Vavilova, Z. (2025) Aesthetics of Inclusive Advertising: a Semiotic Study – МЕЖДУНАРОДНЫЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ

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Zhanna E. VAVILOVA
Kazan State Power Engineering University
51st Krasnoselskaya, Kazan, 420066, Russian Federation
Department of Philosophy and Media, Associate Professor
PhD (in Philosophy)
e-mail: zhannavavilova@mail.ru
ORCID: 0000-0002-0247-8257

Vavilova, Z. (2025) Aesthetics of Inclusive Advertising: a Semiotic Study

Abstract: Nowadays advertising has become a meeting place for the social and the aesthetic and a convenient “testing ground” for experiments with inclusion, as well as for analyzing images, codes, hypertexts, specific messages, and audience reactions to them. The purpose of the work is search for answers to the question of how legitimate it is to talk about aesthetics when advertising is moving away from traditional idealized stereotypes to apply images that are far from classical ideas about the beautiful and the sublime. The paper views artifacts of modern visual advertising to illustrate the mechanisms of semiosis, or the process during which the representamen of an advertising object correlates with its mental double – the interpretant. Iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs used in inclusive advertising are being considered. The conditions under which advertising can be reckoned an inclusive media product are discussed, and the concept of aesthetic inclusion is introduced. Firstly, it is assumed that it should be built outside the criteria that limit aesthetic assessment to expert knowledge; secondly, aesthetic inclusion implies expanding the spectrum of what can be classified as aesthetic objects, e.g. images of a misshapen body, the ugly or the deformed – what lies in the basis of stigmatization. The representamen and the interpretant are analyzed in the context of the aesthetics of advertising; it is concluded that they must remain free, variable parameters of the semiotic triangle, open to aesthetic inclusion. The paper looks into the mechanism of how, under the influence of advertising and the aesthetics of glamour, one turns from a bearer of an interpretant into a sign, into an exact copy of a standard sample. The aesthetics of inclusion in this sense appears in the light of an attempt to reverse the process of total aestheticization, from the subject to their representation, in order to resist their transformation into a sign of eidetic glamour and thus into a simulacrum.

Key words: inclusion, inclusiveness, advertising, inclusive advertising, inclusive aesthetics, aesthetics of advertising, semiotics, semiosis, stereotype, visual normalization, glamour, stigma.

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For Citation:

Vavilova, Z. (2025) Aesthetics of Inclusive Advertising: a Semiotic Study. International Journal of Cultural Research, 2 (59). 90–105. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2025_2_90

DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2025_2_90