‘Brown Sugar’
The textual construction of femininity in two ‘tiny texts’
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v6i1.105Keywords:
advertisement, Africa, discourse, ethnicity, intertextualityAbstract
Advertisements are a key site for gender and language study, many ads constructing relationships between femininity and consumption, and gender relations of a (hetero) sexual nature. In this paper I look in a qualitative way at how two ads in the form of ‘tiny texts’ indirectly index gender inflected with both ethnicity and sexuality. Printed on sugar tubes found in a café in modern urban Botswana, one of these ads shows a black woman, the other a white woman. I adopt a feminist discourse analytic approach to argue that the many lexical and other intertextual associations of ‘sugar’ and ‘sweetness’ in relation to women and sex function to sexualise the black woman (in particular), and that these in turn intertextually sexualise the white woman in ways which index women’s ‘availability’ within an overall discourse of multiculturalism and social liberalisation.
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Thornborrow, J. (1994) Th e woman, the man and the ? lofax. In S. Mills (ed.) Gendering the Reader 128–51. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
van Leeuwen, T. (2008) Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Zoonen, L. (1994) Feminist Media Studies. London: Sage.
Widdowson, H. (1995) Discourse analysis: a critical view. Language and Literature 4/3: 157–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/096394709500400301
Williamson, J. (1978) Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertisements. London: Marion Boyars.
Wodak, R. (2008) Controversial issues in feminist critical discourse analysis. In K. Harrington, L. Litosseliti, H. Sauntson and J. Sunderland (eds) Gender and Language Research Methodologies 193–210. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wodak, R. (2009) Th e discourse-historical approach. In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis 87–121. 2nd edition. London: Sage.
Bagwasi, M., Alimi, M. and Ebewo, P.J. (eds) (2008) English Language and Literature: Cross-cultural Currents. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.
Bakhtin, M. (1981) Th e Dialogical Imagination (ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Barthes, R. (1986) Th e Rustle of Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Benwell, B. (2003) (ed.) Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines. Oxford: Blackwell.
Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. BBC/Penguin Books. Bignell, J. (2002) Media Semiotics: An Introduction. 2nd edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Cameron, D. (1992) Feminism and Linguistic Th eory. London: Macmillan.
Chebanne, A. M. and Nyati-Ramahobo, L. (2003) Language Knowledge and Language Use in Botswana. Proceedings of the CSO: 2001 Population and Housing Census Dissemination Seminar, Gaborone, September 8–11, 2003, 392–404.
Chebanne, A. M. (2008) A sociolinguistic perspective of the indigenous communities of Botswana. African Study Monographs 29/3: 93–118. Also A. M. Chebanne http://jambo.africa.kyoto-u.ac.jp/kiroku/asm_normal/abstracts/ pdf/29-3/chebanne.pdf (Sept. 10 2011)
Ellece, S. (2007) Gendered Marriage Discourses in Botswana. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity.
Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1972) Th e Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock Publications.
Gill, R. (2007) Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Go? man, E. (1976) Gender Advertisements. London: Macmillan.
Goldman, R. (1992) Reading Ads Socially. London: Routledge.
Graddol, D. (1997) Th e Future of English. London: British Council.
Hall, E. (1964) Silent assumptions in social communication. Disorders of Communication 42: 41–55.
Hasselbring, S., Segatlhe, T., Munch, J. (2000) A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Languages of Botswana (Basarwa Languages Project). Gaborone: Tasalls Pub. and Books.
Hines, C. (2000) Rebaking the pie: the WOMAN AS DESSERT metaphor. In M. Bucholtz (ed.) Reinventing Identities 145–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hoey, M. (1986) Th e discourse colony: a preliminary study of a neglected discourse type. In M. Coulthard (ed.) Talking about Text. Birmingham: English Language Research Discourse Analysis Monographs 13: 1–26.
Hooks, b. (1984) Feminist Th eory from Margin to Centre. Boston: South End Press.
Johnson, S. and Ensselin, A. (2007) Language in the media: theory and practice. In S. Johnson and A. Ensselin (eds) Language in the Media 3–22. London: Continuum.
Kimenyi, A. (1992) Why is it that women in Rwanda do not marry? Paper presented at 2nd Berkeley Women and Language Conference, Berkeley. See also http://www.kimenyi.com/language-women.php (Sept. 10 2011)
Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2006, 2nd edn.) Reading Images: Th e Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge.
Kristeva, J. (1986) Word, dialogue and novel. In T. Moi (ed.) Th e Kristeva Reader 34–61. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lazar, M. (2005) Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Litosseliti, L. (2006) Gender and Language: Th eory and Practice. London: Arnold.
Matiki, A. (2010) Th e case for the use of indigenous languages in the legal system in Botswana. In K. C. Monaka, O. S. Seda, S. E. Ellece and J. McAllister (eds) Mapping Africa in an English-Speaking World 182–90. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.
Miller, A.T., Carpenter, W., Claggett, W.M., Heckel, F.W. and Nelson, J.C. (1975) Advertising and Women. New York: National Advertising Review Board.
Mills, S. (2008) Language and Sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mills, S. and Mullany, L. (2011) Language, Gender and Feminism. London: Routledge.
Myers, G. (1999) Ad Worlds. London: Arnold.
Nicholls, J. and Moan, P. (1978) ‘What o? ends one of us won’t o? end the next chap’: the Advertising Standards Authority’s line on sexism. Spare Rib, July 1978. Reprinted in M. Rowe (ed.) (1982) Spare Rib Reader: 100 Issues of Women’s Liberation 65–69. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Otlogetswe, T. (2004) Th e BNC as a Model for a Setswana Language Corpus. In M. Lee (ed.) Proceedings of the 7th Annual Colloquium for the UK Special Interest Group for Computational Linguistics 193–98. Birmingham: University of Birmingham.
Peirce, C. (1931) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Phili, C. (2011) Representations of Women in the Sunday Standard newspaper in Botswana. MA Dissertation, University of Botswana.
Polyzou, A. (2004) Metaphor and Gender Representation in Nitro, a Greek men’s Lifestyle Magazine. MA Dissertation, Lancaster University, UK.
Queenan, J. (2007) ‘Sympathy for the white devil’. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ music/2007/sep/13/2#article_continue (Sept. 10 2011)
Radway, J. (1984) Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature. New York: Verso.
Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. W. (2003) Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203422724
Sunderland, J. (2004) Gendered Discourses. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230505582
Talbot, M. (1998) Language and Gender: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Thekiso, E. (2010) Courtroom narratives: judgement, evidence and submissions in a Botswana courtroom. Marang: Journal of Language and Literature 20: 109–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/marang.v20i1.56823
Thornborrow, J. (1994) Th e woman, the man and the ? lofax. In S. Mills (ed.) Gendering the Reader 128–51. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
van Leeuwen, T. (2008) Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Zoonen, L. (1994) Feminist Media Studies. London: Sage.
Widdowson, H. (1995) Discourse analysis: a critical view. Language and Literature 4/3: 157–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/096394709500400301
Williamson, J. (1978) Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertisements. London: Marion Boyars.
Wodak, R. (2008) Controversial issues in feminist critical discourse analysis. In K. Harrington, L. Litosseliti, H. Sauntson and J. Sunderland (eds) Gender and Language Research Methodologies 193–210. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wodak, R. (2009) Th e discourse-historical approach. In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis 87–121. 2nd edition. London: Sage.
Published
2012-04-30
Issue
Section
Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan African Contexts: Research Agendas
How to Cite
Sunderland, J. (2012). ‘Brown Sugar’: The textual construction of femininity in two ‘tiny texts’. Gender and Language, 6(1), 105-129. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v6i1.105
