The Construction of Gender Identities in Media Texts: A Content Analysis of Polish Magazine Advertisements

• Autores: Emilia Wasikiewicz-Firlej
• Localización: Discourses in co(n)text: the many faces of specialised discourse / Magdalena Zabielska (ed. lit.), Emilia Wasikiewicz-Firlej (ed. lit.), Anna Szcezepaniak-Kozak (ed. lit.), 2015, ISBN 978-1-4438-7419-9, págs. 190-210
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Advertising as "the distorted mirror" of culture and society both reflects and models consumer culture, providing a valuable insight into a culture's most salient values (Pollay 1986). One of the most essential aspects of cullure, frequently exploited and replicated in advertisements, is gender identity. Thus, ideals of femininity and masculinity propagated in advertisements are ideologised and correspond with desired identities, values, lifestyles and aspirations of the target consumers. The present chapter focuses on the visual discourse of advertising and illustrates how it exploits images of idealised human body-particularly the female body-in order to achieve its monetary goals. It is argued that the visual mode is highly effective in reproducing stereotyped representations of gender, especially in global advertising campaigns. Drawing on social semiotics as the analytical framework, the chapter explores the construction of gender identities in a corpus of 642 adverts randomly selected from seven Polish magazines for women. In order to define the dominating visual representations of gender and their relations to the advertised product type, the images have been content analysed. The categories for visual codification were developed in a pilot study that revisited four semiotic categories for iconic representation of women proposed by Vestergaard and Schmder (J 985) and five categories for depiction of men, developed independently. The analysis has shown that despite essential social changes over the last decades and a visible shift of female social roles towards professionalism and independence, the highly sexualised female body still remains the main visual persuader.