How Advertising Preserves Cultural Identities while Communicating Societal Changes: A Comparative Study of the Representation of Women between Italy and Saudi Arabia

This contribution is part of a wider reflection on the similarities and differences in terms of socio-cultural facets and their repercussions in the cultural text between Italy and Saudi Arabia. The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between the representation of women and the dynamics of changes happening in the last few years between the two cultural contexts. The study begins by providing an introductory reflection on Lotman’s concepts as an effective tool to understand cultural transformations. This part offers a first reading of the two cases under study and an overview of the relation between advertising and women representation. The paper employs a semiotic approach drawing on a corpus of six cases representing women in advertising. The findings reveal a first significant difference in terms of prominent societal and cultural changes, focusing on attitudes and dynamics of transformation, while a second difference pertains to the salience of gender stereotypes. Despite the relevance of a comparative study, it has limitations due to the corpus size and time frame. The study contributes to the understanding of challenges and barriers that might arise in communicating the cultural transformations and their impact on society through the cultural texts.