Title: A semiotics view through objectification of females in tourism related advertisements

Authors: Vahit Oguz Kiper; Şevki Ulema

Addresses: Faculty of Tourism, Sakarya University of Applied Sciences, Sapanca, Sakarya, Turkey ORCID: 0000-0001-5558-2341 ' Faculty of Tourism, Sakarya University of Applied Sciences, Sapanca, Sakarya, Turkey ORCID: 0000-0002-5874-8797

Abstract: Females take place in advertisements for different reasons and using them as sexual appeal content is one of them. Like all other industries, advertisers use females in advertisements and this causes the objectification of female which brings some negative consequences such as stereotypes against women and approve of violence against them in the tourism industry. It also marginalises women out of society by creating a perception as they belong to men and men's pleasure by serving them. There are numerous researches about this topic. However this research aims to explore the existence of objectification of females in tourism related advertisements by investigating hotels' picture galleries which are setup to promote hotels to their potential customers. Since nudity and sexuality are subjective terms, contents from literature and two different image sets are used to strengthen the discussion of this paper. Findings present how females become objects of sexual appeal in 5-star hotels' images.

Keywords: female objectification; nudity in tourism; sexual appeal in tourism; tourism advertisements; tourist images; semiotics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTA.2021.116092

International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, 2021 Vol.8 No.2, pp.148 - 161

Received: 08 Dec 2020
Accepted: 10 Feb 2021
Published online: 09 Jul 2021 *