The portrayal of women in Elle magazine advertisements. A comparison between France and Russia

Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Communications - Public Relations, Advertising, Marketing, Social Media, grade: 2,3, University of Central Lancashire, language: English, abstract: The purpose of the dissertation is to investigate how women are portrayed in two chosen countries: Russia and France. More specifically, it will be investigated whether women are portrayed as sexual objects in both countries or differently. The purpose is to investigate whether this is indeed true by choosing woman magazine Elle to investigate whether women are primarily used as sex objects or not to advertise different products and for what kind of products in France and Russia and whether there is a difference in one of the countries in particular the degree of body revealing clothes plays an important role as well as the gaze of women. As France is supposed to be open-minded to nudity, it was interesting to find out whether this is indeed true and whether Russia is the same because the culture differs. Therefore, a content analysis of magazine advertisements in women magazine Elle has been conducted of the French and Russian issue of Elle from May to September 2014 to investigate the degree sexuality by looking at body revealing clothes that is body display, facial expression as well as nudity will be taken into consideration. In addition, gender roles in advertisements will be considered where women are with a men in advertisement regarding women role allocation. As a guideline, variables will be applied developed by sociologist Ervin Goffman, who developed gender categories which can be applied in advertisements. They are the following: Licensed withdrawal, relative size, function ranking, feminine touch and ritualization of subordination which will be covered and explained in the literature review in more detail. To classify roles women and men take in advertisements when being together, the relative size and function ranking categories will be applied to estimate gender roles in the analysis of advertisements. In addition, the gender roles, that is the position between a man is investigated by measuring size whether woman is equal, smaller or not important and whether she takes decorative roles, non-executive roles making her inferior or not. Goffman's gender variables will be thus considered to help to find out whether women are portrayed unequal as well. Furthermore, two additional categories have been added by Kang (1997) who did a content analysis using Goffman's variables, these are body display and self-assertiveness/independence.