Grace Diabah

The proposed research aims at investigating the linguistic and visual representations of gender identities in Ghanaian commercial adverts. This is in response to the fact that although adverts mirror social realities and thus constitute a good site for investigating gender identities, there is no known study that looks at how gender identities are linguistically and/or visually represented in Ghanaian adverts. To achieve my aim, I shall collect and analyse commercial print and radio adverts which have been running from November 2012 to August 2013. Through the use of Feminist Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis and multi-modal text analysis, I hope to show how Ghanaian commercial adverts mirror social realities in the way they use language and visuals to portray the diverse identities of modern Ghanaian men and women. Upon completion, this research is envisaged to add to the existing literature on gender and language by providing contributions from Ghanaian (African) socio-cultural contexts.