‘An iron, pyjamas, an apron, a Pandora bracelet.’: The social shadow of sexism in Italian adverts

This is an exploratory article engaging with an advertisement that appeared on the billboards of Milan’s metro network in December 2017. Investigating discourse as the prominent site for identifying the ideological assumptions embedded in language use and the existing social conventions emerging from them (Fairclough 2015), the author argues that the use or frequency of sexist stereotypes does not necessarily mark a brand’s alignment with sexism. The methodology adopted is a form of Bakhtinian stylistics, i.e., an analysis of texts with a view to evaluate the addressivity and answerability of utterances and investigate their heteroglossic and interindividual nature as well as their positioning within a specific community, time and place (Di Martino 2019: 3-5). Based on a constructionist and critical sociolinguistics matrix, this study focuses on style meant as the particular ways an individual uses language as social practice through which ideological assumptions emerge (Coupland 2007).