Semiotic Analysis of Gender Stereotypes in “Snow on the Pines” and “A Cube of Sugar”

Media by its specific codes not only offers the culture to the audience but also actively gives meaning to culture. Cultural products, particularly movies have an ideology that is what the historical and cultural creation, show natural. Representation of women and men in the media, is an important subject and because this representation is often filled with gender stereotypes, this issue has become even more important. In this paper, we have tried to interpret gender stereotypes in the two movies of “Snow on the Pines (2012) and “A Sugar Cube” (2011). John Fisk’ theory of semiology is used to explain three levels of encoding. The results show that the Snow on Pine belongs to the upper middle class with a clear lack of gender stereotypes and A Sugar Cube belongs to lower middle classes with obvious gender stereotypes. Decoding of this syntagmatic relationship shows that movies with obvious gender codes have happy families in them and films that have a positive approach to women in contrast, depict torn-apart families. So the audience is convinced that the existence of such stereotypes is essential for a happy family.