Gendered Racism of TV Commercials: A Semiotic Analysis with an Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract

This study is a semiotic analysis of two selected TV commercials: Labels Against Women-Philippines Pantene commercial and CoverGirl: Women Empowerment. They are analysed within an interdisciplinary approach to display the positive and constructive role of multimodal contexts in exposing and correcting cultural attitudes that are related to discrimination and double standards against women. a) The targets the social role of language in TV commercials away from the marketing role; b) it displays and explains the various types of modes utilised by copywriters to send meaningful messages and affect the targeted audience and societies concerning gender discrimination as well. c) It clarifies the specific types of meanings used to communicate with viewers. Those objectives are accomplished through the application of a social semiotics theory, film theory, and Leech’s semantic theory to the two, selected commercials, mentioned above. The key participants in this study are the representatives of both sexes in the advertisements. One of the arguments of this study is that multimodal contexts e.g., advertisements are rich and highly influential. In this study, data goes