Bureychak T. Construction of Gender Identities in Advertising Discourses

Analysis of peculiarities of gender identities construction in the framework of consumer culture, which is actively developing in modern Ukrainian society, is the basis of this research. Special emphasis is placed on the development of a complex conceptual approach to the study of gender discourses in advertising. Discourse analytical approach has become the basis for the theoretical definition and empirical study of gender identities and their notions promoted by advertising and perceived by audience. According to this approach gender identity can be considered as a discourse, i.e. as a structure of interconnected meanings, which defines the concepts of masculinity/femininity and legitimizes membership of a particular gender group. Existence of a range of definitions of masculinity and femininity is the evidence of the number of gender discourses and inevitable competition among them. The antagonism of gender discourses is solved by the domination (hegemony) of particular discourses (due to their spread in mass consciousness, values, stereotypes, support on state level and mass media etc.). This leads to their subduing of other discourses that aspire to definition of the same semantic field. It is suggested that gender discourses are classified according to their power influence, spread in mass consciousness and particular way of definition of gender identities into dominant, alternative and mixed type. Diverse practices of this gender discourse classification in advertising are analysed in the thesis. The conceptual approach to the measurement of gender discourses of advertising, offered in the dissertation combines a model of structure and positioning of gender discourses and a model of their decoding by an audience. According to this a multi-method study, which embraced specially developed procedures of content-analysis and focus-group discussion, was accomplished. A study of the dominant gender representations in advertisements reveals their general correspondence to the patriarchal discourse. It manifests itself in opposite meanings of masculinity and femininity when it deals with appearance and public/private sphere attachment. In particular, visual domination of women and audio domination of men was among the main research findings. These representational practices legitimise the ideals of women's attractive appearance and female recognition and actualization as an object of gaze. Male characters tend to be depicted as a subject which defines social reality. Stressing the importance of female beauty advertising also offers certain criteria for its construction. Being young and attractive are among them. Meanwhile advertisements offer a quite blurred image of female beauty, assuming that there are a variety of ways for women to express their attractiveness. As to male appearance in advertising, one can observe the opposite tendencies in representations - wider range of age for male characters, however more strictly defined criteria for appearance. In most cases this represents traditional roles divisionbetween the one who look and the one who is being looked at.