Genere e pubblicità. Prototipi comportamentali veicolati dalla pubblicità

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the relationship between magazine advertising and gender social definition. The theoretical approach underlines how the language of advertising produces representations independent from the advertised goods, so to provide a communicative surplus. Besides its technical-practical literal meaning (selling goods), by using suggestive shapes and a metaphorical language the advertising produces a wider social and symbolical meaning, and at the same time a system of secondary values. Nowadays, such values have a great relevance in the advertising campaigns: they are also able to define and reproduce typical behaviour. These representations embrace actually behaviour modalities that, on one hand, express pre-existing social and existential realities; on the other hand they aim to build new ones. In both cases they influence the every-day life. Given these introductory statements our empirical work aim to characterize some gender representation and differences between males and females in behavioural features. To deal with this, we have focused on two kinds of gender magazine, selected on the basis of their target and their spreading on the national (Italy) scale. Trough an analytical criterion of relevance we selected a corpus of sampled imagines. Starting from the analysis of communicative frames and their specific patterns of correlation of the different element contained in the advertising message, it was possible to individuate some gender prototype.

Valentina Cremonesini, Carla Izzi, Genere e pubblicità. Prototipi comportamentali veicolati dalla pubblicità in "SOCIOLOGIA DELLA COMUNICAZIONE " 35-36/2004, pp , DOI: