Challenging Gender Stereotypes: A Semiotic and Critical Approach to Pakistani TV Advertisements

Advertisements, being an expression of any post industrialist society, have always been the concern of research in social sciences, especially in sociolinguistics, to explore the gender roles. But in the recent many years, their emphasis has been shifted to the researches on stereotypes. This study seeks to explore distinct and challenging portrayal of male and female gender roles in Pakistani TV advertisements in the contemporary times. After exploring the relevant literature on stereotypical images existing in Pakistani society, a gap has been found in the field of gender studies. The researcher intends to deal with idea of how to break stereotypes via TV commercials with the help of semiotics and critical prescriptive to language used by the advertisers to serve their interests. Barthal’s Semiotic approach(1994) presents an insight into audio-visual aspects of the advertisements and takes words as symbols, whereas critical perspective of Laclau and Mouffe(1985) probes deeply into discourse of advertisements to uncover the hidden ideologies behind the words in broader social and cultural contexts.