BETWEEN BEERS AND COCKTAILS: GENDER STEREOTYPES AND THE CULTURE INDUSTRY IN THE "CHEERS TO ALL"

Abstract

Advertising creates small fictions that slip through everyday life and subtly shape what we see, what we desire, and what we consume. Among these fleeting narratives, the audiovisual advertisement "Cheers to all," launched by Heineken in 2020, stands out for combining subtle humor, inversion of expectations, and discreet tensions between male virility and female sensitivity. Starting from this context, this study investigates how this piece weaves meaning by mobilizing established stereotypes and procedures specific to the Culture Industry. The research was guided by a qualitative approach and was organized into three movements: (i) careful description of the scenes; (ii) discursive analysis of the effects of meaning; and (iii) critical interpretation in light of foundational and more recent authors who reflect on mass culture, advertising, and symbolic consumption. The results reveal that the advertisement operates within a logic of elegant repetition, in which difference appears as a choreographic gesture. The inversion between beers and cocktails challenges, but does not break, the symbolic matrices that organize gender habitus. Humor softens the criticism and transmutes tension into a light spectacle. Therefore, it can be concluded that the advertising text stages controlled ruptures and confirms invisible continuities, remaining open to (in)conclusions. Its meanings can be revisited through other theoretical lenses, reaffirming that media narratives are never exhausted in a single reading.