WIFE MOTHER/DAUGHTER-IN-LAW - MULTIPLE AVATARS OF HOMEMAKER IN 1990S INDIAN ADVERTISING/

This article analyses the role which advertising discourses play in th e construction of a 'New Indian Woman' in her multiple avatars of home maker. Given the new economic climate of liberalization that has been sweeping over India, the urban Indian woman is now an important consum er who, for the first time, has choices available to her. Consequently , advertising now adroitly combines both ideologies of feminism and fe mininity within discourses of consumerism. The article also argues tha t advertising discourses and the construction of gender and women's su bjectivities are all inherently interrelated, and that they administer and moderate each other. Adopting a modified Foucauldian approach in locating the subject, the woman is seen both as constituted and formed by discourse, as well as resisting it. Moving away from reception-bas ed analyses, the article concentrates on the ideas that producers of m edia texts have about their targeted audience. It goes on to show how, interestingly enough, women's spaces of resistance are created by adv ertisers themselves, even if that may not be their primary aim. Finall y, the article examines how these spaces of resistance have to be unde rstood as part of the entire dominant social structure.