Discourse on Disciplining Indonesian Women’s Bodies in a Dove Advertisement

Abstract

In modern society, all human beings are performers. Our identities could be formed to imitate the personality types that are circulating around us, or we could create our own unique personality styles, which are different and in fact has never been attached to another person. Advances in information technology affect the way people define their identity. The mass media provides the widest opportunity for people to get a reference of lifestyles and role models in the process of establishing a person's identity. Hair is one of the attributes of the body which receives most of human attention besides the skin, face and body itself. It becomes a topic that is often discussed in various articles published in mass media, ranging from magazines, newspapers and the Internet. Hair has also become one of the attributes of the body sold by the world beauty industry. This article does not only describe the contents of a shampoo advertisement text, but also questions the existence of the advertisements in the context of society and explores their role in the project of disciplining the female body. A Dove shampoo commercial is chosen to be analyzed in an effort to dismantle the intervention of the beauty industry in the process of identity formation of women in Indonesia. The discussion in this article advertisement adopts Fairclough's theoretical framework on three elements of discourse, namely text, discourse practice (production, distribution and consumption of text), and socio-cultural practice (socio-cultural practices in society).



Author Information
Rina Widiastuti, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia

Paper Information
Conference: ACCS2016
Stream: Media Studies

This paper is part of the ACCS2016 Conference Proceedings (View)
Full Paper
View / Download the full paper in a new tab/window


Comments & Feedback

Place a comment using your LinkedIn profile

Comments

Share on activity feed

Powered by WP LinkPress

Share this Research

Posted by James Alexander Gordon