As a denim ad glorifies whiteness under the guise of ‘great genes,’ feminists are left asking: Whose America is this?
When it comes to delivering both clear and implicit messages, advertisers know what they’re doing. So, when our politically charged culture wars go to battle over seemingly innocuous words like “great genes” versus “great jeans,” there is no such thing as overreaching. A provocative ad relishes in the power of double entendre.
In the case of the recent American Eagle denim commercial starring popular actor Sydney Sweeney, we could hardly call the messaging subtle: A video showcased Sweeney painting over her billboard image as the word “genes” is crossed out and in its place appears “jeans.” This video was then followed by a 15-second ad featuring the blonde actor describing how jeans are passed down from “parents to offspring” and that her “jeans are blue,” right as the camera focuses directly on her blue eyes.
“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” Get it?
The issue is, we all get it and cannot avoid the ad’s uncomfortable truths about how women’s bodies convey different symbols and meanings. As a symbol of beauty, Sweeney certainly fits the bill as an attractive, voluptuous young woman who has capitalized on her looks and popularity. However, when the camera emphasizes Sweeney’s blue eyes just after panning across her body as she gives a quasi-scientific lesson on how “genes” get passed down, beauty is no longer just about whether a young woman is attractive enough to serve as an ad campaign’s spokesperson. 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”).
I imagine the American Eagle clothing company thought it was being clever as it also references a different ad in which Sweeney talks about the denim she’s wearing while the camera fixates on her large bosom, subsequently prompting her to say, “Hey, up here!” While this particular ad has a bit of innocent fun with the male gaze, the subsequent “my jeans are blue” ad fails in its refocusing from Sweeney’s curves to her eye color. The ad mirrors less of the 1980s Calvin Klein commercial featuring 15-year-old Brooke Shields, which discusses genes and jeans through the context of science and evolution, and instead alludes to the pseudo-science of eugenics lifted from evolutionary discourse to construct concepts of race.
American Eagle’s advertising is not innocuous—not after centuries of chattel slavery followed by Jim Crow legal race segregation, settler-colonialism targeting the elimination of Native Americans, and various immigration bans and quotas in the interest of maintaining a majority-white demographic in the United States. This nation’s history of racist subjugation, coupled with reproductive restrictions on women’s bodies, now echoes in our present day with the Trump administration refueling anti-immigration crackdowns and obliteration of policies that support diversity, equity and inclusion.
It is no coincidence that certain right-wing conservatives have heralded Sweeney’s American Eagle ad with statements like “America is back!” (As if “America” went somewhere…) President Trump called the ad “fantastic” (and relegated Taylor Swift to “no longer hot“) after learning that Sweeney is a registered Republican.
Of course, those who lean left and promote progressive politics have responded with their own takedowns. From nicknaming the actor “Swastika Sweeney” (unfairly, I might add, since Sweeney has supported progressive causes and arranged for the proceeds from her American Eagle campaign to fund domestic violence services) to repositioning women of color in TikTok video commentary and witty memes. These include Asian American influencer Tiffany Fong satirically posing in yellow denims with the tagline “My jeans are yellow,” and an Internet meme reframing pop star Beyoncé’s own Levi’s Jeans ad with the caption “Beyoncé has better jeans.”
Unfortunately, the latter pits celebrity women against each other, with some questioning whether the pop star’s “jeans/genes” are indeed “better” given that her platinum-blonde appearance suggests the desire for all women across races to aspire to white femininity. (Such commentary of course inspired some “Black don’t crack” responses—the idea that the genetics behind melanin-rich skin helps it to age well—which challenged whether 27-year-old Sweeney could still look as ageless as Beyoncé does when she reaches the pop star’s current age of 43 going on 44, or even supermodel Iman at age 70 for that matter.)
Witty or not, provocative or not, sadly, these conversations surrounding Sweeney’s ad have proven that, as academic Tracy Butts writes, “women’s bodies are a battleground.” Moreover, the discourse has returned women to the confining prism of gender and race essentialism, despite the tireless efforts of sociology and gender studies to remind us that these concepts are “social constructions.”
Seeing race and gender as social constructs recognizes how physical characteristics are often assigned a social label, which then gets politicized and mobilized toward nation-building. But what does it mean to socially construct “race” and “gender” in our commercial media? Why does the American Eagle ad seem more eugenicist than the Calvin Klein ad featuring Brooke Shields? Is it simply a difference between the eras? Or did Shields, as a brunette model, appear less “Aryan?” Granted, Shields’ ad didn’t make innuendos about color, only speaking of genes in a mostly race-neutral way, and centering the double entendre on the “evolution” of different designer pairs of jeans.
However, does being brunette or “blonde” really matter? The late bell hooks once criticized both Beyoncé and actor Laverne Cox for sporting blonde hair through their public personas in ways that de-emphasize their Blackness. hooks claimed that American media has traditionally promoted platinum-blonde sex symbols as “ultra-white,” which to her, “was a way to promote white supremacy” (1992, 119). Given Beyoncé’s own ad with Levi’s Jeans, a partnership that corresponds with her song, “LEVII”S JEANS,” there is no doubt that the pop star engages critically with these racial politics in Americana imagery.
Having just wrapped up her Cowboy Carter world tour—now the highest-grossing country-themed tour—Beyoncé went to great lengths to reframe and reclaim the Americana imagery, often associated with country music, for African American culture.
Such reclamations include: denims (some have referenced the fabric as “Negro cloth” combining indigo and cotton, crops grown by enslaved then later sharecropping labor); the African origins of the banjo; cowboy history; and horses (such as the Lipizzaner horse on the Cowboy Carter album cover, whose color changes from black at birth to white as it ages). The latter point dovetails with Beyoncé’s hair color choices, as the impossibly white hair she sports on the album cover mirrors the same shade of the horse she rides.
Beyoncé’s platinum-blonde hair, especially when associated with her country music era, recalls the construction of a whiteness based on an impossible purity; a purity that her own Creolized Blackness upends, especially as she reclaims the country music genre and Americana and reroutes it toward a Black aesthetic. Of course, within the context of her Cowboy Carter world tour, her blonde hair is placed in dialogue with more Afrocentric expressions, such as her “Reclamation of America” look that included beaded black braids. She posed as Lady Liberty in this look, her arm outstretched to reveal a smoked cigar—both reclaiming a masculine symbol and a relic used in Afro-based religious rituals for cleansing and purification—as her own beacon of light. Incidentally, Beyoncé closed each tour stop with a replica of Lady Liberty on stage donning a bandana-like mask, also sporting braids.
Beyoncé is cheeky with these reclamations and further references the artistic efforts of other Black women reclaiming Lady Liberty, a symbol first memorializing the abolition of slavery before it later represented a “nation of immigrants.”
Faith Ringgold’s “They Came to America” (connecting Lady Liberty with a slave ship and its African occupants) and Amy Sherald’s “Trans Forming Liberty” (which depicts Lady Liberty as a Black trans woman) come to mind. Indeed, the latter artwork became a recent target for censorship with the regime change at the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery, thus prompting Sherald to withdraw her provocative exhibit “American Sublime.”
These democratic projects undercut the authoritative impulse to reinscribe “biology as destiny.” Democracy fuels the idea that we can transcend and transform our own bodies, dreams and desires, thus liberating us from biological essentialism.
The best “all-American jeans” advertisement should capture this sense of aspirational dreaming. And Ralph Lauren “Oak Bluffs” ads do just that. These campaigns depict the collegiate, bougie aesthetic of Black middle-class life—represented by those African Americans attending HBCUs and vacationing in Oak Bluffs at Martha’s Vineyard during the summertime—and resonates more positively for a wider audience than American Eagle’s exclusionary “great genes” messaging.
Both represent “America.” But one recalls both a heritage and an aspirational quality that is achievable through upward mobility, while the other curtails our aspirations and restricts aesthetics to a certain race, look and body type. One is invested in the democratized “promise of America,” while the other restricts that promise to “whites only.”
Regardless of our political leanings, let’s uplift a democracy that includes all of us, not just some of us, and hope that our commercial media will adjust accordingly.
Great Job Janell Hobson & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
