Abstract
Media is a powerful tool that helps to perpetuate ideologies, process of discrimination and power relation between social groups. Therefore, there lies an inevitable relationship between media, gender and identity. Gender representation in media varies across cultures but the notion of femininity linked with attractive appearance in advertisement industry can be seen in almost every part of the world. A recent approach to post-feminist averred that gender roles are changing and equality is approaching in every domain, but when it comes to media and advertisement the subject of language and gender is still a controversial issue. Considering this context, it is important to analyze how different cultures still portray and construct femininity in their context. Therefore, present study undertakes the linguistic analysis of Pakistani beauty Ads to examine how predominant mainstream media constructed a certain kind of femininity ideal through the language of cosmetic advertisements. The scope of this research is limited to female beauty adverts as theses advertisements texts “best conceptualize the sites of female struggle”, where the addressee is subjected to certain position, “to which they can accept, reject or otherwise respond” to feminine ideals (Mills, 2012). 8 cosmetic ads were randomly selected from Pakistani media for qualitative analysis by using Feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) framework while Hoey’s (2001) problem-solution model was adapted as a methodological framework with the purpose of analyzing the texts critically. The analysis revealed that media incorporate femininity ideals in contemporary advertising discourse where female body is presented as problematic that needs to be fixed at any rate and can be attained by buying their cosmetic products. Thus, by presenting numerous factors, such as environment, aging and existing bad products etc that affect female body; they present an ultimate (however temporary) solution to the problem i.e. none other than ways of enhancing good looks. This research and its detailed analysis of the intricacies of female representation in advertising industry would allow future feminists to challenge the core ideologies and possibly find alternatives to change stereotypes.
Aisha Tanweer. (2018) LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF FEMININE IDEALS IN PAKISTANI PRE-DOMINANT MAINSTREAM MEDIA ADVERTS, Journal of Social Sciences & Interdisciplinary Research, Volume 7, Issue 2.
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