Dissertation Title The Representation of Women in Advertisements: A Social Semiotic Analysis of Algerian and British ORIFLAME’s Beauty Catalogs.
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Date
2017
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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
Description
75p.:ill;30cm.(+cd)
Keywords
ORIFLAME catalogs, Advertisements, Women Images, Visual Grammar, Metafunctions, Interviews, Content Analysis.
Citation
Applied Linguistics and Social Semiotics