Abstract
The gender image and ideology in the advertisements reflects our society contemporary situation. As a product, perfume often consider as symbol of personal taste and image. People choose to wear certain perfume to present him or her personality. The dissertation is going to choose several female perfume advertisements from woman 代写英国留学生硕士论文fashion magazine for the last two years as example and use social semiotic as an analysing framework to find out how woman are depicted in perfume advertisement. And does it have contained feminine beauty myth? If so, what is the stereotype of woman in perfume advertisement?
Introduction
“Advertisements are one of the most important cultural factors moulding and reflecting our life today” (Williamson 2005:11) Through survey the Woman usually represented as housewife/mothers figure in the advertisement. For example, there will always be a woman struggling to clean the mess in the kitchen or do the household chores in the cleaning product ads; or magic mom prepares food quickly to feed her starving child in frozen food advertising. Woman figure have been design as proficient, elegant and calm in house appliance advertisements categories. In addition, woman figure also be set as a beauty vast to support a successful man in automotive car ads through smiling sitting next to driver’s seat to plays subsidiary role support “the new Man” image and showing the symbol of man in control. When it present “happy family” concept, the typical image is male plays dominate role, a successful career man who is in charge of family and with his lovely wife and kid.
Besides those two woman figures which mention in former paragraph, woman also appear as sexual object in many advertisements, such as under wear or jeans ads focus on woman curve of body or only certain parts of body appear on the screen. “ Femininity has become widely synonymous with the intensive scrutiny of signifiers created by visually dissecting the female body into zones of consumption- lips, eye, breast, hips, waist, skin, hand……..” (Goldman, 1995:132) In conclusion, woman often presented as housewife/mothers figure who subsidiary to me or even divided into an object in advertisements.
However, the researcher observed the female image in perfume advertisements are rarely represent as housewife/mother figures and be place in the home, on the contrary, the woman in perfume advertisement looks pleasant and the set often outside the house.
Perfume is a product which does not has particular function, because scent is intangible.
Chapter 2: Methodology
Types of research
There are two major research methods going to be used, which are semiotics and questionnaires. Quantitative studies typically process from the researcher’s ideas about the dimensions and categories which should constitute the central focus (Bryman, 1989) the tactic of quantitative research is design the questions that researcher want to solve firstly, and then gathering a huge amount of data in order to analysis the information and conclude the finding of research.
Semiotics
The Greek word semeion is the roots of Semiology and semiotics, which means sign. Study semiotic is to analysing how sigh means communication and signs in society. Semiotics originates in 19 century the main contribution of work in this period are from Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles S. Peirce. Saussure was linguistics; he showed that language is made up of sighs (like words) and it contain meaning can be use in communication. “The sign consists of signifier, the material object, and the signified, which is its meaning. These are only divided for analytical purposes: in practice a sign is always thing-plus-meaning” It also called “a process of Hermeneutics.” Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). He expected all other way of communication can use the same methods of analysis as the way of linguistic signs do. Another scholar Charles S. Peirce according to the relation between signifier and signified divided sign into three kinds, firstly iconic signs: the signifier represents the signified by having a likeness to it, for example: photographs. Secondly, indexical signs: the relationship between signified and signifier is inherent like the relationship between smoke and fire or road signs etc. Thirdly, Symbolic signs: the relation between signified and signifier is base on conventionalised, like tribal totem. ” All of our thought and experience, our very sense of our own identity, depends on the systems of signs already existing in society which gives form and meaning to consciousness and reality” (Bignell 2002, 31) /Semiotics technique provide us a framework and a series of methods to analysing signifying practices through gesture, posture, photography, writing…etc.
In the dissertation, the author choose the example from woman fashion magazine between 2008-2010
Feminist theorists note that” structuralist semiotics has been important for feminists as a tool for critiques of reductionism and essentialism and has facilitated the analysis of contradictory meanings and identities”(Franklin et al. 1996,263)
Strengths
代写英国留学生硕士论文Semiotics can help to denaturalize theoretical assumptions in academia just as in everyday life; it can thus raise new theoretical issues (Culler 1985, 102; Douglas 1982, 199)
Questionnaire
Kumar “a questionnaire is a written list of questions, the answers to which are recorded by respondents” (Kumar, 2005:126)