Gillian Rose Gender

For an example, over the years advertisements have become vastly popular in getting a message across in forms of marketing and product service. There are often prejudices and dominant ideologies embedded within the narratives; a focal point to assess is the portrayal of gender. This is because there are certain damaging ideologies about gender, which are hidden or naturalized in glossy media images. Gillian Rose states gender in adverts is about the viewers ‘who bring their own ways of seeing and other knowledges to bear on an image and make their own meanings from it’, although the audience are free of opinion to interpret the advertisement, there are already aspects of gender performativity deep-seated in our cultural landscape, these denote …show more content…
Pierce’s work focused on how we make sense of the world around us rather than language directly, his theory was made of three elements: ‘a sign, its object, and its interpretant’, translated as the icon, index and symbol (Pierce 1998:484). The sign referred to the abstract representation, which had a direct link between the sign and object, leaving the symbol based on cultural associations. In our everyday life we frequently use these semiotics in order to interpret meanings, they can show one thing but mean another. For an example a traffic light, this is the iconic sign; we use the different colours of a traffic light to establish when we should stop the car, wait and then continue to drive again. The colour red firstly is an index of danger, ordering the driver to stop for safety, whereas the colour green tells the driver they can go. These symbols are fundamentally arbitrary and must be learnt through unconscious cultural knowledge, as ‘we enter the world as an unstructured animalistic being’ (Kate McGowan 2007:24). From a young age we are socialized and taught the basics of everyday life as we live in a world full of signs, without these signs there would be no way of