Gender Stereotypes in TV Commercials: A Multimodal Analysis Approach

The current study examines gender stereotypes in TV commercials through the lens of multimodality. It adopts Kress and Van Leeuwen's (2006) visual grammar to decipher the visual resources that form gendered depictions in Algerian TV advertising discourse. To achieve this aim, five TV ads broadcasted on public and private Algerian TV channels were selected and downloaded from YouTube, then they were analyzed in terms of the representational metafunction, the interactive metafunction, and the compositional metafunction. Results show that Algerian TV commercials are loaded with offensive depictions for both genders. They also indicate that different multimodal resources are involved in the construction of these gendered portrayals. The study concludes with some recommendations for ad designers and TV producers.