How Traditional and Modern Women Have Been Represented in Iran's TV Advertisiments (2011-12)

TV advertisements is one of the relevant areas for cultural studies, especially for representing the dominant manners in portraying of women's identity in society. In this article, the representation of gender identity have been studied through different topics and different approaches such as semiology and content analysis. The main subjects are the representation manner of women and their assigned roles which are constituents of traditional and modern women's position. In this study, the random sampling method has been chosen and advertisements that broadcasted during one year about all kinds of products have been classified into seven groups. At first step, the presence rate of women and men in advertisements has been identified and then women's roles in the advertisements has been criticized according to the definition of modern and traditional woman. In this research, it was indicated that in 40% of all advertisements, there wasnt any woman character at all and in the rest, equivalent to 59% of all advertisements, men were presented. Another statistics shows that women were only in 17% of advertisements and the presence of men and women together were restricted to 23% only. In representation of women, usually the image of a traditional woman was in priority. The reason of this situation, beside cultural issues is the domination of a manner and a thinking which favors the consumerist, non-thinker and marginal women which ultimately led to the creation of a kind of marked advertisement in which the woman character is presented.