A DISCURSIVE STUDY OF GENDER IDEOLOGY IN ADVERTISEMENTS IN THE CONTEXT OF IRAN

Among vast areas of Critical Discourse Analysis, much attention is being given to mass media playing a significant role in the modern world, by not just broadcasting information in fast speed but mirroring social power abuse, dominance, and inequality in the social and political context, if any. By creating a certain type of message, media can both reflect and influence people’s attitude and opinions, and shape a specific ideology towards different aspects of people’s lives. To explore the ideologically schematic idea of gender in the context of Iran the present study investigated a corpus of 30 print textual and/no pictorial commercials structure of the last decades of some leading press agencies and magazines of Iran in quantitative and qualitative domains, in the framework of Cook [1] and two ads were analyzed in-depth. It attempted to specify (female) gender stereotypes, which are used in advertising. It concluded that in a hierarchically gendered society of Iran power asymmetries and gender ideology depicted in ads impose an inferior submissive and subordinate image for women. It indicates that machoism and patriarchy as an ideological system is still dominant. Emancipation of women is not practiced in real sense in the culture of Iran. Though the sexist view of power attenuated and gender-role variance has been dwindled in social praxis of both genders, the distinctness and inequality has not been eradicated.