Oh, I feel like a woman! : A qualitative semiotic gender study through texts and images in the Swedish fashion remote commerce

Abstract: Oh! I feel like a woman! – A qualitative semiotic gender study through texts and images in the Swedish fashion remote commerce is a bachelor thesis on how clothes are portrayed in illustrations and photographs of models and in texts in mail-order catalogues and websites in the Swedish fashion remote commerce. The thesis aims to compare how genders and fashion are connected and manifested in the fashion remote commerce by portraying different gender stereotypes. The research is conducted through a case study by a semiotic discourse analysis on three different periods in time, using one remote commerce company from each year; Allmänco's mail-order catalogue from 1939, ELLOS's mail-order catalogue from 1984 and the NELLY's and NLYMAN's websites from 2017. The main conclusion of the thesis is that the studied remote commerce fashion companies use texts and images, which co-exist in an intermediality to communicate different gender roles. These roles can be applied through Erving Goffman’s theory of Performativity.