A Study On Woman Image In China's Contemporary TV Commercials In A New Perspective

Since the nineties in the last century, with the continuing reforms in politics, economics and culture, especially the establishment of marketing economic system and promotion of accompanying values, the China's television commercials has received a renaissance, and the status of Chinese women are also improving. The television is not only a source of information, but also brings a lot brand new experience and feelings, which may influence and change people's ideas and behavior. Television commercials, as a kind of television media cultural patterns, could also be understood as a procedure of producing and consuming symbols. This thesis paper aims to combine the content analysis, text analysis and audience analysis together, eliminate the single feminine perspective angle, and make a systematic and three-dimensional inspection from a new perspective. This paper depicts the current construction of the woman image in contemporary China's television commercials, and reflects the new changes appearing in TV commercials destructing the traditional woman image, as well as take the audience awareness of woman image in TV commercials into consideration, so as to offer some feasible suggestions.Firstly, this paper stated the roles played in daily life by the television media and the television commercials, and analyzed the various types of female symbols and why they would appear in television commercials frequently. Secondly, this paper had a content analysis of the woman images in television commercials between 2007-2009, and discussed the reasons why the women images kept changing. The author also compare this latest content analysis with the previous content analysis of the woman images in television commercials before 2007, and draw a quite different conclusion. Thirdly, this paper carried out a text analysis of two typical television commercials, applying the theory of semeiology, narration method and intertexuality, to examine how the new women images deconstructed the traditional woman images in television commercials, and the positive role they play in improving the gender equality and constructing a harmonious relationship. Fourthly, the author inspected the meaning in research of the television commercials audience, and quote relevant data, graphs and questionnaires, to find out their attitudes towards woman images in television commercials, forming a coordination with the previous content and text analysis. Finally, this paper points out that, the latest changes in woman images in television commercials break through the originally reserved side and present a benign tendency.From the research above, this paper maintains that, woman images in television commercials should be viewed in a dialectical and objective way, we cannot draw an arbitrary conclusion that "sex prejudice must exist in television commercials" or "consumers are victims" from a few examples. In fact, since the thirty years of the renaissance in television commercials, the woman images in television commercials has scattered in quite complex layers, which also echoes with the conflicting and replacement of the new and old gender values in China's social transformation. At present, the basic state policy of equality between men and women still defines the main direction of television commercials, the prospering of consumerism, and the status of women as consumers are being paid increasing attention by commercial powers, and the academic angle has also developed from feminism to different schools of thought, with the hope of building a bridge between television commercials and female consumers.Finally, the perspective of this paper is new in that:on one hand, we should see the necessity of TV commercials taking advantage of woman image, and not simply blame all the duties in representing woman images on television commercials itself; on the other hand, we should consciously change the spontaneous status of television commercials, which means we should urge the supervisors, advertisers, advertising company and academic stuff, as well as the audiences to implement necessary rational intervening from various angles, prompting a more healthy and harmonious development.