(Desperate) Housewives, Domestic Angels, or Femmes Fatales: Stereotyped Categories of Female Representation on the Italian Social Semiotic Landscape

Introduction

Gender violence against women, across all of the variants of femicide, domestic violence, verbal and sexual abuse, psychological and sexual violence, represents a truly social and especially cultural emergency nowadays. We really are in a state of war in which terrorist acts against women reflect the demonstration of a moribund patriarchy that is thrashing around in the attempt to keep the power by any means. The facts are clear and depict a sexist and andro-phallocentric culture in which women have always been considered an object owned by men – firstly, the father and then the husband.

The objective of this study is to analyze the ways in which sexism occurs by focusing attention on the distorted representations of the female body in the advertising images displayed on the streets of Italy.

This refers to the fixed images that are encountered on the major advertising panels located on roads and thoroughfares across the Italian countryside, posted on public transportation, visible at the bus stops and other public places, which make an integral facet of the visual and linguistic landscape. Furthermore, as Michael Halliday (1978) states, “The city is a place of discourses: it is constructed through language” (p.20) and we are surrounded by a linguistic-figurative landscape that frequently changes into visual pollution as it will be observed through the photographs analyzed below. This is a type of immediate message, on display to all, which cannot go unnoticed. Advertising, due to its own intrinsic nature, needs temporal speed and a place in which it may communicate at high speed, all these coupled with the dynamism to apply its persuasive and seductive activities. The specific characteristics of the advertising messages depend on the means through which they are disseminated; there is a clear difference between a radio ad and an ad placed on a panel or on a page in a newspaper or magazine, in which the visual element takes predominance.

Billboard advertisements, in order to achieve their goals, have to draw attention and be remembered. They are glimpsed by people moving rapidly within the urban context. Under the pressure of time, they are unlikely to stop to decipher long, complex and difficult to understand texts, as well as to maybe return later to read the messages. The recipient of this type of advert should be impressed by an image – this is its main objective – while the text itself should be very brief, a little bigger than the headline and the brand. Nothing else is needed. Billboards feature a special type of advertising characteristic to the city environment in which they are posted and received in difficult to understand conditions or, at the least, different when compared with other means of communication. For these reasons plus the impossibility to avoid them (they are in plain sight), this type of messages may have very important consequences and potentially become very toxic.

Billboard advertising predominantly displays local type characteristics, normally referring to businesses, companies, products and services from the respective area. This does not mean that the major brands do not trust this means of advertising. From the internal organization point of view, this type of message, in comparison with others (on radio, television, in printed press or via the Internet), is iconic, scarcely verbal, appealing, or at least it strives to achieve this goal. Consequently, it greatly favors double meanings (frequently going down to truly low levels of double meanings as it will be shown below) even when it shares some utopian characteristic such as to dream about a different life or to create an illusion that everything might be different.

Billboards occupy a very broad swath of urban architecture within the scope of frequently producing visual pollution. Each is designed and detailed so as to be recognizable from a great distance. This should capture attention through each type of visual or verbal strategy, the product should be made particularly clear as well as what the product serves for or what public is targeted. The verbal text, as explained above, should be simple or at least as minimally elaborated as possible, written in large letters and in colors able to attract attention.