Constructing female identities through feminine hygiene TV commercials

In this paper we report the results of a qualitative multimodal analysis of a corpus of Spanish and British TV ads featuring female hygiene products such as tampons, liners and sanitary towels/pads. We contend that advertisers of menstruation-related products employ a wide range of strategies to convey both overt information about the products advertised, as well as to – and more importantly – indirectly transmit stereotypical beliefs of women which inevitably helps reproduce and sometimes perpetuate a gender-biased type of discourse (Holmes and Marra, 2005, ). Crook's (2004), distinction between the product-claim and the reward dimension in ads has been taken as the starting point for our analysis. Within the product-claim dimension we have focused on what information is transmitted through the application of some of Brown and Levinson's (1987) generic positive and off-record politeness strategies. On the other hand, within the reward dimension attention is shifted to how information surfaces the language in an indirect fashion through attention to different format types, visual imagery, voices and music. Results indicate that ads either tend to focus on the product, its advantages and practicality as the solution to women's worries during menstruation, something that brings the negative aspects of this biological activity to prominence; whereas a second group of ads is constructed as a celebration of womanhood and the creation of a certain female identity whereby women are endowed with their ability to break with old myths and taboos.