A Cross-cultural Comparison Of Gender Roles In Chinese And American Magazine Advertisements

A gender role is a set of culturally defined behavioral norms associated with males and with females respectively in a given social group or system(Connell,1987, p. 165). According to Courtney and Whipple(1983), advertisements reflecting traditional gender roles are more effective than those reflecting non-traditional gender roles. However, gender role norms for men and women can vary significantly from one country or culture to another. Therefore, how gender roles are portrayed in advertisements cross-culturally is worth studying in contemporary American and Chinese financial magazines. Many scholars have focused on this problem from the perspective of marketing, content analysis, critical linguistics and even MCDA with the multimodal tendency of advertisements. As a further development of traditional CDA, the concept of MCDA was first put forward by Machin and Mayr in their monograph in 2012. MCDA holds that images and texts in magazine advertisements work together to create meaning and aims to reveal the ideology buried in the seemingly neutral images as well as the texts.This research applies the analytical perspective of MCDA by combining Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and Kress & van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar. Advertisements including males and females are chosen from both countries’ financial magazines to study the gender roles embedded in them by using quantitative and qualitative methods. The analysis is divided into two stages: visual analysis and linguistic analysis. The visual analysis is conducted first by adopting quantitative method which adapts Courtney and Lockeretz’s classification scheme(1971) to classify and calculate the advertisements. A further visual and linguistic analysis of two business program advertisements is conducted by combining SFG and VG to analyze comprehensively how images and language work together to construct gender roles and the its effects on promotion of product.The result shows that gender roles in Chinese advertisements are rigid andtraditional while the gender roles in American advertisements are varied and diverse.Hofstede’s masculinity dimension can still explain the gender role differences existing between the magazines. Representational meaning of image and ideational function of language in magazine advertisements cooperate with each other to construct gender roles through anchorage, relay and illustration. The construction of gender roles through visual and textual elements can increase reliability, help build consumer relationship more easily and control the viewers’ possible reading paths to accentuate the advantages of the product. The advertisers integrate visual and textual elements with the final purpose of promoting the products.To sum up, the result found in this thesis is not only practical for advertisers in both countries but also for common people who don’t have the consciousnesses of noticing the gender roles hidden in advertisements. Its theoretical significance lies in revealing contemporary gender roles hidden in advertisements and proving the usefulness of MCDA in analysis of multimodal discourse.