A Case Study Of Female Image In Food And Drug Advertisements In Reader’s Digest In The Early Period Of21^st Century

As the production of society and culture, advertisement reflects the beliefs,values of contemporary society. In another hand, it also changes or reinforces thesocial identities of some certain groups and even changes their daily life. Female,which are used frequently as the models in advertisements to show some certainproducts, have experienced huge changes in their social status. With the rapid andtremendous development of the society, it is sure that the image of women willcontinue to change or be improved. Thus, as a mirror of people’s real life,advertisements must reflect the tendency of women’s improving status in the society.In food and drug advertisements, previous studies believe that women have alower social status and dependent on men and they appear in the pictures of food anddrug advertisements more frequently than men. When occur in the advertisements,the roles of women are always confined in the house-related settings or in somelow-level working positions. However, in this thesis, the author finds that the imagesof women in food and drug advertisements in magazine have experiencedtremendous changes and also exhibited new features in the beginning of the twentyfirst century.In the present thesis,213food and drug advertisements from all issues ofReader’s Digest, one of the most popularity American magazines, between2009and2010are categorized and coded to explore the ideology and representation of womenin the early21stcentury. The approaches of content analysis and textual analysis areused to explore the female image in food and drug advertisements in magazine.After examining and comparing the information of the sample advertisements,the author finds that although the current ideology about women in advertisements isnot totally different from the traditional stereotypes, the food and drug ads inReader’s Digest exhibit the diversity image of women which are in accordance withthe improvements of women’s status in the contemporary society and the female roles portrayed in food and drug advertisements have also demonstrated new featuresin the form of age, appearance, setting and work condition at the beginning of thenew millennium.Then, it is also worthy to notice that the improving female image in food anddrug advertisements are inseparable from the contemporary economic form of thewhole society, the benefits of the advertisers and the industries, people’sconsumption attitude, and transformation and progress of society.