Discourse Construction Of Gender Identity In Magazine Advertising

There is no denying that recent few years have witnessed an increasingly crucial issue which has been gaining more and more scholars’ attention.Therefore, this study, through analyzing advertising discourse in Reader’s Digest, reveals the way how advertising discourse constructs gender identity and what way to build kind of gender identities are constructed. Corpus of previous studies focused mostly on the macro level, such as: books, newspaper editorials and other articles. And perspectives of most previous studies mainly focused on the external, obvious characteristics of each gender, such as using different vocabulary,syntax, tone and so on. However, it is not easy to detect implicit features of gender from grammatical level.Therefore, against the background of the lack of systematic and comprehensive linguistic studies of the construction of gender identity in advertising discourse in Reader’s Digest, the current study is intended to explore this issue, primarily on the basis of systemic functional linguistics which is selected for its dedication to expounding the relationship between culture, society and the use of language. And in order to explore this issue, this study tries to answer the following three questions:(1) How the different gender identities are constructed respectively in advertising discourse in Reader’s Digest published in 2013?(2) What different characteristics of gender identity are constructed respectively in the advertising discourse?(3) What kind of social ideologies are reflected in the term of these gender identities constructed with the help of linguistic devices?To tackle the above questions, this study chooses gender-oriented advertisements in Reader’s Digest published in 2013 as data for analysis, which can be defined as those advertisements with targeted consumers either men or women, naturally divided into women ads and men ads. This study, mainly based on the theory of Critical Discourse Analysis, uses Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, combines the language with society and analyses the recessive gender characteristics from level of lexicogrammar in discourse. UAM Corpus Tool, which is mainly used to mark text and provides data for qualitative analysis is used as research tool in this study, researching the number of six processes(material process, mental process, relational process, behavioral process, verbal process, existential process) using in both(men ads for short and women ads. In addition, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar is used as a starting point,marking and counting the number of each process in men and women advertising respectively.The results of this study shows that material process takes up the most in men’s advertising, indicating that men are objective, independent, creative and initiative and authoritative, which sees men asorder-givers and decision-makers. While in women’s advertising, relational process and mental process occupy the majority, which shows that women are sensitive, passive, focusing on inner feelings change,dependent on men and materialized.The current study broadens the scope of the study of Critical Discourse Analysis. To a certain extent,this study can help people treat advertising correctly, rationally, find out gender discrimination in advertising discourse and to be rational consumers for the sake of eliminating gender discrimination in advertising and promote gender equality.