Celebrating Mothers. An Analysis of Cultural Codes of Motherhood in 2022 Mother’s Day Advertisements

PELCLOVÁ, Jana. Celebrating Mothers. An Analysis of Cultural Codes of Motherhood in 2022 Mother’s Day Advertisements. In “From Stabat Mater to Mater Movens : Analysing Discourses on Motherhood”, International Conference 8-9 July 2023 – London/Online. 2023.

Basic information

• Original name: Celebrating Mothers. An Analysis of Cultural Codes of Motherhood in 2022 Mother’s Day Advertisements
• Authors: PELCLOVÁ, Jana.
• Edition: “From Stabat Mater to Mater Movens : Analysing Discourses on Motherhood”, International Conference 8-9 July 2023 – London/Online, 2023.

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Presentations at conferences
• Field of Study: 60203 Linguistics
• Country of publisher: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• WWW: URL
• Organization unit: Faculty of Arts
• Keywords in English: motherhood; advertising discourse; Mother's Day; stigma
• Tags: International impact, Reviewed

Abstract

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.

Links

• MUNI/A/1053/2022, interní kód MU: Name: Paradigms, strategies and developments - English linguistics and translation III

Investor: Masaryk University, Paradigms, strategies and developments - English linguistics and translation III