DefinePK

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the sexual objectification of women in print media adverts where women are treated as a sexual commodity instead of a person. Advertisements are instrumental tool for utilizing and propagating sexist notions and images as a tool for marketing in the consumer society (Jacobson and Mazur, 1995). A large amount of data reveals that advertisements not only sell products but sex, and contribute to the objectification of women by making them objects of desire (Ullah and Khan, 2014).
The data for the study comprises print media adverts collected randomly from Pakistani newspapers and magazine covers. The adverts in these media, in accordance with the principle of economy of space, maximize their effect by using sexualized images of women in order to seize the attention of general public. As all the advertisements are composite texts having more than one mode of meaning-making therefore a multimodal discourse analysis approach (Kress and Leeuwen, 2006) based on systemic functional linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) is used in this research. It analyzes various semiotic resources employed in advertisements like gaze, posture, color, size of shot, space, smile, etc. to decipher the sexist images. For example, this research shows that gaze directed in an erotic manner is the most frequently used mode in all the adverts. Therefore, this study reveals the objectification of women in print media advertisements in Pakistan through representational, interactional and compositional meanings (Kress and Leeuwen, 1996).