As poses, a composição e os acessórios na construção da masculinidade em anúncios publicitários: uma anatomia de poder

Abstract

Various institutions, including the family, church and school, have been trying to convey notions about what it is to be “adequately” male and female. On the other hand, the media, through various resources including magazines, the internet, television, newspapers, etc. also contributes to this inculcation of "gender", because through it, advertising offers its own lessons, presenting suggestions on how to achieve ideal masculinity or femininity. In this sense, it is crucial that producers use different strategies and codes directed to the reader to ensure that the rhetorical goals of persuasion are achieved. The main objective of this article is to analyze male representations in different periods of time and socio-cultural contexts in the search to identify, through micro and macro aspects, how certain codes are capable of transmitting the ideologies of a specific socio-cultural context and period of time. The relevance of this type of analysis in advertising that belong to periods of time prior to the current context is the fact that such investigations serve to demonstrate how masculinity is conceived in different periods and socio-cultural contexts, leading to a greater understanding about its current stage. In order to achieve the aims, three advertisements were selected, dated 1969, 1979 and 1997. For the analysis of the advertisements, I use authors such as Fairclough (1995), who analyzes the trends of media discourse, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003) who consider the discourse as a significant social activity capable of encompassing verbal and non-verbal aspects, focusing on the discourse of sexual genders, to the multimodality of Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), which focuses on the multimodal elements of images and to Callen (1998) who used three guiding axes (poses and proportions, composition and media, and accessories) to decode the visual language. The analysis of the ads showed that, although there is a gap of time between them, they present characteristics in common in order to preserve, strengthen and enhance aspects of traditional and hegemonic masculinity through micro and macro elements.