Abstract
Cosmetic names today carry more than just information on products’ functions or ingredients; they carry dreams, fantasy and stereotypical beliefs of femininity. This study intends to investigate gender representation through advertising language from the perspective of Mills’ (1996) Feminist Stylistics. This research explores the naming devices at word and clausal level, stylistic features and rhetorical devices in order to uncover the extent to which prevailing views of gender are either maintained or challenged. It examines how advertisers and copywriters use language to depict women and how language contributes to such depictions. Findings reveal that the noun phrases are dominated by pre modifiers that function as adjectives to describe the cosmetic names. The notion of gender is also represented in various clause types in which women are not encouragingly depicted, while the stylistic features and rhetorical devices used in cosmetic names reveal traits that are stereotypically prescribed to women. Evidences in which the cosmetic names revolve around gender differences and the patriarchal concept of male domination are extensive. This study hopes to contribute in improving advertising practices, as well as to provide awareness in educating buyers to be more critical when decoding advertising language. DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2017-1701-02
Highlights
The cosmetic industry is one of the fastest-growing industries that generates multibillion dollar revenues each year and this lucrative, worldwide industry is experiencing rapid growth as opposed to a decade ago
Anchored by research in advertising language and stylistics analysis, this study aims to bridge the gap that has been identified in the previous section
The determiners, pre-modifiers, head nouns and post modifiers were used to describe the cosmetic names in the corpus
Summary
The cosmetic industry is one of the fastest-growing industries that generates multibillion dollar revenues each year and this lucrative, worldwide industry is experiencing rapid growth as opposed to a decade ago. While naming can be an intricate business, the possibility for marketers to manipulate gender has never lost its relevance, causing concerns in depictions of femininity. Apart from advertising language being carriers of ideologies, these names communicate harmful underlying messages that could result in women being perceived as sex objects, passive and undignified. Scholars further indicate that inserting sexuality in ISSN: 1675-8021 names is an instant means to appear impactful because sex sells (Gill, 2008; Zimmerman & Dahlberg, 2008; Perez, 2013). While not all advertised products in the market contain explicit connotations of sexuality, advertisers feed on the man-made definition of ‘perfection’ by creating names that carry stereotypes, myths and ideals. While the representation of women has not been encouraging, such names have the capacity to sustain gender differences and keep women in their place (see Wolf, 1991; Merskin, 2007; Gill, 2008; Berberick, 2010)
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