My roommate was eating a frozen pizza for dinner the other night and I found it odd that it had a "mascot" on the front. I wondered why a company would add a mascot to the front of their pizza box. Does this "mascot" help the pizza brand sell? Does the company think displaying a face with a pizza name will create loyal customers? What is this mascot wearing and why is the mascot male? This last question quickly made me think of this class and I did a search on the Internet to see what other pizza brands used this selling technique. I found many examples, but the three images below display some of the male pizza mascots.
All of these images play into the social constructions surrounding gender. In these three images, the man is portrayed as strong and in control. These three men can cook and are the face of this pizza, displaying that this pizza is cooked for a man, by a man. I only found one pizza with a woman mascot.
This image displays the woman mascot in an old-fashioned way. Her non-alert pose and how she is displayed plays into the gender hierarchy that Bornstein talks about in My Gender Workbook. The male is displayed as strong and dominant in the three images above, but the woman is displayed as domestic. It is also interesting that all four boxes display white mascots. Who would have ever guessed that socially constructed ideas about gender and race would make their way onto a pizza box? Who decides that these are the mascots that represent the pizza and why did they choose to portray the mascots in this way?
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