Co-authors: Dr. Sasha Johfre, Lauren Woyczynski, Ágnes Eszter Fejér, Elizabeth Nguyen, and Patricia Carrasco
Abstract:
In contemporary American life, “returning to nature” functions as a moral imperative: people are expected to spend time outdoors, eat natural foods, and embody natural properties of the self. Yet the labor this requires has gone largely untheorized. This paper introduces the concept of nature work — the symbolic, behavioral, and material effort required to bridge a perceived gap between the modern self and the natural ideal — and argues that it constitutes a form of cultural labor that intersects with and actively reproduces systems of social inequality. We examine nature work empirically through an abductive, mixed-methods content analysis of 5,700 print advertisements across seven mainstream American magazines from 1970 to 2019. We identify two dominant frames of appeals to nature in advertising, each occurring in one in six advertisements in our sample: 1) references to the outdoors and 2) references to natural properties of products and selves. We further find that these two frames are co-constitutive with gender: outdoor appeals co-occur with images of White men and discourses of adventure and domination, constructing rugged masculinity; natural properties appeals co-occur with images of women and discourses of purity, health, and authenticity, constructing what we term natural femininity — a hegemonic ideal in which women's sustained labor of becoming natural is rendered invisible by being framed as what women naturally are. We also find that appeals to nature routinely co-occur with appeals to authenticity and realness, suggesting that part of nature work’s cultural power lies in positioning the natural as the real, and therefore natural things as inherently legitimate. Nature work and gender work co-constitute each other, and together naturalize gender inequality.
Abstract:
In contemporary American life, “returning to nature” functions as a moral imperative: people are expected to spend time outdoors, eat natural foods, and embody natural properties of the self. Yet the labor this requires has gone largely untheorized. This paper introduces the concept of nature work — the symbolic, behavioral, and material effort required to bridge a perceived gap between the modern self and the natural ideal — and argues that it constitutes a form of cultural labor that intersects with and actively reproduces systems of social inequality. We examine nature work empirically through an abductive, mixed-methods content analysis of 5,700 print advertisements across seven mainstream American magazines from 1970 to 2019. We identify two dominant frames of appeals to nature in advertising, each occurring in one in six advertisements in our sample: 1) references to the outdoors and 2) references to natural properties of products and selves. We further find that these two frames are co-constitutive with gender: outdoor appeals co-occur with images of White men and discourses of adventure and domination, constructing rugged masculinity; natural properties appeals co-occur with images of women and discourses of purity, health, and authenticity, constructing what we term natural femininity — a hegemonic ideal in which women's sustained labor of becoming natural is rendered invisible by being framed as what women naturally are. We also find that appeals to nature routinely co-occur with appeals to authenticity and realness, suggesting that part of nature work’s cultural power lies in positioning the natural as the real, and therefore natural things as inherently legitimate. Nature work and gender work co-constitute each other, and together naturalize gender inequality.