Multimodal discourse analysis of gender ideology in television food product advertisements in Thailand

Abstract

This study aims to explore linguistic and visual features employed to convey gender ideologies in the television food advertisements and to analyze how these advertisements portray the gender ideology in Thai society using qualitative research data collected from 40 television food product advertisements. To analyze these two dominated features reflecting gender ideologies, the linguistic and visual decoding schemes from existing literature were applied. Multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) was also employed as the analytical tool for scrutinizing the gender ideologies portrayed through the dominant linguistic and visual features. The results indicated that there were 7 patterns including (1) lexical selection, (2) figures of speech, (3) rhetorical questions, (4) the use of medical or technological information, (5) personal experience, (6) claiming, and (7) imperative sentence and 4 visual strategies including (1) function ranking, (2) product presenter, (3) relative size, and (4) ritualization of subordination, reflecting gender ideology representations. Moreover, it was found that these linguistic and visual strategies have been cooperatively represented some specific representations of gender ideologies regarding the (1) gender role depiction and (2) gender career depiction, indicating that these two modes might not only help to promote the advertised products but could be also considered as the representations of gender ideology transmission through television food advertisements in Thai society.