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This thesis considers women’s representation in television commercials in Australia and Bangladesh. It is an empirical study. A total of 780 advertisements were recorded from various television channels of Australia and Bangladesh. Among them 280 and 500 advertisements were taken from Bangladeshi and Australian television channels respectively. This thesis is about women’s representation in television commercials in Australia and Bangladesh. Bringing an interdisciplinary but empirical approach to a broad range of recently screened advertisements, the thesis examines how femininities are stereotypically represented in these two countries’ television commercials. The study suggests that women are produced and reproduced as sexual objects and/or objects to be looked at, and that representations of women’s bodies circulate around the binary of purity and pollution in heavily gendered and racialised ways. The interesting finding of this study is the extension of the ‘male-gaze’ concept where women come under the gaze from (hetero) sexual perspectives. The study suggests that images of femininity and racialisation are produced and reproduced. This constructs women’s secondary position and creates racial instability in societies.

Magister Artium - MA / The theory of multimodality (Kress 2010; Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) has impacted major research fields like Linguistics and Education by significantly extending our understanding of what is meant by communication through different modalities and media. More recently, scholars have been paying attention to multimodality in the world of advertising (Lick, 2015; Enli, 2014). Drawing on the work from multimodality scholars like Machin and Mayr (2012), Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) and others, this study explores the multimodal choices that were strategically made by a major multinational beverage company, Coca Cola. Specifically, these choices relate to its health-related television advertisements that were created in response to health-related criticisms of its products by consumers and health institutions over the years. The purpose of this study is to examine whether the beverage company is ‘spinning the truth’ in response to health-related criticisms by using certain multimodal strategies in its healthrelated television advertisements posted on the YouTube website. The study also critically reviews the reactions of consumers to these specific television advertisements on YouTube and the issues they raised in their on-line comments. The findings of this research study illustrate that Coca-Cola did not admit to its contribution to obesity in its health-related television advertisements and it did not address health-related criticisms in the comment sections on YouTube. Instead the brand’s common message and stance in all of the health-related television advertisements was that consumers need to lose the calories that they gain from consuming Coke by eating well, being active and exercising in order to avoid obesity and other health issues.

Magister Artium (Psychology) - MA(Psych) / Menstruation can be defined as the cyclic shedding of the uterine wall in response to the production of hormones from the ovaries. Although menstruation is experienced as both a positive and negative phenomenon, the dominant view remains a negative one. Menstruation has been stigmatised across most cultures, and culturally constructed as something that needs to be hidden, and hygienically managed, and a source of shame and embarrassment. It is also seen as a dirty process and a source of discomfort, illness and emotional instability. Dominant cultural constructions of menstruation in advertisements convey the message that through the purchase of particular menstrual products, women will be “protected”, “fresh”, and thus the cultural beliefs of a hygiene crisis, concealment and secrecy are perpetuated. This study explored isi-Xhosa speaking women’s experiences and meaning-making related to the portrayal of menstruation and menstrual products in television advertisements. Active audience theory, a branch of media theory, formed the theoretical framework for this study. This research adopted a qualitative approach, and made use of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore participants’ personal experiences. Three focus groups were conducted in English, consisting of 5 participants per focus group. Research began with two focus groups until saturation was reached. Participants were shown two television advertisements of two major South African companies (Kotex and Always) who sell menstrual products, as a means of stimulating discussion. The findings indicated that there were major discrepancies between what was portrayed in menstrual product advertisements and the reality of participants’ experiences; there was an exaggerated emphasis on checking behaviours; menstrual product advertisements avoided displaying the discomfort associated with menstruation; advertisements heightened the fear around leaking and emphasised hygiene and remaining clean. The positive finding to emerge was participants’ view that menstrual product advertisements served as a means of education, in the context where they were often misinformed about menstruation or provided with minimal or no information. This study extended on a previous study conducted at a different South African university, and contributed to the literature in this area within the South African context. All ethical guidelines stipulated by the University of the Western Cape were strictly adhered to.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / Two studies of the mass media were conducted to investigate the roles of Blacks in magazine and television advertising. Study I was a longitudinal study of 6266 pictorial advertisements in five categories of general magazines. Study II was a descriptive study of one week of 705 commercial network television advertisements. In both studies, the amount of exposure and status relationships of Blacks were studied vis-a-vis their White counterparts. Results showed a marked tendency toward all-white characters in both magazines and television with some indication that status for Blacks is increasingly that of an "equal". / 2031-01-01

Thesis (M.A. (African Languages)) -- University of the North, 2001 / Refer to the document

From the television advertisements made by presidential candidates from 1952 to 1976, this study analyzed the 131 advertisements that contained women. The analysis used the following descriptors: Number of Women's Roles, Age, Occupation, Marital Status, Locale, Concerns, and Status Relative to the Candidate. The results indicate that women are most likely to be shown as physically present although not speaking, in the 18 to 30 age group, belonging to a non-business atmosphere yet outside the home, and of an unknown marital status, and will not be shown in the same frame as the candidate. Womens' images in these advertisements were most commonly associated with issues involving the cost of living, taxes, pro-Nixon, and social security.

Political advertising on television is a relatively “new” phenomenon in South African general election campaigns (circa 2008). The purpose of this study is to analyse and compare the three sampled 2009 and 2014 African National Congress (A.N.C.) political television advertisements, with a specific focus on the verbal, non-verbal and visual rhetoric in the communication of election campaign messages. To achieve this goal, the study reviewed literature in the subject of rhetoric and post-colonial perspectives in the areas of Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism, focusing specifically on the seminal work of the Afro-centrist, Molefi Asante, and the anti-Western-centric scholar, Samin Amin. The study uses social semiotics (as both a theoretical approach and a research methodological framework). As a theoretical approach, the social semiotic approach was conceptualised by Valentin Voloshinov (1973) and Michael Halliday (1978), and it argues for the creation of social meaning within a text and within a society. The study focuses on the former, the creation of meaning within a text, that is, the content of the three sampled political advertisements. As a research framework, the approach was adapted by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (1996). The study favours their social semiotic research method which provide the interpreter/researcher with dimensions, or “tools’, with which to explicate and deconstruct textual meanings. Thus, in this study, social semiotics as part of the broader field of discourse analysis, was used to deconstruct the latent and manifest ideologies of the non-verbal, verbal and visual rhetoric of two 2009 and one 2014 A.N.C. political television advertisements. Using this combined theoretical framework (rhetoric, social semiotics and Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism), and, research approach, it could be determined whether the verbal, non-verbal and visual rhetoric of these three A.N.C. political television commercials represents Afrocentric and/or Eurocentric post- colonial The main findings of the study show that both the visual and verbal rhetoric of the sampled A.N.C. political television commercials represents a combination of a varying ideological constructs, namely the “nationalist”; “socialist”; “liberal feminist”; and, “liberal capitalist ideologies” (cf. Haywood 1998; Thompson 2003). Furthermore, the findings of the study point out that the verbal, non-verbal and visual rhetoric of the selected A.N.C. political television commercials, are neither exclusively Afrocentric nor Eurocentric in nature. Both post-colonial perspectives are represented, in varying degrees, in the sampled A.N.C. commercials. The study makes a significant contribution to the political communication landscape in South Africa, in that, it is an exclusively qualitative content analysis, as opposed to previous, quantitative content-analysis studies (cf. Fourie 2008; Fourie & Froneman 2003; Fourie & Froneman 2001). It is also important to note that as far as can be determined, that this is the first study to use social semiotics, as either a theoretical framework or a research method. The key limitation of the study is that, it only focuses on three purposely sampled A.N.C. election campaign television advertisements, and does not include the political television advertisements of opposition political parties, such as the Democratic Alliance. / Communication Science / M.A. (Communication)