Celebrating Mothers. An Analysis of Cultural Codes of Motherhood in 2022 Mother’s Day Advertisements
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Mother’s Day is an international event that is meant to celebrate the mother figure, motherhood and mothering practices. The day is celebrated privately and also publicly, both in traditional and online social media. From the point of view of marketing and business industry, it is a great opportunity for various brands and companies to enhance their public image and brand identity by paying tribute to the mother figure. Celebratory advertisements thus contribute to the construction of the maternal identity and to the concept of motherhood in media environment, namely in the advertising discourse which is often blamed for creating the normative of a perfect mother immersed in intensive mothering. On the other hand, the quest for representing social and cultural diversities in official media texts makes advertisers remedy the sugar-coated image of a perfect mother and thus show motherhood in its heterogeneity. The paper studies several audio-visual commercials launched on the 2022 Mother’s Day in the USA and UK, and it focuses on how the mothering experience and the institution of motherhood are reconstructed to mirror the motherhood in all its complexity. Framed with multimodal critical discourse analysis, the preliminary results show that the advertising texts tend to challenge taboos such as postpartum depression, non-birth mothering and aging mothers. The talk will focus on the visual and verbal modalities and their potential in representing these cultural codes of motherhood. It will also discuss how these maternal identities are commented on by media and commentators in the online environment. |
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