"Mix them and get into trouble": the constitution of the female discursive ethos in a campaign aiming the male audience

Abstract

Advertising campaigns aiming the male audience are usually portrayed in situations involving women. With that, we aim with this article to investigate the constitution of the female discursive ethos in an advertising campaign destined to the male audience. To do so, we selected as corpus Axe’s 2012 campaign called “Mix them, and get into trouble”. Under the theoretical-methodological support of the French Discourse Analysis, this work is emphasized by the studies of Maingueneau (1997, 2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2013), who combines the discursive ethos with the publicity genre into the contemporaneous advertisement discourse, affirming that this genre tries to persuade while associating products to a moving body. The results of this analysis indicate that in the selected corpus, the female discursive ethos, refers to socially accepted stereotypes of women.