“I Can’t! It’s a Prius”
“I Can’t! It’s a Prius”
Purity, Piety, Pollution Porn, and Coal Rolling
Chapter 3 explores Toyota Corporation’s hybrid automobile, the Prius, as a consumer icon of green virtue, charting media representations that portray the Prius as a vehicle of ecopiety as practiced through acts of consumopiety. It then sharply contrasts these eco-pious cultural readings of the Prius with ones that are intensely hostile and resistant. Drawing insight from “moral foundations theory” and its theorized connections to political disparities in environmental attitudes, this chapter’s media analysis of the Prius provides an opening into the complex incongruities between media “encoding” and media “decoding,” as messages of the Prius as icon of “environmental piety” get filtered through different power dimensions of class, gender, sexuality, and race. The resulting oppositional narratives give rise to the new and fascinating “subgenre” of pornography called “pollution porn.” This chapter probes seemingly unlikely, but nonethelessoperative, class-based media interventions into a dominant environmental discourse that is often perceived to be elitist, self-righteous, and smug.
Keywords: Toyota, pollution porn, encoding, decoding, moral foundations theory, oppositional narratives
NYU Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
