A Study Of Stereotyped Women Images In The American Advertisements Of The1990s

Advertisements have been exerting an unfathomable impact on all the social, economic and civic divisions ever since the advertising campaigns gained its momentum. At the same time, its expansion into social and cultural realm after being introduced by the thriving economy is laying guidance for the way people consume, identify, judge and influences their values, even insinuates into their ideology. The gender theory has been widely applied into feminist studies ever since1970s which upholds that the gender difference is socially constructed and acquired rather than physiologically predetermined.This thesis is aimed to undertake a study of the stereotyped women images in1990s’ advertisements and its factors by conflating gender with advertising and to examine its social implications. The methodology to be applied majorly draws on the psychoanalytic theory, especially that of the "unconscious" initiated by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage. Great quantities of pictures are employed to lend a better support to the theme.Ruptured from her original entity, woman’s body is deprived of independent personality and thinking at the mercy of advertisers’ insatiable commercial appetite. Women are sexually objectified and dwell in the aesthetic reign of masculinity as their faces, breasts, legs, bodies, hair are exposed through close-ups. There are alternatively other times that they make their appearance as irresistible beauties in American advertisements of the1990s. Attributed to the display of the power asymmetry that the ideological ineptitude generates through commodities advertisements, women images are hence freeze-framed and stereotyped.Gender portrayals of women in the advertisements can be deemed as the signification and commercialization of women, yet despite the appearances, as the chronic outcome of female objectification by male supremacy. Women images are to great extent damaged and distorted, which may result in the breach of gender equality, the halted rise of women’s status and the desensitization to ethnic values that cannot go unnoticed and underestimated.