Translating the mythology of motherhood
A social semiotic analysis of pregnancy dress codes in contemporary advertising and magazine covers
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19222148 |
|---|---|
| Authors | George Damaskinidis (0000-0003-2283-6901, University of Western Macedonia, corresponding author), Sofia Girintli (0009-0006-4655-5660, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-20 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-29 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Semiotics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1035-0330 • E-ISSN: 1470-1219 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10350330.2026.2665122 |
| OpenAlex | W7160063121 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
Social semiotics is brought into dialogue with translation studies to examine how cultural myths of motherhood, as circulated in contemporary advertising and magazine covers, are made publicly legible through maternity dress codes. A purposive corpus of 20 publicly available artefacts (10 advertisements; 10 magazine covers; 2014–2025) was sampled for explicit pregnancy visibility and for the semiotic centrality of dress. Analytically, the article combines Barthes’ denotation – connotation – myth model with multimodal social semiotics to trace translational chains (body → styling → image → layout → anchorage) through which pregnancy is recoded into genre-specific maternal subject positions. Advertisements construe pregnancy as (1) responsible care and preparation, (2) aesthetic lifestyle management and (3) empowered optimisation; magazine covers construe it as (1) romantic-natural femininity, (2) high-fashion aesthetic power and (3) postfeminist action and disciplined performance. Across genres, public knowledge of pregnancy hinges on the “right” belly sign, while risk, pain, leakage and ambivalence are systematically left untranslated. The article shows that commercial maternity imagery disciplines visibility by rewarding only those pregnant bodies that appear ordered, manageable and compatible with consumer governance, and it offers a transparent myth – translation framework for making that process analytically explicit.
Discourse analysis · Feminism · Multimodality · Mythology · Semiotics · Social semiotics · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Media, Gender, and Advertising
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |