Abstract
Erving Goffman occasionally wrote on gender issues specifically, and he addressed gendered advertisements in particular. This work is still relevant today, in a world where visual representations form an increasingly important part of the way people come to understand society and its place in it. While this chapter will consider the ways Goffman's work on gender and advertising is useful in contemporary social analysis, it also examines other elements of Goffman's work with relevance to gender relations, especially the ways such concepts as 'presentation of self', 'front stage', 'back stage', 'definition of the situation' and 'frame analysis' can be applied to contemporary writing on gender. In an era when social media plays an especially important role in reproducing and challenging gendered norms and patterns of behaviour, Goffman's focus on both self-presentation and the visual has a lot to contribute to our understandings of ourselves and our place in the wider world.