Ideologies of masculinity in women’s magazines

a critical stylistic approach

Authors

  • Laura Coffey-Glover Sheffield Hallam University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v9i3.17360

Keywords:

Critical Stylistics, Masculinities, Women’s Magazines, Performativity

Abstract

This article reports on an analysis of ideologies of masculinity in a corpus of women’s magazines from a (feminist) critical stylistic perspective. I identify four core themes of ideologies of masculinity produced via assumed and implied meanings. My discussion of these themes demonstrates how the texts’ constructions of masculinity ultimately uphold gender dichotomies, denying a performative understanding of ‘gender’ in a post-structuralist age. The ideologies discussed have potentially negative implications for female readers, because they serve to maintain notions of gender difference and uphold the power differential between women and men.

Author Biography

  • Laura Coffey-Glover, Sheffield Hallam University

    Laura Coffey-Glover is a researcher for the Humanities Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research interests are in the area of gender construction in the media, and in the combination of feminist discourse analytic and corpus linguistic methods for analysing texts. She is a member of the Discourses of Marriage research group, which maintains a blog at http://discoursesofmarriage.blogspot.co.uk, and she is currently writing a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan entitled Men in Women’s Worlds: Constructions of Masculinity in Women’s Magazines.

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Published

2015-12-01

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Coffey-Glover, L. (2015). Ideologies of masculinity in women’s magazines: a critical stylistic approach. Gender and Language, 9(3), 337-364. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v9i3.17360