Summary
In the article “Linguistic construction of Gender in Glossy Magazine Discourse” (https://cyberleninka.ru/article/v/yazykovoe-konstruirovanie-gendera-v-diskurse-glyantsevyh-zhurnalov ) N.V. Lazareva thinks about the representation of genders in modern mass media, especially in magazines.
In the beginning, she states that there is a great interest to a sociocultural phenomenon in linguistics, so this topic is rather relevant; now one of the most important parts of linguistics is gender linguistics which studies the interaction of a language and gender. For gender linguistics, it is important to see how gender is reflected in the language. She claims that one of the most important sources for studying this issue is mass media.
In her article, she describes her research based on the analysis of two magazines: Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health. Lazareva studies lexical, morphological and stylistic means which are used in these magazines to see the difference in the presentation of both genders.
The main topics for men are cars, relation with women, appearance and health. The main themes in women magazines are relationships with relatives, the upbringing of children, self-care, etc.
Lazareva points out that for women’s magazines it is typical to use a lot of interjections, epithets, metaphors, similes and also to quote a lot, while for men’s magazines it is not typical - authors often use different terms and easily insert new words in their articles.
Moreover, there are a lot of syntactic peculiarities in both men’s and women’s magazines. There are a lot of simple exclamation sentences, which indicate emotionality, while it is typical for men’s magazines to use plenty of parenthesis and asyndetic sentences.
In the end, Lazareva says that magazines for men and women differ a lot in their representation of information. There are a lot of stereotypes in them which can be dangerous because mass media becomes the main power which creates people’s opinion about gender roles; so, it can easily manipulate their opinions and change their values.
After reading this article some questions came into my mind:
1. Are there any magazines which pay attention not only to the topics such as beauty, celebrities, sex, relationship, but also give some useful food for thought (e.g. educational topics, articles about great people in history, etc.)?
2. How pictures in the magazines represent the gender stereotypes?
3. If there will not be any gender stereotypes in mass media, would our (Russian) society become a clearly feminine culture or not?
Liza,
ОтветитьУдалитьthanks for sharing the summary of this article. Overall you have managed to explain its main points rather well and organised it in a logical way with enough supporting evidence. It is noteworthy that you also managed to formulate a number of questions connected with the topic of this article.
The thing to consder from the point of view of the language is the phrase in the beginning of your summary: "Lazareva thinks about..." It is more common to use 3rd person forms of reference, such as "The author" and some other verbs to explain the points of the article, so it's better to say that "the author considers"