TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘Keep calm, stay safe, and drink bubble tea’: Commodifying the crisis of Covid-19 in Singapore advertising
AU - Starr, Rebecca
AU - Go, Christian
AU - Pak, Vincent
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was done in the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network. The authors would like to thank Marika Gunji of Stanford University for help with TEM imaging. Financial support was provided by the MARCO Interconnect Focus Center and a Stanford University Center for Integrated Systems gift grant.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.
PY - 2022/4/9
Y1 - 2022/4/9
N2 - Advertisements employ multimodal configurations of semiotic resources in an effort to lead consumers to draw particular meanings from desired consumption behaviors. This analysis examines the deployment of such resources in advertising during the global Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on the Southeast Asian nation of Singapore. We identify five discourses that offer distinct framings of Covid-19 as a challenge for workers, a wellness issue, a threat to home and family, a challenge for women, and a threat to the Singapore lifestyle. Undergirded by neoliberal notions such as the productivity imperative, these discourses rationalize a range of consumer behaviors as necessary and justified in the struggle to defeat the virus. Advertisements are argued to place the burden of navigating the pandemic primarily on women via the evocation of power femininity. We propose a new framework, crisis commodification, as a means of understanding the ideological mechanisms at play in Covid-19 advertising. (Critical discourse analysis, crisis commodification, semiotic analysis, advertising, public health, Southeast Asia)∗
AB - Advertisements employ multimodal configurations of semiotic resources in an effort to lead consumers to draw particular meanings from desired consumption behaviors. This analysis examines the deployment of such resources in advertising during the global Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on the Southeast Asian nation of Singapore. We identify five discourses that offer distinct framings of Covid-19 as a challenge for workers, a wellness issue, a threat to home and family, a challenge for women, and a threat to the Singapore lifestyle. Undergirded by neoliberal notions such as the productivity imperative, these discourses rationalize a range of consumer behaviors as necessary and justified in the struggle to defeat the virus. Advertisements are argued to place the burden of navigating the pandemic primarily on women via the evocation of power femininity. We propose a new framework, crisis commodification, as a means of understanding the ideological mechanisms at play in Covid-19 advertising. (Critical discourse analysis, crisis commodification, semiotic analysis, advertising, public health, Southeast Asia)∗
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85111444712&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S0047404521000567
DO - 10.1017/S0047404521000567
M3 - Article
SN - 0047-4045
VL - 51
SP - 333
EP - 359
JO - Language in Society
JF - Language in Society
IS - 2
ER -
