The 'Forever Young' Canon. Advertising Figurations of Femininity

Abstract

In the contemporary advertising discourse, brand’s meanings prevail over the ones concerning the products. This is one of the several consequences resulting from the increasingly exploitation of the intangibles values to the detriment of those ones usually took as the USP fundamentals. To paraphrase Jean Marie Floch, promotional expressiveness relies increasingly in those paradigms of the oblique advertising and especially of the mythical advertising, for which references as Ph Michel or, especially, Leo Bernett and Jacques Séguéla become unavoidable (Floch, 1990: 201- 204, Camilo, 2010: 123-130). Precisely with reference to this discursive context, it is our purpose to unveil how is figured the advertising actor, especially that one who plays the roles of "young” and “female".

This work aims to carry out a semiotic classification of the major advertising representation schemes concerning the "young woman" and stems from a semiotics approach of textual nature. It is based on a analysis corpus of 230 advertisements published in Portuguese women’s magazines in the period from May and July 2015. We intend with this qualitative study to trace a 'semiotics profile' concerning the female actors in order to verify in what extent they are over-determined by an attribute: the 'youth'.