Wholesome homosexuality: Normative childhoods in same-sex family advertisements

Abstract

Conducting a multimodal discourse analysis of 40 television advertisements featuring same-sex families across 10 countries between 2005 and 2015, this article examines the discourses of childhood that emerge within the advertisements. It argues that same-sex parented children are dominantly framed within mainstream advertising in ways that are normative in terms of gender and social class. The study shows how same-sex families, while increasingly visible in mainstream advertising, are often discursively constructed by television advertisements in ways that limit subject positions that family members can occupy if they are to be seen as an ideal family unit. The article discusses how exclusionary discourses of same-sex families have implications for social inclusion of such families into social ideals of familyhood, as well as for how children of same-sex parents can be anticipated through discourse prior to being materially encountered.

Keywords

Childhood studies discourse analysis same-sex families television advertisements

The capability of same-sex couples to raise appropriately socialised and normative children has been mobilised in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equality debates in the past 10 years. Across the Western world, powerful and well-financed political opponents to same-sex families such as the National Organization for Marriage in the United States and the Australian Marriage Alliance in Australia have questioned the ability of same-sex couples to raise children, citing the need for male and female role models, the unique bond between mother and child, and potential harms to children from being separated from a biological parent (DeFilippis et al., 2015; Rodriguez and Blumell, 2014). In the context of critique and debate about the ability of same-sex couples to raise children, everyday representation of same-sex families acts as a discursive backdrop to political debate. Images of children of same-sex families on billboards, posters, television screens and shopping malls form cogent discursive narratives that produce in the social imaginary understandings of what it means to be a member of a same-sex family at the turn of the 21st century. Like other forms of advertising, television advertisements can work to inform same-sex families as well as the broader public about what an ideal child in a same-sex family unit might look like. The subjectivities that the child of same-sex parents embodies in advertising can signify the family’s health and normativity as a whole, and equally, the unhealthy and delinquent child can quickly become a signifier of the unfit parent. As Ambert (1994) argues, ‘when one sees children, one “sees” parents. When one sees children who have problems, one looks for parents [who have problems]’ (p. 53). Thus, the branded narratives of corporations weighing in on same-sex family issues have a discursive effect on social understandings of same-sex families, particularly in contemporary times in which advertising saturates quotidian life.

This study of television advertisements released between 2005 and 2015 across 10 Western nations is concerned with the ways television advertisements can construct discourses of childhood within same-sex families and anticipate what an ideal child in a same-sex family looks like. Television advertisements were chosen for analysis because they are powerful discursive texts that are particularly pervasive in contemporary Western societies (Hogan, 2009; Stokes, 2003). In the era of neoliberal consumer capitalism, social and cultural discourses of childhood can be influenced by television advertisements, which construct idealised versions of childhood that are ostensibly achievable through consumption (Drew, 2015). By watching television advertisements, consumers can learn which subjectivities an ideal child embodies and what branded goods should be consumed in order for that ideal to become a reality (Miller and Rose, 1997; Stokes, 2003). Thus, television advertisements function as texts that produce discursive ideals about childhood and broadcast them into living rooms around the world, normalising idealised childhood subjectivities and making them knowable across broad populations (Hogan, 2009).

In a time in which the appropriateness of same-sex parenting is challenged by some and when same-sex unions are increasingly legalised across the Western world (Pew Research Center, 2015), it is argued here that everyday discourses of children of same-sex parents that recur on television screens have a role to play in the discursive constitution of the ideal same-sex family unit. When the same-sex family is consistently constructed in normative ways in terms of gender and social class, some same-sex families and their children are rendered idealised, while others remain excluded from cultural ideas about the ideal family, parent and child (DeFilippis et al., 2015). Thus, the discourse analysis conducted here has implications for understanding the ways children of same-sex parents can be anticipated through discourse as ideal or otherwise prior to being encountered in material life. As childhood studies scholars have argued for the past 20 years (Jenks, [1996] 2005; Matthews, 2007), dominant discourses of childhood affect the ways children can come to be known in relation to the norm and in this sense have the capacity to have material effects on the ways children are expected to navigate their social worlds.

This article begins with an examination of extant literature on LGBT representation in the media and advertising, and through this examination an outline is provided of how LGBT representation has become increasingly mainstream with increasing societal acceptance of LGBT people in Western societies (Moscowitz, 2010). However, this discussion also outlines the ways LGBT people are frequently framed in media and advertising as being normal and normative members of society in all ways but sexual preference (Barnhurst, 2007; Clarke, 2002). While visibility of LGBT people in advertising has been scrutinised within cultural and media studies, dominant discourses about children of LGBT people in advertising have been subject to less academic examination.

Following the discussion of LGBT representation in the media, the Foucauldian and multimodal discourse analysis approaches to the study are discussed, and the data collection process is examined. The collection of data from YouTube and AdRespect archives is briefly discussed, and a multimodal approach to discourse analysis is explained. The analysis of two key themes follows, which are the dominance of middle-class childhood subjectivities and the dominance of childhood gender normativity within the corpus. Some ruptures within these themes are also included, in order to show ways advertisements can subvert and offer critique of dominant discourses, thereby disrupting the regimes of truth that currently dominate childhood representations in same-sex family advertising.

The era of the visible: LGBT representation in media and advertising

The timeframe of the advertisements examined here (2005–2015) is a time in which significant change and upheaval have taken place for LGBT rights across the Western world. Recent years have seen a significant surge in normalisation and legitimation of same-sex unions within Western nations. Same-sex marriage was legalised in the Netherlands in December 2000, and in the succeeding 15 years more Western nations have followed with law reform, referenda and court rulings that have led to official recognition of same-sex marriage in over 20 Western nations, with some stark exceptions such as in the case of Australia (Pew Research Center, 2015). Similarly, LGBT adoption rights have been extended to same-sex couples in most Western nations, with notable exceptions including in the Australian states of Queensland, the Northern Territory and South Australia; the state of Mississippi in the United States; and all districts of Italy (Pew Research Center, 2015). Nonetheless, significant strides in relationship recognition and adoption rights throughout much of the Western world have discursively normalised same-sex families and established legal frameworks for the recognition of same-sex parents and their children as legally sanctioned family units.

However, progress in the recognition of same-sex families is not necessarily an indicator of increased tolerance for diversity in Western nations. It is widely recognised within queer literature that gay and lesbian families have been commonly framed by mainstream gay rights activist organisations such as PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and GetUp! as being no different from straight families in order to press the case for mainstream recognition of same-sex families (Barnhurst, 2007; Clarke, 2002; Moscowitz, 2010; Riggs, 2006). Such a framing strategy can be seen particularly damaging for movements of equality because rather than encouraging acceptance of difference, it positions homosexual parenting within a heteronormative and traditionalist framework of family and marriage. It positions traditional family structures as the norm which homosexual families must emulate (Clarke, 2002).

Some feminist scholars also argue that the inclusion of same-sex couples into marriage and family discourse has the effect of positioning LGBT couples inside of an institution that has historically placed women at legal, economic and social disadvantage (Barker, 2012; Bernstein, 2015). Similarly, the LGBT community’s emphasis on acceptance and celebration of diversity has led some feminist and queer scholars to reject the institution of marriage altogether, arguing that exclusion from discourse of marriage and the traditional family has enabled LGBT people to live outside of normative social structures and strive for family structures that do not carry the historical baggage of state- and church-sanctioned marriage (Barker, 2012; Boyd, 2013). As DeFilippis et al. (2015) argue,

Marriage has never been the gold standard of relationships for queer communities; LGBT people have developed a wide array of creative and adaptive structures for relationships and families, partly out of necessity and partly out of the freedom that comes from being outside the parameters of that which is ‘normal’. (p. 467)

Nonetheless, mainstream LGBT rights movements across the Western world have put their weight behind same-sex marriage legalisation in the recent past to a great degree of success (Borgerson et al., 2006; DeFilippis et al., 2015). With increased recognition and acceptance of same-sex unions, LGBT families are exposed to ongoing scrutiny against the norm (Bernstein, 2015; Clarke, 2002), which continues to work to silence and marginalise difference within LGBT communities. In particular, normative expectations place significant pressure on the children of same-sex parents to appear normative in order to prove that their parents are capable of raising children normatively despite their sexual deviance (Clarke, 2002; Taylor, 2009).

This narrative that same-sex parents are no different from straight parents has been identified in the media since the mid-1990s (Liebler et al., 2009; Moscowitz, 2010; Rodriguez and Blumell, 2014). Studies of US newspaper reports find that articles in support of same-sex couples generally represent LGBT couples as much within heteronormative frames of reference as possible to present homosexuality as unthreatening (Liebler et al., 2009). A growing body of literature also argues that supporters of same-sex marriage in the media construct LGBT parents as valuing normative family structures and gender roles in order not to confront heteronormative audiences and generate goodwill towards their fight for same-sex marriage (Clarke, 2002; Liebler et al., 2009; Riggs, 2006). A significant part of this limited representation by many same-sex marriage supporters is the importance of not too much sexual deviance, and to this end, bi-sexuality and flamboyant homosexuality are frequently rendered absent from positive representations of same-sex unions in US media (Galupo, 2009; Hackl et al., 2013).

A smaller cohort of researchers have specifically examined gay-friendly advertising (Borgerson et al., 2006; Kates, 1999; Tsai, 2010). Increased visibility of LGBT couples in advertising and television sit-coms, as well as increasingly pro-gay and lesbian narratives on television, has been identified from the late-1980s to the present in a time known as the ‘era of the visible’ (Moscowitz, 2010: 26). A strategy of advertising in mainstream media named ‘gay window dressing’ (Tsai, 2010) emerged in the 1980s in the United States which was characterised by ambiguous relationships between same-sex people on advertisements. Such ambiguity has the effect of allowing consumers to choose whether or not to see the people on the advertisements as friends or romantic couples (Oakenfull et al., 2008), enabling advertisers to net a larger target audience through their adverts without offending the dominant heteronormative culture.

However, in recent years, mainstream advertising by large multinational brands has become increasingly explicit in its depiction of LGBT people in the era of the visible (Branchik, 2007; Moscowitz, 2010). While overt representation was once confined to a queer chic target audience characterised by the double-income White male couple purchasing high culture products (Branchik, 2007; Tsai, 2010), its presence has spread with the mainstreaming of homosexuality in the 1990s. With a groundswell of support for the same-sex marriage in Western nations, images of gay and lesbian people have moved into advertising that targets not only LGBT consumers (Tsai, 2010) but also an increasing consumer segment of LGBT allies who seek brands with similar values to their own (Borgerson et al., 2006). Such a shift in mainstream brands’ recognition and advocacy for gay family rights has been exemplified by high-profile cases of corporate support for same-sex unions including the 811 companies that produced an advertisement in The Australian newspaper urging the Australian government to amend laws in 2015 and Visa’s viral Instagram campaign when they released an image playing on their famous accepted everywhere tagline, adding ‘Love. Accepted Everywhere’, below a rainbow flag.

With the mainstreaming of LGBT imagery in advertising, homosexual families have more recently been constructed as ‘akin to mainstream standards’ (Tsai, 2010: 3) of race, gender and social class. Same-sex couples have increasingly been represented as ‘normal folk’ (Borgerson et al., 2006: 959), particularly in advertising targeted at a broad consumer base as opposed to niche LGBT target markets of the 1990s (Tsai, 2010). Such a trend parallels the narratives of the same-sex marriage movement to make same-sex commitments appear conservative and interested in the security and moral stability of the traditional model of marriage (Clarke, 2002; Riggs, 2006) in order to appeal to a larger and more conservative social base. Conservative imagery of family units has historically been a significant discursive indicator of wholesomeness within advertising, in particular as it relates to the middle-class dream of suburban bliss (Drew, 2015; Holland, 2005; Manca and Manca, 2012). While the nuclear family discourse has been implicated in a consumption-based ideal that middle-class viewers can buy into for much of the 20th century (Drew, 2015; Manca and Manca, 2012; Miller and Rose, 1997), the newfound presence of the traditionalist same-sex family in advertising, and particularly the representation of their children, is scarcely examined. Nonetheless, same-sex families have been increasingly depicted in mainstream advertising (Borgerson et al., 2006; Rodriguez and Blumell, 2014), and such representation is worthy of analysis. Borgerson et al. (2006) highlight this point well, identifying the construction of a same-sex family unit in advertising often involves depictions of children and pets within the family, which ‘may ward off associations to gay promiscuity, HIV, or perversity’ (p. 970) and can therefore retain a more traditional market segment while also appealing to the LGBT market. However, the analysis that follows shows that the use of the same-sex family motif in advertising should also reveal insights into discourses of contemporary childhood, and in particular discourses that frame how children should behave in idealised same-sex family units, if the family and the child are to be considered normative and acceptable in the early 21st century.

Methodology

The study follows a Foucauldian perspective of truth and discourse (Foucault, 1972, 2002; O’Farrell, 2005), with an understanding that truth is a product of social and cultural ideas that are prominent at any particular time. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), Foucault (2002) puts forward a form of analysis that examines texts and discourses from within a specific timeframe in order to come to understand how ‘regime[s] of truth’ (p. 131) are constructed not in relation to objectivity, but in relation to the dominant ideas that emerge in discourse within that specific era. Following Foucault, an examination of regimes of truth generally involves the collection of texts within a specific timeframe in order to glean the discourses which emerge as dominant (Graham, 2005; O’Farrell, 2005). This form of analysis should reveal the ways in which truths are constructed through the dominance of particular ways of thinking at a particular point in time. By revealing the ways truths are constructed through discourse, researchers can then critique the truth claims made, in order that ruptures in discourses of truth can emerge, and dominant knowledge be challenged.

In order to conduct a Foucauldian archaeological analysis, data from within a specific timeframe were collected for the analysis of discourses which would emerge as dominant. Television advertisements featuring families with same-sex parents were collected from two user-generated archives, youtube.com and adrespect.org. YouTube (2015) is the world’s largest user-generated archive of videos, while adrespect.org is a user-generated archive specifically focused on global LGBT-focused advertising. AdRespect listed 1325 LGBT-themed television advertisements on 16 December 2015. User-generated online archives are increasingly popular source archives for academic use, as researchers are finding them sources that are more complete than many official archives due to the breadth of contributors and sheer archive size (McKee, 2011).

On the YouTube archive, search terms including ‘same-sex family ad’, ‘gay tv commercial’, ‘tv ad gay dads’ and ‘lesbian family ad’ were used. Snowball sampling was used alongside these search terms, wherein suggested advertisements that emerge on the right-hand side of the YouTube website were followed in order to increase corpus size. Advertisements visually featuring same-sex families, and produced between 2005 and 2015, were collected. Adrespect.org’s listed advertisements were narrowed down using the ‘Advanced Search’ feature of the site. The advertisements were selected by theme ‘same-sex couples/families’ and year range from 2005 to 2015. All advertisements in this range were viewed. From initial data collection on both archives, a final corpus of 40 television advertisements featuring or discussing the children of same-sex couples between 2005 and 2015 was identified. Of this corpus, 23 advertisements were from the United States, 4 from the United Kingdom, 4 from Australia/New Zealand, 3 from Canada, 2 from Spain and 1 each from Argentina, France, Brazil and Italy. While the data collection returned few results from the latter nations, these advertisements remained within the corpus in order to enrich understandings of the diversity of ways LGBT families are represented in advertisements, and it is recognised that future studies specific to those nations would be a clear direction for future research.

Following data collection, a multimodal discourse analysis was undertaken in order to glean the discourses that emerged dominant throughout the corpus. Multimodal discourse analysis was chosen as a methodology for identifying discourses due to its focus on the ways multiple signifying modes, including text, voice, colour tone, narrative and motion, convey meanings within texts (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006; O’Halloran, 2004). Themes were gleaned through close attention to each advertisement’s narratives and framing techniques, and texts were grouped according to commonalities in discursive framings of children within the advertisements. These groupings led to two key discursive themes that emerged across the corpus: middle-class childhood subjectivities and traditionally gendered childhood subjectivities. The two themes are detailed in the following section. While both themes are examined in order, the themes overlap and the themes are often used in conjunction with one another, and this is reflected in the analysis.

Wholesome homosexuality: Key themes in the corpus

A recurring narrative in the corpus of advertisements is that of middle-class normativity within the depicted families (Campbell’s Soup, 2015; Chevrolet, 2014; Honey Maid, 2014; Ikea, 2006; Kohl’s, 2015; Penney, 2012; Tylenol, 2015). One example of this middle-class normativity is the Ikea (2006) Living Room advertisement, which opens with a White nuclear family featuring a son and two daughters but soon flicks to more scenes of other living rooms, to show the diversity of family groups within American society. In the first scene, the daughter plays on the floor of the living room, the mother and second daughter hug, and the father and second son play hockey in the walkway behind the couch. It is a scene that is conspicuously middle class, with a large new home full of brand new furniture and well-manicured gardens out of the window to represent a middle-class, nuclear family ideal.

The second scene in the Ikea advertisement moves to a similar living room, again full of movement with a mother and grandmother on a long couch watching television, father lying on the floor, older son on a single-seater couch and younger son skateboarding around the room. The family is of Indian descent, showing the racial diversity of American life. The scene has deeper tones of orange and brown signifying a cosy warmth (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006). With this warmth and the family all huddled into the living room, the message of family togetherness remains salient. Another similar scene flicks by, showing an African American family sitting in their living room smiling and watching television.

Finally, another family appears, where just one father and daughter rearrange books in the living room. A male voiceover states, ‘Why shouldn’t sofas come in flavours?’ Then another voiceover from a girl comes in, ‘Just like families’. As the voiceover makes this statement of different flavours, the father and daughter reappear on the floor in front of their sofa, now with a second father in the middle. His arm is around his husband, and his left hand is patting the family dog, reminiscent of claims that dogs and children frame same-sex families as normal and wholesome (Borgerson et al., 2006). The daughter snuggles in, smiling at the camera. The advertisement’s tagline then comes up on the screen under the Ikea logo, ‘A better everyday life at home’.

Here, the advertisement is alluding to the everyday middle-class American family ideal (Dickinson, 2015). Middle-class families, one after the other, are shown enjoying each other’s company within the private space of their living rooms. Children play, depicted as the centre and lifeblood of the family (Holland, 2005). This ideal of togetherness and family love, the advertisement suggests, is one that Ikea supports. Ikea provides the beautiful furniture which acts as the backdrop to all kinds of middle-class families’ lives. One reading of this advertisement could be that the American family comes in all different types. However, this difference is tempered by the surrounds that cast the families as normative inasmuch as they are well-to-do middle-class family units living an idealised suburban life, as this is indeed Ikea’s target market.

Furthermore, the same-sex couple’s homosexuality in the Ikea advertisement is moderated by their generally conservative dress, the presence of a dog, brand new furniture and rug, large array of books and child lying on her nice clean rug. The construction of the same-sex family in this advertisement, then, is of a family that does not interrupt norms of social class, and indeed they fit the middle-class ideal seamlessly. The child’s reading, along with the presence of a dog, and the physical affection of the girl with her dads are necessary here in making the family appear competently middle class.

This trope of the middle-class normative child within the same-sex family is not exclusive to this one advertisement, but is common across the corpus. A Chevrolet (2014) Traverse advertisement similarly uses the strategy of showing several families scene after scene to show how seamlessly same-sex families fit the middle-class norm. Four families in the Traverse advertisement are nuclear families, while two families have same-sex parents. As the scenes of families smiling for the camera are flicked through, the voiceover explains,

While what it means to be a family hasn’t changed, what a family looks like has. This is the new us. Chevrolet Traverse.

This advertisement was playing during the 2014 Sochi Olympic games, in the context of strong global outcry over Russia’s anti-gay laws. The advertisement reinforced an image of America as being a diverse nation in which sexual and racial difference are celebrated. The voiceover explains that ‘what it means to be a family’ is to ‘always [be] there when we need them’. The scenes could be switched with the scenes of many of the other advertisements in the corpus: beautiful large new kitchens, gay fathers in collared shirts smiling at cameras and hugging their daughters and conspicuously well-built gay men with a hint of facial hair to show off their maturity, lest they be viewed as experimenting youth. Ironically, ‘what a family looks like’ has changed minimally in the Traverse advertisement. Middle-class new double story homes flood the scenes, and giggling happy children create scenes in which middle-class norms remain central to ‘what it means to be a family’. The children’s normative dispositions, as if they were any middle-class child with appropriately masculine fathers, cast the family as an appropriate one in which a child may be raised.

Gender normativity is similarly a recurring theme across the corpus of same-sex family advertisements (Campbell’s Soup, 2015; Dove, 2015; Expedia, 2013, 2014; Heinz, 2008). One telling example of how traditional normative gender and middle-class discourses frame childhood within the corpus of same-sex advertisements is the Honey Maid (2014) This Is Wholesome advertisement. The advertisement features three families: one White nuclear family, one White family with gay fathers and one straight African American family. The White nuclear family features a thin father wearing a singlet and showing off his tattoos. This is the only time tattoos were identified within the corpus of advertisements for the study, and indeed this tattooed father was the least muscular father figure across all advertisements. Interestingly, it was a heterosexual father who exhibited such characteristics, and perhaps it was his heterosexuality that allowed such a diversion from the image of conservatism that permeates the corpus. Indeed, the one same-sex family in this particular advertisement involves two conservative looking fathers walking down a path in a suburban park. Both have well-trimmed hair and wear long-sleeved collared shirts. Both have a hint of grey in their hair, as if they were older, wiser professional men – a stark contrast to the tattooed father in the heterosexual family one scene prior. One father pushes a stroller, and light glistens off the trees in the park in the background.

The final scene in this Honey Maid This Is Wholesome (2004) advertisement reinforces the heightened sense of normativity of the same-sex family as opposed to the nuclear family. The fathers stand in front of their suburban home. In the background are a tree on the left and a star-spangled banner hanging from the house on the right. Their son stands in front of them, smiling and giggling to reflect the happiness of his middle-class suburban American life. A newborn baby is held in the arms of one of the fathers. As they stand in front of their idealised suburban American home, their commitment to middle-class American values is reinforced by the voiceover, ‘No matter how things change, what makes us wholesome never will’.

Another advertisement, Campbell’s Soup (2015) I Am Your Father, provides another strong indication of the way gender normativity operates across the corpus of same-sex family advertisements. The advertisement opens with a shot of a Campbell’s soup tin. In the blurry foreground, a pot boils, with the steam from the soup rising from the pot. A father well-groomed in his collared shirt, short hair and trimmed facial hair starts singing the Star Wars opening credits tune. He ladles soup with a spoon and holds it forward for his son to eat and recites a well-known phrase of the Star Wars franchise with his son’s name substituted for Luke Skywalker’s, ‘Cooper, I am your father’. The shot then broadens, and the camera slowly zooms out to reveal another father on the left of the frame. ‘No, no, no’, the other father interjects. ‘I am your father’. The second father is similarly well-groomed wearing a collared shirt as if he has returned home from his professional job.

This effect of having only one parent in the initial frame, which was also observed in the Ikea advertisement earlier and in others such as the lesbian mothers in the 2015 Wells Fargo advertisement, is a strategy to catch the viewer off-guard. It is a plot-twist, designed for viewers to question their assumptions. Before the zoom-out takes place, there is little of controversy, and the heteronorm is silently assumed. The zooming effect to bring the second father into the frame implicitly sends a message that this family should be assumed to be normal, and the father’s sexuality is of little consequence to the otherwise normal father–son relationship. As such, this camera effect reinforces the narrative that same-sex family relationships are no different from nuclear family relationships (Clarke, 2002). Before the zoom, as the handsome father recites popular culture to his son. His gender position is intentionally represented here to be distinctly normative in order for the plot-twist to have its effect.

Furthermore, in this wider shot, white light beams in from the surrounding windows. A bowl full of fresh apples sits on the table alongside a toy truck for the boy to play with, and the house appears clean and ordered. The furniture is modern and a picture frame hangs squarely in the background. The brightness, newness and cleanliness of the backdrop, as well as the well-dressed parents in this scene, project an image of an economically well-off family. The second father has a strong, thick covering of facial hair that is groomed to appear masculine and avoid the projection of an image of the clichéd feminine gay man. The parents are doting over their son, playing Star Wars games to endear them to the audience. These parents are competent with popular culture and are caring fathers but not too feminine. It is Star Wars themes and toy trucks on the kitchen table that they are exposing their son to, after all, not Barbie or horses. The image projected here is one of control and competency. These parents have the money, love and competency teaching their son how to be a boy. The boy is learning masculinity off his fathers, and therefore, the moral order of family wholesomeness has not been threatened.

Like the Honey Maid (2014) This Is Wholesome advertisement and the Ikea (2006) Living Room piece, this Campbell’s Soup (2015) Made for Real Life advertisement provides an example of the scrutiny that heteronormative discourse places upon children of same-sex families. The advertisement challenges traditional boundaries of sexuality in the family home, yet retains gender and social class structures which provides continuity with a traditional image of gendered and classed family life (Dickinson, 2015). The child learning normative gender in a middle-class suburban home consistently recurs across the corpus, framing children of the same-sex parents as normative in order that the families be framed as valuing the traditional heteronormative family structure. Rather than challenging traditional understandings of the ideal gendered and classed family, then, the advertisement reinforces them in its efforts to construct same-sex parenting as just like heterosexual parenting, vis-à-vis acceptable.

‘Going to have to fight’: A subversion of heteronormativity

The above examples have been used in this article to present key themes that emerged through the corpus. As exemplified in the focal advertisements in this article, the themes of gender and social class normativity overlap and appear side-by-side in many advertisements, and both themes reappear not only across the advertisements explored here but also through the broader corpus of advertisements studied. While these themes emerged as dominant, there were some instances in which the normative scrutiny faced by children of homosexual parents becomes the explicit topic of discussion. In these advertisements, normative traditional family structures are challenged through clear critique of heteronormative pressures.

One advertisement, Cheerios’ (2013) Cheerios Effect, critiques heteronormative discourses that affect the children of same-sex parents and would provide informative discussion on the topic of ruptures to heteronormative discourse. While this disruption is not common enough to be described as a recurring theme, it does provide an opportunity for ruptures in dominant discursive ideals of childhood as it appears in same-sex family structures. The advertisement features two White fathers, one holding their Black daughter in his arms. She plays with a bowl of Cheerios cereal while the fathers speak to the camera. They wear collared shirts and look into the eye of the camera. Both have well-trimmed facial hair, another symbol of the compulsory masculinity of gay fathers. High-pitched piano music plays, sounding beautiful and heartfelt. They begin telling the camera how they began dating and then move on to the day they were told they were adopting a child. ‘I was at work, and I got a phone call’, one father begins explaining. He continues later, ‘[We] got off work, we rushed in the shower. We had, like, ten minutes to get ready but we wanted to be clean, we wanted to be handsome’.

Other father then turns his attention to social scrutiny that their daughter faces as a result of heteronormative discourse:

She’s really cool, she has love, she’s confident. And, uh, people outside who have a problem with that, they gonna try to put doubt in the head and you know, we’re going to have to fight with that … if Raphael has [a] problem [with] two dads, I can see that it won’t be our fault … I know we are good parents.

This brand constructs itself as both gay friendly and family friendly. It, perhaps more explicitly than any other advertisement in the corpus, confronts the challenges of being a child of same-sex parents. The fathers explain the discursive pressures that they face: that they are ‘going to have to fight’ with broader societal scrutiny of their child as she grows. What emerges here, then, is a challenge to dominant discourses within advertising that position children of same-sex parents as requiring traditional subjectivities in order for the fathers or mothers to appear within discourse as ‘good parents’. This advertisement works to counter the discursive pressure that children of same-sex parents face by naming heteronormativity as an unfair discursive influence on the family and the child, and through this strategy, presents a challenge to the regime of truth (Foucault, 1972) around childhood normativity that the broader corpus reiterates over and again, sustaining its dominance within the discourses about same-sex family ideals.

Conclusion

The discourses of gender and social class normativity identified within the corpus of advertisements in this study idealise and promote same-sex family structures that are normative and conservative in terms of gender and social class and render outside of the frame of the ideal childhood subjectivities that are non-gender conforming and working-class. With the dominance of such conservative discourses of childhood within advertisements featuring same-sex families, it is apparent that the increased visibility and acceptance of same-sex families within advertising does not necessarily hail an era of increased acceptance of diversity of childhood or parenthood subjectivities. Rather, normative representations of same-sex families show how same-sex couples and their children are included within idealised discourses of the family on the terms of traditional ideals around gender and social class.

The above analysis shows some of the ways in which same-sex families are discursively constructed within television advertisements across the world. More than 50% of the corpus of 40 advertisements was sourced from the United States. Four advertisements were identified from Australia and the United Kingdom and three from Canada. The other nations in the study were less well represented. The narratives from advertisements from the less represented nations tended to reflect the narratives that were present in the advertisements from the United States, and the key themes were present across all nations in the corpus; however, more analysis from these less represented nations would be instructive in terms of understanding the unique discursive representations that emerge from each individual nation. Italy and Australia retain laws outlawing same-sex marriages, which may lead to somewhat different results were those nations to become the foci of future studies. Similarly, the racial diversity within the advertisements out of the United States is found in extant literature to not be corroborated in advertisements featuring children from Australia (Drew, 2015). Thus, there is scope for nation-specific analysis, analyses specific to the genders of parents – which might be revealing of other trends given the tendency of the advertisements in this corpus to feature male parents – and further analysis of corpuses across a greater variety of mediums.

However, as I argued at the beginning of the article, a study of discursive constructions of children of same-sex parents can show how such children can be anticipated through discourse prior to being encountered in material life, and this exploration has brought forth some tentative themes. From a Foucauldian perspective, the discourses examined in this study have the capacity to have material effects on the children of same-sex families by constructing an ideal against which children of same-sex parents can be assessed. The timeframe of this study is a time in which same-sex family rights and recognition remain contested, and everyday advertising discourses have a role to play in the normalisation of particular ideals around same-sex family units. As this study has shown, mainstream television advertisements produce discourses of same-sex families in ways that might include LGBT couples and their children into narratives of family, but the same-sex families and their children are constructed in ways that are limiting and that continue to exclude children of marginalised and non-conforming LGBT populations and their parents from cultural understandings of familyhood.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Christopher Drew is Lecturer in Education at Teesside University. His scholarly work is at the intersection of childhood studies, media studies and education studies. He is particularly concerned with the ways in which discourses of schooling are formed and sustained through advertising. His work examines student subjectivities in online and print-based school marketing materials, as well as broader advertising texts featuring schooling discourses, and explores how discursive formations within such texts anticipate childhood inclusion and exclusion within schools and classrooms.

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