FEMININITY AND THE NEGOTIATION OF GENDER IDEOLOGY IN COSMETIC ADVERTISING A Comparative Analysis of English and Japanese Language Posters Across Two Historical Periods

Sammanfattning

In recent years, women’s empowerment discourse has been widely discussed across various fields. As a key site of negotiation of gendered ideologies and power relations, advertising has interacted with feminist movements over time and adapted them across cultural contexts. This thesis examines cosmetic advertising posters in English and Japanese through synchronic and diachronic comparison, focusing on the construction of female imagery and its underlying ideological regulation. Using qualitative multimodal discourse analysis and feminist critical discourse analysis, the study investigates how femininity is constructed through visual and linguistic patterns in relation to objectification, normalization, relationality, empowerment, and postfeminism. The findings suggest that cosmetic advertising does not show a simple linear shift from objectification to empowerment. Early advertisements tended to define femininity as an object through fragmented and sexualized bodily symbols, associating it with romantic relationships, aesthetic evaluations, and objectified values. Later advertisements employ symbolic blurring, shifting the discipline of femininity toward women’s self-choices and pleasure. Although empowerment discourses appear in advertising expressions, emphasizing confidence, individuality, and personal expression, this empowerment coexists with aesthetic regulation, self-regulation, and beauty discipline. The English and Japanese datasets share similar ideological tendencies but realize them through distinct adaptation strategies. This study argues that femininity in cosmetic advertising should be understood as a hybrid construction, and its development follows a spiral of evolution, in which the autonomy and regulation of contemporary female identity coexist across different cultural and temporal contexts.