A Feminist Stylistic Analysis Of Sexism In Video Advertisements

In the past Western society, women always had a lower position than men. As is known to all, language is a mirror of society, which can reflect social phenomena including sexism. And language is sometimes used as one of the tools for people to conduct sexism. With the development of social civilization, linguists have paid more attention to the study of relationship between gender and language. Stylistics, as a branch of linguistics, takes as its main task to reveal ideology in language use. And feminist stylistics in particular, as a branch of stylistics, focuses its attention on sexism reflected in language use. Therefore, we can see that feminist stylistics combines sexism study with stylistic analysis of texts of all types.This paper adopts a qualitative approach to studying video car advertisements based on Sara Mills’feminist stylistics and it aims to reveal sexism hidden or implicitly reflected in these advertisements. It also aims to provide a fresh perspective for people to appreciate car advertisements, and simultaneously to raise people awareness of sexist discrimination in them in which no sexism can be found on the surface.Specifically, this thesis analyzes 15 video car advertisements in Super Bowl Game, (one of the most popular sport games in the whole world) in 2015. The analysis was carried out at three levels, individual word, phrase/sentence and discourse. First of all, this thesis analyzes the advertisements at the level of individual word from second person pronouns, generic nous and endearments perspectives. We can find out that most car advertisements are especially made by and for men, and males are the mainly target audiences; that is to say, car advertisements are seldom made for women or people in general, even though the reality is that the number of women car buyers is larger than that of men. Secondly, sexism is analyzed at the level of phrase/sentence from the perspective of presupposition and inference and metaphor. We find that main media always praise the love of a father. The emphasis on fathers’love leads to ignorance or neglect of mothers’contributions. This is a quite common mistake the advertisers often make. Finally, the analysis is carried out at the level of the discourse. After analyzing the roles men and women play, their images and power relationship in dialogues in advertisements, we find that it is rather easy to people, males or females alike, to come to a conclusion that men play the leading roles in life and society. Thus, through the feminist stylistic analysis, car advertisements with no apparent sexism can be found to manifest sexism, though it is hidden.In a word, sexism exists in many different forms in our society. Although people are pursuing human rights and equality, there is still a long way to go. The main media conveys sexism to the audiences imperceptibly, reconstructing the readers’ ideologies by language.