Dissertation Title The Representation of Women in Advertisements: A Social Semiotic Analysis of Algerian and British ORIFLAME’s Beauty Catalogs.

Abstract

This dissertation deals with a Social Semiotic Multimodal analysis of women’s representation in beauty catalogs in order to determine how various semiotic resources have been utilized in representing particular meanings to a given audience. The study deals with the opinions and reflections of Algerian designers of ORIFLAME catalogs on the design process as well as on women’s representations. The corpus selected for this study is taken from ORIFLAME beauty catalogs. It consists of ten images of women: five taken from an Algerian catalog and five others taken from a British one in order to compare the way women are represented in the two cultures. In order to carry out the Multimodal analysis of the corpus, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s framework for the reading of visual images (1996; 2006) is used as a methodological toolkit. The study reveals that despite some differences, women are represented in the same way in the two catalogs. That is to say, both representations reinforce certain stereotypes, mainly the ones which associate women with beauty and fairness and the constant search for perfect body to become attractive. Additionally, both representations reflect their respective cultures: Algerian women reflect the conservative nature of Algerian people to keep customs and traditions;whereas,British women reflect the modern independent status of the 21st Century European woman. In terms of compositional principles, the two catalogs follow the same structures by using and positioning some semiotic resources namely: gaze, colour, angle, body posters, and size of elements in the same manner and to achieve the same outcomes. Interview data showed that these designers are more or less aware of the importance of using and placing the different semiotic resources within the visual representation in a way to achieve the desired goals (i.e. better adverting for ORIFLAME products). They are also aware of the various stereotypes and cultural messages that women’s representations provide to the intended audience and know how to use these to serve the objectives of their company