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Code of woman: transformation of femininity strategies in Russian mass culture. Α case study
The paper presents the results of a recent cultural-semiotic study. The author makes an attempt to build a meta-model of cultural analysis based on the notion of semiosphere by Lotman, and of interpretive codes by Williams. The model becomes a basis for the following case study of communicative strategies of femininity in Russian mass media. More than 300 samples of Russian and global mass culture were analyzed. The material included popular TV series, movies, TV shows, advertising campaigns of beauty, fashion, technologies, FMCG brands, images of celebrities, images and articles in magazines. By means of narrative, visual, discourse analysis, and the authorial meta-model of analysis, all texts were arranged according to three types of codes (residual, dominant, and emergent) showing relevancy of different communicative strategies of femininity within the current Russian cultural context. The corpus of texts demonstrates transformations in several aspects, namely, treatment of body and appearance, relationships, self-realization attitude, and treatment of children.