Towards a descontruction of symbolic violence in a sample of advertising discourse. A critical discourse perspective

María Martínez Lirola

doi:10.18002/cg.i17.7132

Authors

María Martínez Lirola Universidad de Alicante - España

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18002/cg.i17.7132

Keywords:

woman, critical discourse analysis, multimodality, advertising discourse, symbolic violence, gender studies

Abstract

This article examines the representation of women in the advertisements used by Dolce & Gabbana, in order to observe the examples of symbolic violence associated with women. The main objectives of this study are: 1) to deconstruct the main visual strategies used by Dolce & Gabbana to represent women in its newsletter; and 2) to characterize the main types of symbolic violence in the texts analysed. Data were collected from the newsletter used by Dolce & Gabbana to advertise their products through the internet from January to December 2016–19. The data are analysed based on the critical discourse analysis model of social actors proposed by van Leeuwen (2008) and Kress & van Leeuwen’s (2006) models of visual grammar.

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Author Biography

María Martínez Lirola, Universidad de Alicante - España

Is a Senior Lecturer of the Department of English at the University of Alicante, Spain and Research Fellow at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Her main areas of research are Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. She has published extensively in international journals such as Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, Social Semiotics, Visual Communication, Signos, RESLA, etc. She has also published seven books and several books chapters in publishers such as Peter Lang, Cambridge Scholars Publishers, John Benjamins and Comares, among others. Dr. Martínez Lirola is the director of the research group “Critical Analysis of Multimodal Discourse” from 2010. She has been a visiting scholar in different universities all over the world.

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