ABSTRACT
More than 40 years on from its publication, the work of Goffman remains central to studies of gender in advertising. Moving away from a traditional content analytic approach to analysing images, Goffman examined the way that nonverbal signals such as relative size, posture, and touch conveyed important messages about social value and (gendered) power. His work has been a reference point for almost all subsequent scholars.
The aims of this chapter are two-fold. First, we revisit Goffman’s work. Using a sample of 200 contemporary magazine adverts we examine whether his claims still hold true, questioning his arguments about size, posture, touch, and gaze, and raising new questions about how gender is ‘done’ and communicated today. Second, we examine a subset of adverts in which, rather than appearing small, passive, or deferential, women are presented as bold, confident, and powerful. Drawing on a wider literature we seek to interrogate the focus on confident appearing, asking how it is produced and what it communicates. We situate the seemingly new figure of the confident woman in debates about postfeminism, new femininities and the ‘confidence cult(ure)’ (Gill and Orgad 2015). As such our work contributes to analysing the vocabularies of gender in visual culture.
