How Italian advertising represents women and men. Towards a methodology for the semiotic analysis of stereotypes

The paper presents the first results of a systematic and in-depth survey on about 8000 advertisements appeared from February to December 2013, and attempts to identify and charachterize the gender stereotypes which can be found in them. Having conducted one of the first semiotic investigations on such an extended corpus, the authors also draw some general conclusions on the possibility, for contemporary semiotic discipline, to handle not only single texts and small corpora, as it has usually and traditionally been done, but also very large text corpora, such as those which today either the Internet or any other digital repository makes available to academic and scientific research.