Towards a descontruction of symbolic violence in a sample of advertising discourse. A critical discourse perspective

Abstract

This article examines the representation of women in the advertisements used by Dolce & Gabbana, in order to observe the examples of symbolic violence associated with women. The main objectives of this study are: 1) to deconstruct the main visual strategies used by Dolce & Gabbana to represent women in its newsletter; and 2) to characterize the main types of symbolic violence in the texts analysed. Data were collected from the newsletter used by Dolce & Gabbana to advertise their products through the internet from January to December 2016–19. The data are analysed based on the critical discourse analysis model of social actors proposed by van Leeuwen (2008) and Kress & van Leeuwen’s (2006) models of visual grammar.