Gender Advertisements

This exercise gives you an opportunity to practice visual analysis a la Erving Goffman's Gender Advertisements (1979). Your job will be to find four magazine advertisements that seem to tell a story using human models and to identify ways in which the advertisement displays "ideal" male and/or female behavior or traits.

1. Find four advertisements that seem to tell stories or portray relationships in magazines using human models that you can get easily from magazines or from Google Images by using the keywords "magazine ads."

Cut out the advertisements or print them out and display them on a sheet or sheets of paper that you'll turn in with the exercise. Label the four advertisements with the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4.

2. For each advertisement, briefly (in a sentence or two) tell the story of the advertisement as you see it.

3. Now, describe ways in which the model or models in each advertisement are posed to create an image of the "ideal" male and/or female.