1st TP Acreditable: Van Dijk’s Ideological Analysis

Prof. Emilse Hidalgo

Team members: Baier Camila, Ledesma Leila, Molina Glenda, Piccolo Juliana

The poster was published on December 12th, 2011 in a blog for ‘Haute Living’ magazine. Haute Living
is a luxury lifestyle magazine founded in 2004. It covers interviews on entrepreneurs of great
influence, business magnates, celebrities, and people of important standing in society. The magazine
also covers reviews on luxury products such as private jets, mega yachts, supercars, jewellery, and
timepieces.
The idea of the poster was proposed by Regina who is the magazine’s editor and Angela Simmons’
friend. Angela is a devout Christian, daughter of a Reverend. She was inspired by her uncle Russell
Simmons to adopt a vegetarian diet. Angela has always admired the PETA organization, so she
approached them with an idea for a photo shoot for a vegetarian campaign.

PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is an American animal rights organization. They
claim to be the largest animal rights organization in the world. PETA opposes speciesism, a human-
supremacist worldview, and focuses its attention on the four areas in which animals suffer the most
intensely for the longest periods of time: in laboratories, in the food industry, in the clothing trade, and
in the entertainment industry. They also advocate against the cruel killing of rodents, birds, and other
animals who are often considered ‘pests’ as well as cruelty to domesticated animals. PETA works
through public education, cruelty investigations, research, animal rescue, legislation, special events,
celebrity involvement, and protest campaigns.

The poster aims to represent the mindset of people such as Angela’s fans, Christian vegetarians, people
against any form of animal cruelty and people who are sensitive towards animals and would like to
change to a vegetarian lifestyle. Among the reactions the poster generated were a group of scandalised
people who were offended by Angela’s completely nude pictures, and regular Christians (i.e. those who
eat meat) because in a way they were treated as sinners.

According to Van Dijk the first step in the ideological and discursive analysis of a text or image is to
identify competing or clashing perspectives or world views. Quoting Van Dijk we would like to point
out that ‘the categorization of people in ingroups and outgroups is not value-free but imbued with
ideologically based applications of norms and values’. Here we can recognise these two groups. On the
one hand, vegetarians, vegans or animal conservationists. They would be the ingroup expressing their
ideological stance through the creation of this poster, people who fight against any form of animal
cruelty. They believe in mercy and in animal equality; they think that treating animals as inferior is
cruel and that human beings should excel no power over any living creature, hence the anti-human
race supremacy stance. On the other hand, carnivores would represent the outgroup in this poster.
The outgroup is portrayed as sinners people who do not care about other living creatures; for them
animals serve human beings in the food chain, and eating meat is part of a survival agreement. We can
also analyse the idea of animals as meat through a capitalist ideology, which is based on supply and
demand. For meat-eaters animals supply what human beings need to survive.

In order to develop these two clashing ideas two categories for ideological analysis will be applied:
Metaphor and Irony.

Firstly, Van Dijk defines metaphor as a highly persuasive semantic-rhetoric figure. Through metaphor,
abstract, complex, unfamiliar, new or emotional meanings may be made more familiar and more
concrete. In the poster Angela Simmons is portrayed as Eve, the first woman created by God. This
metaphor is controversial and her nudity is used to draw people’s attention. Hence a covert ideology of
the poster is how women’s body can be objectified or used as an object of sexual desire to “awaken”
interest in an issue. This is a problem, since PETA seems to be thoroughly concerned with stopping
animal abuse, but they seem to care very little for sexism and the representation of women as 1)
sinners and temptresses; 2) “fallen” from grace (thus morally corrupt), 3) temptresses who will “offer”
the apple to Adam (hence blaming women for whatever it is men do). What the ingroup is trying to do
by evoking Eve is contradictory, since in Christian biblical mythology it was due to Eve that man as a
species and all other species living in Paradise were “expelled” from the Garden of Eden (animals had
to suffer this expulsion too). Though the apparent aim of the poster is to judge meat eaters as bad
people, sinners, consequently they suggest that people should go vegetarian in order to be good people
or to be again in the grace of God (which, of course, would not be the case of Eve, who in the Bible is to
blame for the fall of man).
We can also assume that vegetarians (in their positive-self-representation) are presented as thin (or
attractive even when curvaceous-looking as Angela herself), morally upright (despite the
contradiction with the symbol of Eve), good-looking, merciful, good persons, while carnivores are
unhealthy, cruel, immoral, selfish, bad people -sinners, in short. The outgroup could argue that not all
carnivores are unhealthy, immoral or bad people, which is a broad generalization. For them a balanced
diet includes animal protein, arguing the idea that not eating meat could bring health problems in the
long term. The fact that a person eats meat does not mean you are not sensible or don’t like animals,
there are a lot of carnivores who love their pets and would never hurt an animal with their own hands.

Secondly, Van Dijk defines irony as a semantic cohesive device of rhetoric. We would add that it is also
a literary technique in which what appears on the surface to be the case differs radically from what is
actually the case. We would also say that the poster suggests a situational sort of irony because there is
a sharp discrepancy between the expected result and actual results in a certain situation. In the ad
Angela is represented as Eve in the Garden of Eden where all creation co-exists harmoniously and
there is no violence. The biblical record tells us that both man and animals ate plants, not each other.
According to the Genesis book of the Bible, Eve becomes a sinner because she disobeys God persuaded
by a serpent. Eve bites the apple from the forbidden tree and later on Adam bites it too, consequently
recognizing their own nakedness. Adam points to the woman as the real offender, God curses the
woman to the pain of childbirth and to subordination to her husband, again we can see some sexism
related to religion that this poster portrays. After the fall, there was a flood and God allowed man to
begin to hunt and eat animals, the outgroup would favour this view and argue that God created
animals to serve man for labour or food. What is ironic here is the fact that Eve is precisely inviting
people to eat the apple, to free them from sin and convert to vegetarianism in order to stop violence, to
choose God and not evil, to eat vegetables and not meat. As we mentioned before, Angela Simmons’
father is a Reverend. Being raised as a Christian, Angela believes that God’s creatures deserve love and
compassion and wants to raise awareness about the billions of cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals
suffering on factory farms. Nonetheless, the situational irony is that the poster very firmly positions
Angela as her role as temptress again, thereby adhering to all sexist stereotypes on women that have
been decried by feminists for the past to hundred years. Thus, paradoxically, the poster liberates
animals but not women.

We could also identify two weak covert ideologies connected to sexism. On the one hand, in the PETA
ad women are portrayed as weak, oppressed, subordinate to men, considered of a lesser kind, the
same way in which meat-eaters consider animals for food. On the other hand, women are so powerful
that through their beauty they can convince others to change their lifestyle in favour of the weak and
the oppressed.

All things considered, it is clear that the ad presents two strong overt ideologies. First, vegetarians,
who are the ingroup, are presented in a positive way. Second, people who are not vegetarian would be
the outgroup, they are presented negatively. Irony as well as metaphor are used to present, criticise
and condemn meat eaters.