A Multimodal Analysis of Gender Representations in British and Italian TV Advertisements

Abstract

The present paper illustrates the preliminary findings of a CORECOM-funded project called “The representation of the image of women in advertising: interlinguistic and multimodal perspectives”. Its aim has been to identify, analyze and deconstruct semantic asymmetries which continue to proliferate in the field of information and communication, thus perpetrating discursive constructions of stereotyped and discriminating gender identities. Drawing on the most influential contributions to the study of language and gender (Lakoff 1975, Goffman 1979, Cameron 1995; Christie 2000, Lazar 2005, Jeffries 2007, Baker 2008, Mills 2008, 2012, Machin & Caldas-Coulthard 2016), the present research has identified possible pragmatic characterizations leading to the identification of subliminal, discriminating or degrading advertising messages which provide the audience with the image of a stereotyped woman or allusively associated, for example, with an aesthetic canon based on beauty as an absolute value. To this end, the comparison between advertising messages disseminated on the regional, national and international territory has brought out quantitative and qualitative data that have allowed us to define the extent to which the presence of gender stereotypes and sexualization of the female body are occurring in regional and national advertising in relation to some European countries. Reference has thus been made to advertisements in English in both English-speaking and non-English-speaking countries. Consequently, the results of interlinguistic and comparative research have also brought out useful data for the definition of pragma-linguistic patterns characterizing ELF (English as a Lingua Franca; Seidlhofer 2001) in advertising.