judgement, ads like these reflect a longstanding history of glorifying whiteness in the United (settler colonial) States—especially when you factor in the history of Western ads capitalizing off of the image of white women as innocent and appealing to male gaze. For example, most ads depicting housewives in the 1940s and ‘50s displayed what is considered the ideal woman: a dutiful, white housewife whose main concern is purity. 

Dr. Janell Hobson recently wrote in Ms.:

“It’s about which type of woman gets to define beauty and promoting scientific fixation on ‘good genes,’ a holdover from the era of eugenics (which literally means ‘good genes’).”

This bridges in the conversation of the racist subjugation of women’s bodies in connection to this American Eagle ad. 

Sydney Sweeney is also hukking another product: a men’s natural soap with her face on the front—a collaboration with the brand Dr. Squatch—claiming to be made from her leftover bath water. As Alex Lalli wrote in Ms., “Commercial society … encourages women to market themselves towards those often degrading desires and enables men to continue acting as if treating women as objects is acceptable.” 

The association with her image, purity and the concept of what is “natural” as desirable is marketed as a man’s fantasy of bathing in her bathwater.

The Greek imagery in the background of the ad—which is not Dr. Squatch’s typical outdoor Sasquatch branding—likens Sydney Sweeney to that of a Greek goddess, further emphasizing how white femininity is something associated with purity and placed on a pedestal. Dare we call it what it is? Anti-feminist and racist.

The similarities between the way Sweeney’s soap is marketed and how household cleaning supplies were marketed during segregation are uncanny. What we are witnessing is a regression back to propaganda of an Aryan master race.

The emphasis on lightness and brightening does not only extend to the appearance of objects, but to the phenomenon of skin bleaching. Stemming from the glorification of whiteness and colonialism, having a fair skinned complexion has been dominantly associated with beauty and femininity. Colorism has been utilized as an abuse of power and invoked as an occupation of privilege through a femininity serviceable to racist patriarchy.

Historically, Black and brown people have been condemned as impure and inferior.

A prime example is the degradation of Sarah Baartman—an Indigenous South African woman who was stolen from her land and sexually exploited for comparison of Black women’s bodies being different from white women’s. Baartman’s colonial legacy laid the foundation of tropes against Black women as promiscuous, sinful and animalistic juxtaposing with the Victorian puritanical image Sweeney seems to be capitalizing off of.

For notable comparison, in 2017 Dove released an ad which later was taken down displaying the same racist gendered politics of cleanliness:

Can you picture a Black or brown woman in Sweeney’s American Eagle ad?

What is America’s obsession with cleanliness? Eugenics. The association of whiteness with what is correct, normal and pure is dictated by the dehumanization of Black and brown people. 

The body politics Sweeney situates herself in is a reflection of white femininity as a misogynistic weapon of white supremacy and communicates Eurocentric beauty standards as exclusively valuable.

This latest controversy is on brand for Sweeney. Sweeney’s role on Euphoria begins with another docile white woman trope. Her relationship with an African American boyfriend in the first season of the show displays her first sexual objectification through the lens of being a fetish or prize for a Black man. This image of white women being displayed as an object of social status and capital connects itself to conservatives’ desire of reclaiming a glorified image of her in this American Eagle ad.

It would be a disservice to overlook “American” Eagle’s implications of American. The ad was met with immediate backlash, but the company doubled down on the ad, releasing a support statement for it that reads, in part: “Her jeans. Her story. … Great jeans look good on everybody”. 

Discourse regarding who is American, what American looks like, and patriotism’s settler colonial foundations continue to influence what some call the American Dream. (Although the Americas extend down to Latin America, the United States dominantly controls the image of a true American.) American Eagle’s association with whiteness and use of femininity further reinforces an idealized Americana image—one which is racist and sexist. So, what happens when you combine white femininity, capitalism and Americana? A scary reality of gender and race essentialism. 

The relationship between femininity and white supremacy in the United States isn’t to be overlooked. Media like this has been rampantly resurfacing during this moment of emboldened racism in America. These products of popular culture are reflections of the latent underbelly of violence continuing to be triggered by this current political climate and festering to reposition itself as acceptable. 

It is time to implore a feminist critique of race and gender dynamics in commercial media. Seeing as though these racist patriarchal ideas are not new practices, how can we see these modes of cultural productions for what they really are, and how can we move beyond them?