Making the Ad perfectly Queer: Marketing "Normality" to the Gay men's Community

Abstract

The author introduces queer theory and queer deconstruction to the advertising literature. First, he briefly outlines the theoretical and political concerns of queer theory—an emerging branch of radical thought from the humanities. Then he interprets an ad exemplar from an Australian gay newspaper by both a traditional structuralist approach and a queer deconstruction approach. He argues that queer theory and queer deconstruction are potentially powerful sources of ad critiques and productive perspectives for more perceptive marketing practices, for they generate meanings associated with the “panoply of otherness” and expose the ways in which heteronormative discourse informs various representations of gay men in advertising.