New Insights into Gendered Discursive Practices - Language, Gender and Identity Construction

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Acknowledgements: The present study was financially supported by a grant(ID No:FFI2013-47792-C2-2-P)from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. This article is part of the long-term research project “EMotion and language ‘at work’: The discursive emotive/evaluative FUNction in different texts and contexts within corporate and institutional work: PROject PERsuasion” (EMO-FUNDETT: PROPER).

1Following García Gómez (2010: 136), gender readership was determined by “explicit gender statements (…) and gender-indexical language”.

2This “close reading” follows the methodology in Currie’s study (2001), whose conclusions are based on the close reading of two texts. The present study, although cannot be considered quantitative, analyzes a larger corpus. For a quantitative study, a much larger sample of texts should have been analysed; notwithstanding, a larger corpus would not have allowed to apply this qualitative methodology.

2

Official and unofficial propaganda: old sexism (and, racism and classism) in new guises

JOANNE NEFF VAN AERTSELAER

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Abstract

This article traces the connection between propaganda, understood as promoted by the state or institutions, and commercial advertising. Both types of messages use similar techniques –establish authority, exploit existing beliefs, create fear, imply that everyone agrees, be selective about the truth, establish a leadership cult, etc. From a gender point of view, it can be shown that when the messages are directed towards women, they are principally concerned with instructing women as to their proper place in society, and/or they are meant to support men’s self-image, as masculine. The article also includes a brief comparison of propaganda used by the Francoist government and the UK and US government during WWI and WWII.

Keywords : Sexist political propaganda, sexist advertising, power, propaganda.

1 Introduction

This article analyzes various types of propaganda (promoted by the State or institutions), and its “cousin”, commercial advertising, both in official and unofficial campaigns, with the purpose of showing that both types of advertising are/have been targeted more at women than at men and that the messages used by both types of campaigns actually coincide in the techniques they use, which are essentially the same. But, more importantly, from a gender point of view, these two types of advertising converge in that they consider women in light of the two polar social functions, neither of them essential to society: 1) women must be “instructed” as to how they are to carry out their lives –good mothers, efficient wives, beautiful and stylish, etc.; and, 2) women are objects that men use in order to enhance their reputation with other men (Beneke 1997). If the woman is a girlfriend or wife, she may be expected to be very proper, but in any case, she must be beautiful and at least covertly sexy.