Queer Imagery and Codes of Masculinity in 1980s American Beer Advertising
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the ways that 1980s beer advertisements portrayed men and masculinity, and the expectations for men that these ads communicated through their imagery. In the 1980s, beer advertisements began to focus more on groups of men and their activities rather than individual men simply consuming beer, as was more common in the period between the end of prohibition in 1933 and the late 1970s. Women are also not present in many of these 1980s advertisements, which instead opt to show men enjoying each other’s company in various, often competitive, settings. These advertisements also depict men engaging in nonsexual physical contact, putting forth guidelines for when and how men may touch each other and still maintain their masculinity. Existing scholarship focuses on depictions of masculinity in the beer advertising of other countries, like Canada and New Zealand. I apply historical, sociological, and queer scholarship to American beer advertisements. By applying these types of scholarship to beer advertisements, I will examine the queer undertones present in advertising targeted specifically at men. I utilize advertisements from the period to argue that 1980s beer advertisements communicated a strict code to American men for the ways that they should interact with other men.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".