One in a series of books focused on Brazilian visual culture, Maria Cristina da Silva Martins’s Humor & Eroticism in Advertising is a pathbreaking exercise in cultural studies, examining the aesthetic and political dimensions of Brazilian print advertisements and the ways they activate desire and sustain cycles of consumption in late-capitalist society. The interpenetration of visual and verbal languages forms a web of signs whose driving forces—humor and the erotic—are harnessed to maintain the status quo in post-industrial mass societies.

Using advertisements published in Brazilian magazines in the 1980s, Martins considers the relation between humor and eroticism where verbal and visual languages meet, drawing out political and aesthetic implications from the advertisement and its cultural context.

Critical Responses

It is now a matter of postulating a perceptual shock provoked by the intrusion, during the creation of the advertisement, of certain cultural series in a state of emergency or risk… Using as her point of departure advertisements published in Brazilian magazines in the eighties, [Cristina Martins] shows how the humor/eroticism relation… unleashes, in a non-simplistic and unusual manner, political and aesthetic implications between the advertisement and its cultural context.From the Introduction by Amálio Pinheiro

Publisher	San Diego State University Press
Published	1995
Length	154 pages, trade paperback, illustrated
ISBN	1-879691-28-0

HUMOR & EROTICISM IN ADVERTISING

Critical Responses

From the Original CODE[X] Page