Marking differences,consuming identities: Race,sexuality,disease and “global Turkishness” in the United Condoms of Benetton campaign

Intersections: Identity, race and critical race theory

Stuart Hall states that “identities are in an ongoing process of developing and are always becoming” (Hall, 1991: 4). Similarly, scholars of critical race studies underline the process of becoming as an intersecting aspect of identity. By emphasizing the significance of intersectionality for multidimensional identities, they recognize that both race and racism work with and through gender, sexuality, class and nation/nationality (Collins, 2004; Delgado and Stefancic, 2001; Downing and Husband, 2005; Goldberg, 1993; Hodkinson, 2011). These following studies of contemporary race theory are used as a way of looking critically at race relations in a multidisciplinary theory. Rather than a biologically determined essential formation, race is considered to be a cultural, social and discursive construction that is closely connected with the media representations of marginalized groups, the depiction of stereotypes and the animation of racism in media texts and discourses. However, when looking through a more traditional approach to racialization, many studies focus more on the issue of exclusion while investigating the significance of race in power structures in a society. In this study, rather than focusing directly on exclusion, the paper focuses on the inclusion of race in the construction of new identities, particularly the ones in Turkish society in the new millennium.

Note that the terms “black” and “white” are used to specify the skin colour of both the models featured in the ads and the targeted audience. In Turkey, the Turkish population is primarily those of a lighter complexion. Therefore, Turkishness is represented by “whiteness”, which is associated with the light pigmentation of the skin rather than the racial classification that is used worldwide: black, yellow and white. According to the advertising practitioners, it is more than specifying cultural differences between Turks and Africans/African Americans: whiteness is primarily visual (Personal interviews, June–August 2007). Pieterse (1992) notes that the images are primarily produced by whites almost without exception, as they are the ones in a position of dominance, and this is regardless of changes in domination and exclusion of other races. The Turkish advertising practitioners interviewed for this study declared that white superiority was not only acceptable but also was an invisible category in advertisements. In their imagination, it is hard for Turkish people to identify themselves with blackness (Personal interviews, June and July 2007). The normative acceptance of whiteness, as a predominant requirement, was never questioned and white models in Benetton advertisements were never stated as “others” during the interview process.

The Benetton ad campaign, embedded in a neoliberal market, serves to illustrate (a) the increasingly complex and intersecting identities signified by race, sexuality, disease and nationality and (b) how a discursive nodal point is constituted that can be understood in the context of neoliberal developments of the 20th century. These advertisements can be considered as an attempt to reimagining race and sexuality while reinvigorating white privilege and supremacy. As such, they perpetuate the marginalization and admittance of black people.

Neoliberalism in Turkey

It is necessary to take a closer look at the developments in Turkey’s economy and culture to understand (a) the concept of global Turkishness and (b) the relationship between the consumption and construction of identities that defines a new era. The neoliberal policies of the Prime Minister Turgut Özal, in the 1980s and 1990s, had a major impact on the Turkish economy. The neoliberal ideology, based on competition, entrepreneurship, free market, individualism and consumerism, was exalted in the mainstream media with reference to Özal’s discourse. The 2002 report by the Central Bank provides a detailed overview of economic reforms and changes in consumption since the 1980s. According to this report, the January 1984 reform of the import regime represented a major break with the import substitution policies of the 1970s. With the help of the reductions in quantitative restrictions on imports and the cuts in the rates of customs duties, multinational corporations began to operate freely in Turkey (Report 2002: 10). With the improvement in foreign trade, the share of exports in the economy increased 300% in the 1980s (Report 2002: 10). At the same time, the consumerist culture simultaneously arose in Turkey largely due to the government’s export-led growth strategy. Market-and consumption-oriented policies reinforced private consumption (Report 2002: 9, 70).

All these developments reflected upon the consumption practices that immediately took place. In 1991, the total number of credit cards in Turkey was 766,085. This number increased 18 times within the next 10 years. In 2001, 13,996,806 credit cards were in use in the country (Bali, 2002: 307). Consumption has become a leisure activity. In the late 1980s imported goods and global brand names appeared abundantly on the shelves of newly emerging supermarkets. According to Rıfat Bali, lowered barriers on exports, especially on products such as cars, were followed by Japanese cars appearing on the streets. In 1989, consumers had to wait four to six months after they placed an order for a BMW or Mercedes. In the same year, the demand for Jaguars was so spectacular that it went over the quota that the company allocated to Turkey (Bali, 2002: 30). Similarly, with the help of Turkey’s market reforms to ease economic and financial regulations, American and other foreign products and lifestyles became even more popular. Global chains opened restaurants ⁴ and coffeehouse chains began to appear and started to compete with local foodservice markets. All these exemplify the success of neoliberal policies aimed to boost global trade and individual consumption in Turkey and, I argue, a shift in national identity construction.

The global economy, neoliberalism and global Turkish identity

The globalization of consumer markets has demanded the reconciliation of national identity within a global context (Foster, 2002; Kemper, 2001; Mazzarella, 2003). In a neoliberal environment, the construction of national identities is only possible through involvement with global as well as national markets. Today, markers of identity such as race, skin colour and ethnicity are the deliberate focus of advertising agencies, in order that all identities can be defined through their relationship to the markets (Abu-Lughod, 2005; Davila, 2001; Foster, 2002; Mankekar, 1999; Miller, 1995; Wilk, 2002).

As a result, a distinctive Turkish identity, constituted by the globalization of consumer markets and neoliberalism, is redefined and referred to in this paper as global Turkishness. The Benetton campaign reconstructs global Turkishness and addresses both global and national identities in three main ways: firstly, through the consumption of certain products and services; secondly, by acquiring and articulating global symbols or images in a local context of identity; and, finally, through the formation and spectacle of otherness in a neoliberal context. The following paragraphs examine each of these factors briefly. Later in the article, I discuss these three factors in connection with the discourses of race, sexuality and HIV/AIDS as constitutive elements of a global Turkish identity.

The first factor is the simultaneous construction of national and global identities through consumption, since neoliberalism requires individuals to self-consciously construct identities through consumer choice. From a neoliberal perspective, “the creation of globally integrating markets furthers individual freedom and material progress and individual freedom and universal consumerist principles [which] are universally applicable” (Steger and Roy, 2010: 53) are tenets of neoliberal identity construction. Therefore, managing a global Turkish identity involves the deliberate consumption of specific goods and services, particularly consumption of global products, such as Benetton condoms, in a neoliberal national context, as well as the consumption of national products in a global environment (Ogan, 2001; Punathambekar, 2009; Wilk, 2002).

The second way in which the Benetton campaign reconstructs global Turkishness is through the introduction of global symbols and images to the Turkish public space. The media and especially advertising play an important role in this process. The global traits of global Turkishness include familiarity with a global repertoire of images, such as blackness, whiteness and multiracial harmony, in worldwide Benetton advertising campaigns. ⁵ The Benetton brand, specifically, “achieved a very high level of awareness around the world during the 1980s, by means of sparse, strong images, which the company ran as narrative-free advertisements on large poster sites” (Crosier et al., 1999: 838). Personal and collective identities emerge and circulate through their mundane engagement with global images, signs, symbols and global media forms, as well as commodities. The articulation for the construction of the new identity of the Turkish audience depends on incorporating both the local and the global repertoire of images. In this way, the Benetton campaign not only promotes, but also creates a global national identity in relation to race and sexuality in a unique local context. In the ad, the juxtaposition of the image (black skin) and the trademark (Benetton) creates a sense of belonging to a global culture for the consumers of Benetton condoms. The Benetton ad engages with the Turkish cultural legacy by connecting identities to consumption in two major ways: through consumption of black bodies both as a visual signifier and sexual object by neoliberal global Turks and consumption of a global condom brand that represents the transformation of Turkish society into a global consumer society.

The final aspect of the reconstitution of global Turkish national identity is also directly related to and dependent upon the discursive formation of “otherness” through minority groups such as blacks in Turkey. In order to construct a global Turkish identity, advertisers invite the Turkish audience to sustain a dialogue with the “other” in the text. To understand the construction of global Turkishness, then, we have to understand the relationship between Turk-ness and “otherness”, since the Turkish national identity cannot be understood without problematizing the ideological constructions of national identities. The use of ethnic models in advertising campaigns for Benetton mark “the other” and meaning of otherness arises through the spectacle of the black model in the ad.

Race and black sexuality in Turkey

In Turkey, the perception of blackness and discourses on over-sexualized black males were constructed in a historical context. The ancestors of African Turks were enslaved in the Ottoman Empire and brought to Anatolia in that era. In Turkish society, blackness is a cultural reference that is typically thought of in the framework of sexuality. The relationship between blackness and sexuality has been determined in the Ottoman Court as well as in Turkish popular culture. Black slaves were the significant “other” of the Ottoman Palace, and especially the harem. Although the Palace consisted of both black and whites, the harem was generally guarded by black eunuchs. According to historian Jane Hathaway (1997: 139 ), the eunuchs included black Africans from “the eastern regions of sub-Saharan Africa and whites primarily from the Caucasus”. In the late 16th century, African black eunuchs seized power, and the Chief Black Eunuch became the most powerful in the harem. Hathaway (1997: 139) says that the Africans were more likely than Caucasians to survive castration, which occurred before they were transported to Anatolia. Discourses around castration ceremonies and the survival of Africans have reinforced the rhetoric of potency and the over-sexualization of black bodies, with the black eunuchs simultaneously representing impotency and potency. Nevertheless, to this day blackness is still considered to be different, strange or even exotic, and the black male remains “other”.

A Turkish scholar, Esma Durugönül (2003), notes that African Turks, as “visible but invisible” minorities, were seen as Turks/Muslims rather than Blacks both during the Ottoman and Republican eras. In both eras, they were recorded as Muslim and Turkish in demographic records. Black slaves of the Ottoman Empire gained freedom after the abolishment of slavery in 1923 by the newly established Republic of Turkey. They settled in Anatolia and formed communities, especially in the Aegean Region. This did not eliminate discrimination; even today blacks are commonly referred to as “zenci” (coon, blacky) or sometimes, mistakenly, as “Arap” (Arab). In modern Turkish society, Afro-Turks are minorities in the political, cultural and intellectual history of white Turkey. Turkish/black celebrities, artists, reporters, singers and public intellectuals have contributed to the popular representations of racial differences of white and black Turks in the Turkish media. For example, journalists certainly commented on the African origin and skin colours of famous African-Turks, such as Kuzgun Acar, a sculptor, the first black choreographer and ballet dancer of Turkey, Sait Sökmen, and VJ and TV host Defne J Foster, to name a few (Sabah, 2005). Such discourses reinforce the very definition of Turkishness and connotatively relate Turkish identity to whiteness. They are considered to be domestic foreigners, people with a right to live in Turkish society, and are defined as legitimate others within the society.

The other: Black race, sexuality and HIV/AIDS

From the perspective of Turkish advertisers, the “otherness” in both national and international contexts is constructed as “blackness” that engages black male (hyper) sexuality and the racialization of a disease. By producing advertising campaigns by articulating new identities and by putting them into circulation in the public sphere, the Ivme Group makes minorities distinctly visible. The advertising practitioners use of blackness as an ethnic image in the ads not only represents black minorities of white Western countries, but also signifies the reconciliation of consumption with identities in multiracial local contexts. Therefore, in the next section, in order to understand advertisers’ racial imagination, I discuss two new ontological categories in Turkish media, namely Black and White Turks. Then, I analyse Turkish identity in relation to skin colour, social class and lifestyle, and how advertisers reorganize the racial discourse of blackness around concepts of sexuality and HIV/AIDS, as a condition of the creation of neoliberal national identities in Turkey.

The skin colour of Turkish identity: Black Turks, White Turks

According to the Ivme Group, by excluding other demographic groups, the campaign hails “a hip, global, younger Turkish consumer that identifies herself with global brands in an increasingly global world” (Personal interview with Satal and the new-business director, Zehra, 18 June 2007). In other words, the campaign marks the similarity between the savvy Turkish consumer and Benetton’s global customers. The advertisement connects consumer identity with globalization and enables Turkish consumers to enter into world-class consumption. Therefore, this ad can also be viewed within the context of a heated debate of the 1990s about the identity formation of “Black” and “White” Turks in Turkey. Although superficially blackness refers to skin colour, in reality it is a reference to social class and lifestyle. In contrast to the lower class, “Black” Turks, the White Turks belong to the upper-middle or upper classes that adopted a Western lifestyle. They are urban, well-educated professionals, graduates of top high schools and universities in Turkey and the world.

The White Turks’ new approach to nationalism and national identity is important regarding its relationship to global symbols and images. Global images, which are familiar because of the globalized world of moving images projected through the global mass media, become crucial for the formation of global Turkish identity. In the case of Benetton, the global mass-mediated images offer an international form of consumerism that projects a global condom brand into a local context, on the street and at sports events, inviting its audience to engage actively with global images of the advertising campaign. By mimicking the global advertising campaigns of Benetton, these images (e.g. the faceless black man) transcend international space and are quickly assimilated into the local repertoires of culture. In other words, while mass-mediated and deterritorialized imagery reconstructs the national, it transcends boundaries of national space. In this context, familiarity is essential to the ambiguous Turkish identity and the ambivalent meaning of the ads. The condom ad marks the Turkish identity but also connects a specific group of consumers, the White Turks, to the global market.

The Benetton campaign and consuming racial otherness

As previously discussed, since black skin is an obvious mark of the ethnic difference in the Turkish cultural knowledge, the Benetton condom advertisements and fliers are good examples of the use of distinctions for communicative purposes. Africans/African Americans are common images in the Turkish mind, exemplified by black basketball or football players, American soul, jazz, and blues singers, and by African American soldiers on the US bases in Turkey. Briefly, black people are associated either with the United States or Africa rather than Turkey. Therefore, featuring models of different races is one of the most common examples of the process of globalization in the advertising industry. Also, according to the Ivme Group employees, from the Turkish audiences’ perspective, the black model stands for “difference” (Ivme employees, personal interviews, June–August 2007). Both the print advertisements and the fliers produced by the Ivme Group make this philosophy abundantly clear by featuring non-Turkish models. Thus, in the advertisers’ cultural imagination, these ads represent “a spectacle of otherness” (Hall, 1997) that marks the difference and circumscribes issues of exclusion. In order to construct a global Turkish identity, the advertising practitioners invite the audience to participate in the active role of engaging with the “other”: blackness in this case.

The complicity between global and local connotations of blackness in relation to “otherness”, and the implications of the complicity for the merging neoliberal Turkish identity, are layered together in the Carry a Condom campaign. Thus, in this campaign, there are two interpretations of blackness: that of Benetton and that of the Ivme Group. On the one hand, by using a black model, the Ivme Group articulated Benetton’s longstanding international conception of blackness, specifically for a Turkish audience. Ivme has conceptualized its blackness on the basis of earlier international Benetton ads that frequently portray racial harmony and internationalization. Therefore, blackness stands for the global corporate identity of Benetton, which embraces every nation, race and gender in its egalitarianism. In this context, blackness, previously invisible in mainstream Turkish advertising, has become the marker of the Benetton Company. An external conception of blackness was transported globally and articulated as a Turkish concept. On the other hand, in advertisers’ imagination the locally produced Benetton campaign connects Turkish consumers to modern global consumers by signifying the differences and relationship between the racial concepts of Black and White in Turkey. This creates an ambiguity because by employing global images, the campaign, on the one hand, transcends boundaries by appearing to promote black and white harmony, while on the other hand it simultaneously appeals to those who identify themselves specifically with “White Turks.”

Reimagining race and sexuality: Benetton ads

In modern Turkey, blacks are still the subjects of jokes by White Turks within a racialized regime of representation. Rumours about their sexual potency are based on humorous and grotesque stories about their giant penises and prowess. The stereotypes of having “a big dick” or “three legs” underline this over-sexualized character, which is emphasized in an implicit way in the referent system of the Benetton campaign. In the condom ad, the image of a black man signifies potency. According to McCracken, advertising is “a conduit through which meaning constantly pours from the culturally constituted world to consumer goods” (1986: 75–76) and works “as a potential method of meaning transfer by bringing the consumer good and a representation of the culturally constituted world together within the frame of a particular advertisement” (1986: 71). The Turkish advertising industry, building upon the repertoires of representation around black sexuality, both reproduces and maintains racial stereotypes—based in fantasy—dating from the Ottoman Empire. Connotatively, the black men in this ad are confined and defined in their very being as purely sexual, hence hypersexual. Once again, in the Ivme Group campaign, sexuality and race are linked around the image of a black male and a condom.

The campaign idea found favour among Ivme employees, since a more explicit promotion of sexuality and the selling of erotica seemed risky in 2000 (Personal interview, 11 August 2007). Therefore, the company took the safer route by emphasizing the benefits of condom use, rather than directly stressing sexuality. The company chairman, Satal, stated that, even as recently as 1999, they “had to think within a box” ⁶ (Personal interview, 23 July 2007). “Thinking within a box” means engaging Benetton ads with the cultural legacy and the historical construction of over-sexualized black males in Turkey and articulating the sexual discourse of blackness through the spectacle of the hypersexualized black male body in the campaign.

Yet, the question remains: Why use an image of the back of the black head, such that the face cannot be seen? In the ad, both the man and the condom seem out of place. The audience does not expect to see a condom taped to the back of his head. Nevertheless, this positioning is legitimized by a text above the condom: “Keep in Mind”. What is on a black man’s mind is sex. This text provides an element of legitimacy for the placement of the condom on the basis of juxtaposition and appearance. A black male body is featured as a visual representation of a condom, which, as a signifier, refers to the phallus. Thus, through the overt signifier (the condom), a less obvious meaning is created that cannot be understood by the words themselves. The phallus, which “plays the leading role in the grotesque image” (Bakhtin, 1984: 317), is replaced by the head. An influential black author, Franz Fanon, wrote: “it is the subject of a widespread fantasy, which fixates the black man at the level of the genitals. One is no longer aware of the Negro, but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis” (as cited in Hall, 1997: 230).

One of multiple possible interpretations is that, by attaching a condom to the head, the whole body of the black male is transformed into a penis. Therefore, the representation of difference carries a message equating over-sexualization and blackness. The phallus and the head are linked through the placement of the condom in the ad and connected to black sexuality. Fanon emphasizes the obsession of white people with black sexuality, and the Ivme Group's chairman has, inadvertently perhaps, demonstrated this by saying. “the ad featured a black male because the Ivme Group wanted to attract the attention of the public from an erotic perspective”. He explained that Turks associated black males with large penises, and that a symbol was used to imply the penis (Personal interview with Suleyman Satal, 13 June 2007). In other words, the absent phallus of a black man is fetishized. Since the notion of fetish refers to a substitute for that which is absent, it involves displacement, according to Stuart Hall, who argues that “the phallus cannot be represented because it is forbidden, taboo. The sexual energy, desire, and danger, all of which are emotions powerfully associated with the phallus, are transferred to another part of the body or another object, which substitutes for it” (Hall, 1997: 267). The strategy of replacing the phallus with a head works in both ways: signifying eroticism while maintaining a safe distance from what is forbidden or taboo, thus simultaneously representing and concealing the forbidden object of pleasure: the black penis. Therefore, the ad reinforces the primal fantasy and myth of the big black penis.

Enacting global Turkishness: White Turks and Black sexuality

During the late 20th century, blackness and sexuality took on new meanings in the context of extramarital relationships and sexual promiscuity, and have become a constitutive element in the identity politics of global neoliberalism. From the advertisers’ perspective, the early 2000s were the years during which the Turkish media benefited from some degree of sexual liberation (Personal communications, July and August 2007). According to Meltem Ahiska and Zafer Yenal, “[After the 1980s], the new sexual discourse, disseminated through the mass media in particular, encouraged liberation from traditional mores” (Ahiska and Yenal, 2006: 208). Sexual liberation in the late 20th century, in opposition to the conservative attitude of the previous era, brought many changes to Turkey; flirting has come to be considered natural, sexual rhetoric is common in newspapers, articles and quizzes featuring sexuality have appeared in magazines (especially those for women), adult bookstores have moved from back alleys to main streets, and seductive outfits are sold ostentatiously on the streets (Ahiska and Yenal, 2006). Ahiska and Yenal call this the era of “new sexuality”, which is more visible and more part of the public debate.

In light of these discussions, the intentional decision of the Ivme Group to use a black male is a reflection of sexual and racial fantasies about the black male body, offering the promise of sexual liberation and a global identity through commodity consumption. The image of the faceless male in the ad concurrently captures the ambiguous sexual fantasies of white people. With his ambiguous identity, the faceless black man can simultaneously represent anonymity, experience sexual pleasure and engage in sex with a stranger. The advertisement connotes an opportunity for a safe sexual relationship with an erotically marked, but anonymous, sexual partner outside marriage, since the black man is not a regular marriage partner in Turkish society. In this context, the ad signifies extramarital sex and sexual promiscuity, the new components of a global Turkish identity. The Benetton condom campaign was constructed on the basis of an ambivalent semiosis, with a cautious marketing strategy that was bold and conservative simultaneously. Catching the wave of new sexuality in two different print ads by featuring naked bodies, yet absent of sexual act or physical contact, the campaign exists on the borderline of acceptability by simultaneously challenging and endorsing the national moral norms of nudity and sexuality and offering new possibilities for sexual promiscuity to its Turkish audience.

HIV/AIDS, race and sexuality

The first recognized cases of HIV/AIDS occurred in Turkey in 1985, and the number of people infected has increased significantly since the 1990s. The highest number of HIV positive patients was recorded in 2009 (3671 patients) (The Ministry of Health, 2009). Although the authorities constantly emphasize the close relationship between illegal drug use and HIV/AIDS, press coverage gives a clear idea of popular representations of the disease in Turkish society. According to Prof. Dr Melahat Okuyan, the president of the Association for the Fight Against AIDS, drug abuse is the largest factor in the spread of HIV infection in Turkey (NTVMSNBC, 2008). However, the Turkish media have deliberately employed racialization and the discourse of otherness in regard to HIV/AIDS, for example by blaming illegal women immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe, for the spread of infection (Milliyet, 2002, 2008; NTVMSNBC, 2005). By taking a conservative approach, the Turkish media emphasize that, unlike in Western countries, rather than among homosexuals, the epidemic is being spread in Turkey through promiscuous heterosexual relationships (NTVMSNBC, 2005). In addition, to fully understand the HIV/AIDS discourse in Turkey, it is necessary to identify the discursive relationship between HIV and blackness. The media recurrently emphasize the African origin of the disease. Quoting anonymous research, Turkish newspapers claim that Africans are more prone to AIDS, and that half of the continent is already affected (Hürriyet, 1997; NTVMSNBC, 2007; Sabah, 2008 ). This discourse revolves around the emergence and development of the disease in Africa, thus contributing to the racialized nature of the perception of the epidemic. In the collective imagination of the Ivme Group employees, the discourses of HIV/AIDS, race and sexuality are linked and conflated as constitutive elements of global Turkishness. Through the racialization of a disease and HIV-related stereotypes in Turkish society, the advertisers construct and hail a global national identity in advertisements and fliers.

Racialization of a disease

The analysis of the “Carry a Condom” campaign indicates that the Benetton ads not only signify emancipation and traditionalism, race and sexuality, but also create and promote a global Turkish national identity in relation to HIV/AIDS. By using the photograph of a black male, common assumptions about the relationship between blackness and HIV are re-created—reflecting popular perceptions supported by national and international commercial media and scholarly research—about the high rate of HIV in Africa or African American communities. The intertwined visual images (black male, condom) and the text (data about HIV, source of data, UNAIDS) connote the strong relationship between AIDS and blackness. The media coverage of AIDS in Turkey and the circulation of images of black men in the Turkish media provide so-called “logical” links between racial identities and the disease. The juxtaposition of the image and the text—“every day, sixteen thousand people are infected by HIV because they don’t remember/keep in mind”—locates the ad in a social and political context.

By featuring a black male, the Ivme Group builds on the public discourse that HIV is associated with blackness—thus marking the difference between the Caucasian Turkish audience and “blacks”—by producing and reproducing subjectivities. The black image has two functions. Firstly, it reinforces the popular discourse about HIV and blackness. Then, as a way of referencing the common experience of marginalization of the black identity, it creates a safe distance between spectators (white Turks) and HIV. Both whiteness and the condom have thus become marketable in the system of signification. Racialization produces white subjectivities and constitutes the notion of the Turkish nation as being made up of white, healthy and informed citizens; any negative visual image connecting Turks with HIV is avoided, since the Turkish audience is warned through linguistic signs (words) rather than visual images. HIV is linked to sexual pleasure, to disease and to death, and poses significant risk, while the condom, standing for safety and protection, is positioned in opposition to HIV and the risk factor.

In addition to the print advertisements, the street fliers project the discourse that revolves around the sexuality and racialization of the disease by showing the bodies of a black man and a white woman in their underwear, with red ribbons over their genitals (see Figure 2). For a highly conscious global consumer, the red ribbon signifies awareness of AIDS and solidarity with HIV-positive people, and it also assumes specific cultural awareness on the part of the targeted consumers. However, just in case this awareness is not fully present, the slogan (“Just in case, never without a condom”) and the text (“The most effective way to prevent pregnancy, HIV [AIDS], and STDs is to use a condom”) guarantee that the message is transmitted to all potential consumers.

Conclusion

After the 1980s, Turkey underwent a fundamental transformation from the state-centred to the neoliberal economy. Within this context, the merging of national identities with global consumption became relevant in the contemporary Turkish advertising industry. The Benetton Condom ad campaign highlighted the changes in Turkish society in the late 20th century: the transformation from national to global consumers in the neoliberal age. The campaign for Benetton condoms was inspired by the neoliberal tenet of individual choice via the ambivalence of a global Turkish identity. Turkishness is thereby constructed globally and locally, as well as politically and culturally, in the market economy. The campaign both transcends and articulates national identities and connects them to global consumerism of neoliberal ideology using global images, advertising texts and cultural discourses around race, sexuality and HIV/AIDS. By purchasing Benetton condoms, Turkish consumers claim a global identity and Western lifestyle, like their foreign counterparts. Benetton sought to link its global brand image to this new national identity by hailing a “global Turkish identity” and thus inextricably binding global Turkishness to the consumption of commercial products and images—thus creating a new consumerist identity intimately connected with a global generation of consumers.

The Benetton campaign is, itself, a manifestation of an emergent identity within Turkish society in the last three decades. Under neoliberalism, global Turkishness has become the most successful form of identity formation in an era characterized by the advertisers’ imagination to establish a correspondence between globally consumed products and imagery and locally shared world views. Yet, neoliberalism bypasses the nation-state and changes traditional definitions of nationalism—based on political entity and nation-state—by transforming or otherwise modifying the definition of nationalities. Emphasizing that national identities are fluid and unstable, Turkish advertisers define a commodity/consumption-oriented nationalism, rather than one that requires a particular territory or country. Symbolic boundaries of national culture are being transgressed by global images, and national identities are redefined in global neoliberal economies. Therefore, Benetton’s global images (blacks, whites, multiracial people) and Benetton’s discourses on race, sexuality and HIV/AIDS in the campaign have become constituents of identity construction in Turkish society. This global Turkish identity is a product of the marking of differences, for example between the majority of the population and the black identity of the minority in Turkish society. Therefore, a crucial role in the construction of the new Turkish national identity is played by blackness and two interrelated dimensions of difference in Turkish society: sexuality and HIV/AIDS.

In advertisers’ imagination, these elements re-signify the discourses of race, sexuality and global disease for new spectatorship in the constantly changing Turkish society. The Benetton advertising campaign not only introduces global popular images and discourses to the Turkish public sphere and testifies to the arrival of neoliberalism to Turkey; it also reconstructs global Turkishness around the consumption of popular local or hybrid images, symbols and socio-historical discourses concerning race, sexuality and HIV/AIDS. Therefore, advertisers weave the fabrics of new Turkish national identity through the intersection of global and local elements and propound entangled articulations of global and local discourses to construct a global Turkish identity.