TEXT 1 : THE ABERCROMBIE BOY

TEXT IN CONTEXT

The text used as a starting point for the analysis of the core corpus is titled “The Abercrombie Boy” and appeared in XY magazine number 23 (winter 2000). The article directly addresses the evolving discussion around the refusal of major fashion brands, in this case Abercombie & Fitch, to advertise in a magazine made by and for young gay men between the ages of 12 and 29. At the center of the argument is the accusation by the XY editor that Abercrombie clearly uses homo-erotic imagery to target young gays’ wallets, but refuses to support the struggling magazine that is important to the young gay community. I chose the article as a starting point because it explicitly illustrates and addresses the main topic this thesis attempts to discuss: the exploitation of eroticism and sexuality to stimulate consumption, with all its social, political and communicative dimensions.

SOURCE
 

XY Magazine, number 23, ‘Sex’, winter 2000, pp. 50-54
 
Link to the full text: the abercrombie boy (from XY 23) 

EXCERPTS

All excerpts are taken from the article, which consists of five pages of continuous text in a rather large font (for a magazine), in two columns. The first page carries the title “the abercrombie boy” in larger bold print, and pages two to four each have one centered black and white image with a caption. There is no mentioning of an author, but the creators of the images are identified in fine print at the bottom of each page.

METHOD OF ANALYSIS

As described in the chapter on methods (see chapter …..), I will be analysing the excerpts by looking at evaluations of textual elements and themes, based on the semantic categories for the evaluative attributes of propositions and proposals. The principal dimensions of evaluation for propositions, which are also useful generally for identifying evaluative patterns, are:

Desirability -- evaluations of the goodness, desirability, wickedness, beauty, ugliness, etc. (many subtypes);
Normativity -- evaluations of how necessary, appropriate, incumbent, permissible, forbidden, inappropriate something is;
Warrantability -- evaluations of the truth, certainty, probability, dubiousness, uncertainty, etc. of a state of affairs;
Usuality -- evaluations of the frequency, typicality, expectedness, surprise value, or shock of a state of affairs;
Importance -- evaluations of the significance, importance, triviality of something;
Comprehensibility -- evaluations of how comprehensible or mysterious a state of affair is;
Humorousness -- evaluations of how funny, ironic, serious, or humorous something is.

Analysis can take place at different levels, ranging from the word to the phrase, clause, sentence, paragraph, article, magazine, a whole “run” of a magazine all issues of the magazine, all magazines of a type or displayed in a particular rack, etc., all the way up to the global contexts in which the text exists. For the purpose of each actual text analysis in this chapter I will only identify evaluative orientations up to the level of the article. Interpretations of the larger context and conclusions that can be drawn from those will be discussed in a later chapter. I will start with a close reading of the first few paragraphs and identify the evaluators which can be categorised under the color-coded dimensions listed above.
These paragraphs also introduce the themes which will be significant in relation to a key photograph which appears in two issues of this magazine. It was originally published by Abercrombie & Fitch as part of an advertising campaign and is cited as evidence of their denied and hypocritical commercial use of homoerotic imagery.

The second part of the analysis of each evaluative dimension will be at the level of the entire text, with examples from different paragraphs. Finally, I will attempt to subject the images in the article to the same type of analysis and discuss their relationship to the text.
 
 
 
 
 

ANALYSIS 1: CLOSE READING OF PARAGRAPHS 1-3

The first three paragraphs of the text:

Once upon a time there was a boy.
The boy was forced by his kingdom to undress in a locker room in his junior high, which was always full of hot, muscular boys. They were called jocks. The jocks were immature, smooth, big and cute. They strutted about in baseball caps and white briefs. Sometimes they beat the boy up, humiliated him, laughed at him, and teased him. The boy hated it, but on the other hand he liked it. Humiliation, control and power turned him on.
The boy became intimately versed in terms like “wedgie”, dreaming he would be abducted, controlled and forced to do the unspeakable by a team of boyish football players with big smiles. The boy logged on to Kingdom Online, where he searched for private chats where he could be humiliated or gang banged by jocks. He caressed frantic strokes on parts of his body which shall remain nameless due to the family nature of our magazine. He snatched secret glances at jocks. The word jock itself began to carry magical force.

The first paragraph consists of a single sentence:

Once upon a time there was a boy.

This first sentence of the text starts out with the traditional initial phrase of fairy tales. The phrase ‘once upon a time’ is an evaluator of Warrantability as the reader is signalled not to take this story for representing the truth. To some degree the phrase also evaluates Usuality, as the events in fairy tales can be said to be rare and unusual. An argument could be made for an element of Humorousness, as this first sentence as well as the rest of the text contain a high degree of irony and sarcasm, and the choice to write the piece as a ‘fairy’ tale may not have been an accidental pun (“fairy” of course is a colloquial reference to gays). Of course, later when the reader retrospectively may re- interpret the first sentence as being intended ironically, then the events described suddenly represent the opposite of what I just described: the story would be true, apply to many more boys in the kingdom, and be far from humorous.

The boy was forced by his kingdom to undress in a locker room in his junior high, which was always full of hot, muscular boys.

Being forced to do anything by a larger force, in this case the state or society at large, is normally not desirable. Depending on your desire to be around boys, the fact that they are always there and are hot and muscular can be either positive or negative evaluations. And even when you do desire to be around hot, muscular boys, to be forced to undress in their presence can still be a pleasant, unpleasant, or ambiguously pleasurable experience. Forced is also an evaluator of Normativity: forcing something that needs to happen is good, and forcing something that should not happen is bad.

They were called jocks. The jocks were immature, smooth, big and cute. They strutted about in baseball caps and white briefs. Sometimes they beat the boy up, humiliated him, laughed at him, and teased him. The boy hated it, but on the other hand he liked it. Humiliation, control and power turned him on.

Sometimes is of course an evaluator of Usuality, and functions here as a transition between the description of what the jocks usually do (strutting around in baseball caps and white briefs) and what they sometimes do, which is harassing the boy. The harassment is normally not permissable, appropriate behavior [Normativity]. The Desirability evaluators hated and liked clear up the ambiguity by enforcing it: the boy is not really supposed to enjoy the harassment he is given, but somehow does, at least at times. Humiliation, control and power, if you are at the receiving end, are usually evaluated negatively. Again, though, the boy in the story clearly does not experience them as such and is even aroused by them. We see here a good example of back-propagation of an evaluation, since we are now signaled to re-interpret the previous sentence with a different evaluative orientation.

The boy became intimately versed in terms like “wedgie”, dreaming he would be abducted, controlled and forced to do the unspeakable by a team of boyish football players with big smiles.

People usually only become intimately versed in things they engage with actively and frequently, which makes this clause an evaluator of Usuality. It may be possible to add a les prominent evaluation of Importance, as what engages people frequently and actively is usually important to them in some way. Dreaming signals clearly to us that whatever comes after this verb is a fantasy, not the real world [Warrantability]. Dreaming generally carries positive connotations [Desirability], but when one dreams of events considered to be strongly undesirable (e.g. abduction) it is sometimes classified as a nightmare. In this case, however, it is relatively clear that dreaming is evaluated positively and therefore the abduction becomes desirable. Unspeakable here evaluates Normativity as one is not supposed to be engaged in anything that should not be spoken about in society (cf. “the love that dare not speak its name). It MAY also SUGGEST a DEGREE of IN-Comprehensibility [I.E. MYSTERY] as the reader is left in the dark as to what exactly is unspeakable: is it merely sexual activity, homosexual activity, group-sex, rape, a combination, or something completely different?

The boy logged on to Kingdom Online, where he searched for private chats where he could be humiliated or gang banged by jocks. He caressed frantic strokes on parts of his body which shall remain nameless due to the family nature of our magazine. He snatched secret glances at jocks. The word jock itself began to carry magical force.

In the rest of the paragraph the pattern repeats itself: an intended and explicit mixing of usually desirable and usually non-desirable elements which basically result in the conclusion that the boy’s general attitude towards ‘jocks’ and their handling of him is a positive one. People usually search for things they desire, while being humiliated is not usually desired. A ‘gang bang’ can be good or bad depending on ones interests and beliefs, but at least the term itself is classified as ‘often vulgar’ in the dictionary (Mirriam-Webster) and therefore usually undesirable. It is also associated, in the dictionary, with gang rape. Caressing is good, while frantic may suggest that whatever is going on is very important to the person who is being frantic about something. “shall remain nameless” again suggests an element of mystery [Comprehensibility], as we are not told which part of the body is referred to, even though we actually know very well. The implied value judgments of Normativity about not naming things as they are, but obeying social speech taboos are obvious, and may implicitly indict Abercombie and more widely a society which is hypocritical about sex.

In short: the boy in question feels an inexplicable desire for the ‘jocks’ in his high school, evaluates the harassment he receives from them partially positively, and fantasises about being forced to have sex with them. The harassment and abuse which are usually evaluated as undesirable are therefore turned into highly desirable, even though, and perhaps in part because they are also normatively forbidden by society.

ANALYSIS 2: THE WHOLE TEXT

In this section I want to analyse reader-author virtual-interactive relationships in the dialogicity of the text. First, the differerent evaluative viewpoints of the author, the narrating voice, the implied reader, the characters in the story/text, and the possible real readers will be distinguished. Then, for each semantic category, I will show how the text creates some of the evaluative orientations for the different viewpoints.

AUTHOR

A distinction is theoretically possible between the implied author and the real author, where the real author in some way takes on a different persona (the implied author) and writes from that perspective. The name of the real author is not mentioned anywhere in The Abercrombie Boy, but we should probably assume that the text was written by XY’s publisher Peter Ian Cummings. It is not really possible to distinguish between a real and an implied author in this case, which is probably the result of the fictional, fairy-tale character of the story. The author may have chosen to use the genre, and not publish his name, for legal reasons, so that the statements made in the text cannot be directly attributed to anyone in particular.
 

THE NARRATING VOICE

The narrator voice is obviously the most powerful voice in this story. This is mostly due to the story-telling nature of it, which allows the narrator to create and install any action, belief or desire in any of the characters in the story. There are no dialogues or quotes in the text, which removes even the impression that either the boy or the Abercrombie executive could have spoken ‘for themselves’. The narrator’s voice is probably very closely linked to the voice and beliefs of the author himself.

THE IMPLIED READER

As the text appeared in an issue of XY magazine, we can assume that the main target audience is similar to the target audience of the magazine itself, namely 12-29 year old gay men. According to XY’s website the average age of the readers is 22, and 200.000 people read the magazine worldwide (with a circulation of 60.000 copies). We might also assume that those young gay men are generally white, middle class, and suburban.

More specifically, the text seems to speak to gay (or bi, queer or questioning) boys in (junior) high school who frequently find themselves in locker rooms with other boys. The text assumes, in the first paragraphs, that they will recognize the situation that is described there, and identify with the feelings, fears and desires laid out. He is someone who has fantasised in some way about other boys, chats on line, masturbates, admires the jocks in school, and is aware of Abercombie’s advertising campaign using attractive, scarcely dressed male models interacting with eachother.

THE POSSIBLE READER

Naturally the magazine has readers outside the official target audience. These can be either gay males younger than 12 or older than 29, with the latter being more likely. Then there are men who may not identify as gay, bi-sexual or queer, but have another interest in reading material by and for gay men in the target group, as well as viewing images of and by those in that group. Another possible group of readers may be girls and women.

The text obviously represents a complaint, an accusation, against the marketing department of Abercombie & Fitch, and it is likely that a copy of the article has actually ended up there. The author must have had this possibility in mind when he wrote it. Finally, the story may be indirectly addressing other participants in the discussion around Abercombie, both in favor and opposition to the marketing campaign, and is therefore intertextually linked to the other ‘voices’ in the larger discussion taking place.

CHARACTER VOICES

There are two main voices to be distinguished within the story: the boy and the Abercrombie executive. In some sense it can be argued that the XY staff, referred to at one point as having been reduced to ‘Petey and Mikey’ , form a voice in the story even though there opinions are not as explicitly foregrounded as those of the ‘boy’ or the Abercombie executive. XY, in that way, seem to be the ‘victim’ of the Abercombie vs. gay Boy dynamic that is exactly the topic of the narrative. Finally, the ‘jocks’ play a role and have various evaluative dimensions attributed to them as the raw material that makes the exploitation of gay boys possible in the first place.
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DESIRABILITY is the most frequent and lexically and semantically rich dimension of evaluation. To determine global evaluative orientations of authors or readers it is often necessary to look at other key intertexts which may more clearly show viewpoints that are only implicitly present in the local text. I will show examples of such texts later on. Now I will list the main voices as they have been mentioned above and sum up the most important Desirables for each one:

AUTHOR: Overall, the author’s viewpoint is probably that the targeting and exploitation of gay boys by companies such as Abercombie is harmful (to the boys and to XY magazine), hypocritical and therefore undesirable. This claim can only be reasonably supported because it is fairly obvious that the article was written by the publisher and editor of XY magazine, and because other texts written by the same author clearly state his name and objections to Abercombie’s marketing policy. There is, however, in the local text no explicit marker that shows the opinions of the author directly and unambiguously.

NARRATOR: The narrator’s Desirables and Undesirables are probably very close , if not identical, to those of the author.

THE BOY: The obviously desires to be around jocks and be harassed and sexually used and abused by them, but has at the same time somehow been placed in this position against his will. He seems to have no choice to desire them, as they are impossible to avoid. [forced by his kingdom, they strutted around]. On page 52, however, it is made clear that the boy is also interested in being or behaving like a straight acting jock, and that he could therefore be the personal giver of all the locker room love fantasies his potential friends craved. He wants to represent himself as an ‘Abercombie Boy’ , by wearing their clothes, and so have access to the power that jocks seem to enjoy. This is somehow an interesting twist in the story, as the traditional or stereotypical interpretation of the boy as he is described in the first paragraphs is along the lines of a smaller, weaker, possibly more effeminate and sexually passive boy who enjoys submission by bigger, stronger, active jocks. Later on the article it turns out he is actually not only desiring those strong Abercrombie jocks, but he wants to be one himself so that he can enforce the same dominance over others (potential friends who apparantly would crave to be dominated and harassed, just like the boy did or does when he is not in his Abercombie mode).

THE ABERCROMBIE EXECUTIVE: The executive is in a difficult position. He wants to increase profit for Abercombie [had not made very much money in a terribly long time, which made the executive very very sad], but cannot expose his scheme to the board for fear of him and his campaign being identified as gay [oh no, that would not do at all!!]. Being close to jocks and getting sexual pleasure from them is obviously highly desirable to the executive [just the thought of it turned him on, underneath his executive desk of course], but being gay and branding Abercombie as such is problematic and therefore undesirable. The inner conflict here represents the hypocrisy of the larger political and economic system which is attacked in the text as a whole, as the executive uses and appreciates homo-eroticism on one hand, but he denounces it on the other.

At some level it seems as if there is even a more disturbing and undesirable element about Abercombie’s marketing strategy that seems to bother the executive. The fact that the campaign and the imagery can be argued to contain homo-eroticism may not be his worst fear. After all, everyone agrees that gay boys like to look at boys, and one can simply write that off as immoral, unnatural, etc., and ignore it. What may be more difficult for him to explain to the board, apart from exposing his own homo-erotic sensibilities, is that the locker room humiliation fantasies also seem to work for straight boys. At least there is a hint that they do. The board in Ohio may be too dumb to realize this, and think that they are selling a New England preppie look, but this implies that other people outside Ohio will be likely to understand what is going on. The boy in the story seems to have the same ambivalent and slightly subconscious understanding of this meganism: he wants to show that he too was a straight acting jock, which seems to imply that the other boys in the locker room are also more straight acting than straight. It is within this fuzzy area of undeclared desires and loyalties that the campaign is actually able to flourish. The entire text represents the fear of male sexual ambiguity or insecurity to be revealed, which would disturb the sexual and social power relations in the Kingdom, and not be good for sales. The executive somehow personifies these fears and realities and this is obvious from the desirable and undesirable dimensions which have been indentified in relation to him in the text.

THE IMPLIED READER: It is likely that many of the readers in XY’s target audience find the boys in the Abercombie catalogues desirable. They may also find the clothes desirable, and obviously link one with the other. The life style and body type that Abercombie is advertising has also led to boys describing themselves as ‘Abercrombie boy’ or ‘AF boy’ in attempt to appropriate the image that is projected by Abercombie’s advertisements. The many chat rooms for Abercombie fans (and some for opponents) and nick names people give themselves show that the brand promise is quite strong, at least for some people. (see section 3 on I WANT TO BE AN A&F BOY, on CHAT, and section 2 on GAME BOYS and the re-use of the game boys picture in the article WE CONTROL WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE in XY30).

NORMATIVITY is closely related semantically to Desirability; what is Good is also usually thought to be something that Should Be and vice versa. We are looking here at attitudes about what must or should be, what mustn't or shouldn't be, what is allowed and what is forbidden.

WARRANTABILITY is about what we believe to be true or probable, and closely related to Usuality, which is about what we believe to be normal and ordinary, or not. Warrantability is at stake whenever issues of evidence or devices to emphasize persuasiveness or to undermine credibility are introduced.

USUALITY can be about frequency or about typicality, expectability vs. surprise.
Note that the use of the habitual present tense also implies usuality.

IMPORTANCE is a very common evaluative dimension in editorials (Lemke 1998). This is where we reveal our priorities, what matters to us and what doesn't, what is salient and stands out for us, grabs our attention. It differs from un-Usuality in that something may be surprising, but still unimportant to us. 'It is important that John come' realizes Normativity. 'It is important that John came' expresses Importance in the technical semantic sense used here.

COMPREHENSIBILITY is one of the rarer dimensions in editorials; it turns up when people are talking about what they don't understand rather than trying to convince us that they do.
HUMOROUSNESS is also one of the rarer dimensions in editorials and serious expository writing, except for the use of Irony.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

What is the function of the visual images in this text?

In terms of Warrantability, the image is functioning as evidence that A&F really does produce advertising with an appeal to gay men, and especially young gay men, and that it advertises in a rival gay magazine, OUT.

It is in terms of Desirability that things get more interesting. Depending on your sexual tastes, at least the three or four athletic boys in the photograph who are wearing only their briefs are likely to be seen as highly desirable. The prettier boy is also vulnerable, on crutches, and is the focus of attention from the coach and the other boys. It is the nature of that attention which is in dispute, and for whom it is Desirable. The caption proposes the interpretation 'locker-room wet dream' and the main text elaborates 'teenage rape fantasy'. A wet dream is usually about something Desirable; a 'rape fantasy' is more ambiguous. Rape is normally taken to be highly un-Desirable, but fantasies are usually about things that are Desirable. Certainly some gay boys do have fantasies of getting raped and enjoying it; many may have fears of getting bashed and/or raped and definitely not enjoying it. The ambiguity of the image may be sexually titillating from both points of view. The boys themselves, as depicted would probably be sexually desirable to the target XY audience of 'suburban teenage gay boys', as well as to a wider readership. There are several other handsome boys in the photograph as well, and even the coach might appeal to some boy readers (though XY is mainly oriented to boy-boy love only; it's not that edgy).

In terms of Usuality, what is usual in the scene and what is unusual? as a locker-room scene it is usual in most respects, though the undress of some boys is clearly foregrounded by having other figures fully dressed and one even wearing a heavy letterman jacket. What is unusual is the boy on crutches and the uniform focus of attention on him, particularly saliently from the most fully displayed boy (most unobstructed view, least clothed, turn full to the camera, and exceptionally handsome and well-built) and from the coach.

In terms of Normativity, what about this scene is appropriate or inappropriate, permitted or forbidden? If the star athlete is looking at the boy on crutches with sexual desire, or if any of the other boys are thinking of raping him, that foregrounds the forbidden, whether desirable or not. Showing boys in their underwear in a fashion ad would probably have been considered inappropriate not too long ago, especially since A&F (I believe) do not sell underwear, nor most of the clothing seen in the ad. The ad displays attractive young bodies for the viewer's pleasure, and has not much else in the way of overt commercial function. Like much of Bruce Weber's work, it is a sort of borderline soft-porn, however artistic and appealing in its way. Calvin Klein does show even younger models in seductive poses of undress and one such CK ad campaign was withdrawn after substantial public protest that it was pornographic and exploitative of the young models.

Importance in visual images is generally signalled by visual salience. Larger figures, more brightly colored ones, central figures, foreground figures, and figures to which the eyes is led by the visual "vectors" (Arnheim) of composition. All vectors lead to the boy on crutches, mainly the pointing arm of the coach and lines of gaze of the other boys. The brightly lit briefs of the two central figures, contrasting with their dark tans, also draws the eyes, as would their attractive bodies for many male gay viewers. Three heads rise into the white space above the lockers: coach, star, and target. They seem caught in a little drama to which the others are more in the role of spectators. If there is a sexual fantasy being foregrounded here, it would most likely take the two central boys as its principal characters. What else is signaled as Important in the image? One would normally say their briefs, if this were a CK underwear ad, so here it has to be their state of undress, even if that is not un-Usual in a locker-room. And what is unusual is also often visually salient in a scene, as with the crutches here. What do they symbolize? vulnerability? failure? persistence? This is after all a kind of art image, not an expository one, so all reasonable interpretations add up to the ambivalence of the ad's appeal, and the deniability of its pornographic effects.

Is there a Mystery here, something un-Comprehensible? probably so, as we've just found from analyzing the other evaluations. Is there also a projection of something as humorous, ironic, or serious? I think we'd have to say that the image shows the scene as something serious, or potentially serious, and that may add to its sense of danger in the rape-fantasy interpretation. Is the coach berating the boy? accusing him? saying something that might rouse the other boys against him? or just pointing out his errors or folly? or telling him that he has no place on the team, that he's not a real athlete, doesn't have what it takes? and so indicting him as a wimpy fag pretending to be butch? There are many fantasy interpretations with such an ambiguous image.