Corpus-based Female Identity Construction In Female Hygiene Products Commercials

With the development of science and technology,video advertising discourse plays an increasingly prominent role in the dissemination of information,and shows a trend of digitalization and multimodalization.At the same time,with the spread of the feminist wave,there has been an increasing focus on the female identity in the mass media.Therefore,the study of female identity in advertisements can help us recognize the status of women in society and the expectations of the public for ideal female identity from a new perspective.However,due to the specificity of menstruation in most cultural contexts,current research has paid little attention to advertisements of female hygiene products.Based on a self-constructed corpus,this study analyzed the identity resources,the main female identity characteristics and their construction strategies in four brands of hygiene product video advertisements.We divided all the modalities as text,visual,and auditory modalities,and further sub-divided the auditory modalities into linguistic and non-linguistic modalities.The qualitative analysis method was used to explore the synergistic effects of multimodal symbols such as text,images,colors,sounds,and actions in the process of identity construction.Six distinct identity types have been constructed in the advertisements.And they can be arranged in descending order as follows:brave and confident,hedonistic,moody,sexy and attractive,united,and dependent.In terms of the resources of identity construction,the most frequently used one is action process(including characters’ movement,gestures and postures,and facial expression),while the lowest is direct judgment.For the analysis of the relationships among multimodalities,considering text and visual modalities,the coordinated relationship is the most significant in our corpus.While the most common relationship between linguistic auditory modality and text modality is the redundant relationship,and the non-linguistic auditory modality plays an important role of making the text modality prominent.The primary-secondary relationship is common between the visual and linguistic auditory modalities,but the non-linguistic auditory modality mainly plays the role of highlighting the visual modality.