Abstract:

TV commercials are effective culture-bound discourses using cultural ideologies and respective changes for the purpose of selling. Since the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, attempts for Westernization and modernization introduced new models for the traditional definitions of gender in Turkey. This gained impetus with the opening of Turkey into the world at the beginning of the 1980s and the subsequent trends of globalisation. Today, Turkish ideology of gender seems to represent a mixed profile in which new definitions based mostly on Western models, hybrid ones where traditional and new models are integrated with each other and traditional models coexist. This study analyzes two TV commercials broadcast in 2009 with the method of Critical Discourse Analysis in order to understand how and to what extent these models are reflected in the mass media. The results suggest that both commercials tended to employ traditional models of gender rather than reproducing new ones and thus serve for the maintenance of the dominant traditional ideology of gender in Turkey.

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