The dream of a perfect body come true: multimodality in cosmetic surgery advertising

Abstract

This article documents the operation of multimodal and rhetorical strategies in cosmetic surgery leaflets, with a focus on the interplay between the verbal and visual channels. It describes how advertising discourse exploits the image of an idealized female body in order to achieve its economic goals. Recipients are targeted through the application of the prevalent ideology of femininity, which in the Western context is increasingly dependent on patterns of consumption of body-oriented products and services against the background of (male) expectations of the female body ideal. It is argued that in this situation, which merges the private with the public and in which women willingly participate in the self-perpetuating ideology of male-defined femininity, women may, for various reasons, identify with the super-ideal sexualized images of women offered to them, while indulging in a mixture of fantasy and reality and sharing in the guilty knowledge that their own imperfect bodies need to be fixed. This article points out that such ideologies are very effectively studied through their multimodal realizations, where the visual mode, in particular, can non-verbally draw on and reproduce stereotyped representations.