Gender and the Discourse of Advertising in English and Persian Magazine Advertisements

The cultural content of advertising, its language and its connection with gender issues are deeply rooted in our society. Language and gender are significant issues that remain widely controversial in the domain of advertising. The main purpose of this study is to analyze the language of advertising in Persian and English in order to estimate the specificities of the advertising genre in the two different cultural and linguistic systems. The approach employed in the study draws on the ideas of the functionalist interpretation of text typology and source text analysis as proposed by Nord (1997) and Reiss (2000). Besides, it seeks to understand the role of advertising and how it affects the culturally gendered stereotypes, and how each society portrays the image of women compared to that of men. To achieve these objectives, forty advertisements of six magazines were analyzed. The analysis revealed that Persian magazine advertisements share some similar structural discourse strategies with English advertisements. Moreover, differences in culturally gendered stereotypes between these contexts were identified.