Representation of Women in Cosmetic Advertisement: A Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This research was conducted with the purpose to make a discourse analysis over the representation of women in the advertising of different cosmetic products. This paper has uncovered the possible ideologies underlying the advertising discourses. The significance of this study is to represent the social injustice such as unequal access to power, symbolic violence, etc through the representation of women in the advertisements discourse. By limiting the study to the three cosmetic product advertisements in the South Asian context, the researcher has used a critical-analytical method for the study. As a theoretical framework, Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model is used for the analysis of the data as it focuses on the production, reception and analysis of the text.  Based on the data analysis, it is concluded that the most obvious theme in cosmetic advertisements is the exploitation of women through which they are represented merely as objects of entertainment, inferior, helpless and puppet of patriarchal society.