Women today appear to face the almost impossible task of achieving both a healthy weight and body satisfaction. The ultra skinny female ideal portrayed in the media (the 'imagined female community') is unrealistic for most of them (the 'imagined female identity'). Our paper presents the results of an analysis of a corpus of 52 issues of a Romanian TV Guide Magazine ( ProTV Magazin /2003). The corpus of 64 food advertisements is analysed from the point of view of the lexical domains their key-words are circumscribed to, in an attempt to see if there is any overlapping at all between the image promoted by the media and what women would look like if they ate the food advertised for.

imagined community; imagined identity; food; advertising

Presentation: oral