Reading Bridal Magazines from a Critical Discursive Perspective
Reading Bridal Magazines from a Critical Discursive Perspective

Author: E. Glapka

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-09-04

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1137333588

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Bridal magazines have become increasingly popular in Western society, proliferating the idea of a ‘princess bride’ on her ‘big day’. Yet little has been written on how the ever-expanding wedding media and the popular wedding culture constructs gender and affects the ways women live and experience their weddings. Offering a critique of contemporary wedding discourse, this book marries together analyses of media texts and their reception to propose a new approach to media discourse. The analysis richly illustrates how women are invited to embrace not only the stereotypical idea of bridal femininity but also a consumptive way of experiencing it. Through examination of brides’ accounts of their ‘big days’, the book observes the imprints of the popular gender imagery on their self-portraits and self-narratives, and describes the women’s diverse approaches to them. Based on insights from gender and critical discourse studies, sociology and audience research, this exploration illuminates the ongoing debate on ‘media and gender’ and its methodological approaches.

Ambiguous Selves
Ambiguous Selves

Author: Barbara Braid

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-11-21

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1527543757

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This collection of essays on selected texts in literature, film and the media is driven by a shared theme of contesting the binary thinking in respect of gender and sexuality. The three parts of this book – “contesting norms”, “performing selves” and “blurring the lines” – delineate the queer celebration of difference and deviance. They pinpoint the limitation of assumed norms and subverting them, revel in the fluid and ambiguous self that springs from the contestation of those norms, and then repeatedly transgress and, as a result, obscure the limits that separate the normal from the abnormal. The variety of texts included in the collection ranges from a discussion of queer subjects represented in film, television and literature to that of the representations of other non-normative figures (including a madwoman, a freak or a prostitute) and to gender-role contestation and gender-bending practicing evidenced in the press, theatre, film, literature and popular culture.

Music in the American Diasporic Wedding
Music in the American Diasporic Wedding

Author: Inna Naroditskaya

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-05-23

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0253041783

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With real-life stories, this collection “focuses on the role of music in the often-delicate negotiations surrounding weddings in immigrant communities” (Ellen Koskoff, author of A Feminist Ethnomusicology). Music in the American Diasporic Wedding explores the complex cultural adaptations, preservations, and fusions that occur in weddings between couples and families of diverse origins. Discussing weddings as a site of negotiations between generations, traditions, and religions, the essays gathered here argue that music is the mediating force between the young and the old, ritual and entertainment, and immigrant lore and assimilation. The contributors examine such colorful integrations as klezmer-tinged Mandarin tunes at a Jewish and Taiwanese American wedding, a wedding services industry in Chicago’s South Asian community featuring a diversity of wedding music options, and Puerto Rican cultural activists dancing down the aisles of New York’s St. Cecilia’s church to the thunder of drums and maracas and rapping their marriage vows. These essays show us what wedding music and performance tell us about complex multiethnic diasporic identities, and remind us that how we listen to and celebrate otherness defines who we are.

Singular Selves
Singular Selves

Author: Ketaki Chowkhani

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-31

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1000962075

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This book examines, for perhaps the first time, singlehood at the intersections of race, media, language, culture, literature, space, health, and life satisfaction. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach, borrowing from sociology, literary studies, medical humanities, race studies, linguistics, demographic studies, and critical geography to understand singlehood in the world today. This collection of essays aims to establish the discipline of Singles Studies, finding new ways of examining it from various disciplinary and cultural perspectives. It begins with laying the field and then moves on to critically look at how race has shaped the way we understand singlehood in the West and how class, age, gender, privilege, and the media play a role in shaping singlehood. It argues for a need for increased interdisciplinarity within the field, for example, analyzing singlehood from the perspective of medical humanities. The volume also explores the role workplace, living arrangements, financial status, and gender play in single people’s life satisfaction. With an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, this interdisciplinary volume seeks to establish Singles Studies as a truly global discipline. This pathbreaking volume would be of interest to students and researchers of sociology, literature, linguistics, media studies, and psychology.

The Language of Cosmetics Advertising
The Language of Cosmetics Advertising

Author: Helen Ringrow

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-09-28

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1137557982

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This book offers a cross-cultural comparison of French and British cosmetics advertisements and explores how the discourse of beauty advertising represents ideas about femininity in French and English language contexts. As the global beauty industry expands and consumers become more critical of the claims made, the topic of cosmetics advertising discourse is examined using Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. One common theme underlying most cosmetics advertising discourse is that the female body always requires ‘work’ to fix its ‘problems’: flat skin, dry hair, and so on. The author uses themes of language and gender, media and identity, and advertising across cultures to expose exactly what is going on in the language of cosmetics advertising and to offer a first step towards challenging these ideas and thinking about alternatives.

Discourses of Perfection
Discourses of Perfection

Author: Anne-Mette Hermans

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-22

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1000364828

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This book explores editorial and advertising discourses related to cosmetic procedures and beauty products and services in UK lifestyle magazines, offering a holistic perspective on the normalisation of cosmetic procedures and the societal context in which particular perceptions have flourished. The volume examines the societal climate that contributed to cultural perceptions of the body as object and project, and constructions of masculinities and femininities as context for developments in lifestyle magazines’ content on beauty and cosmetic procedures. Integrating approaches from Critical Discourse Analysis, Thematic Analysis, and Content Analysis, Hermans explores the varying ways in which cosmetic procedures and other beauty products are marketed to different audiences and examines phenomena such as the problem/solution rhetoric, and developments in beauty advertising discourse specifically targeted at men. The book also investigates the continuum view of beauty products and cosmetic procedures, and examines the implications of these blurred boundaries for the regulation of the cosmetic surgery industry. This innovative contribution to research on the representation of cosmetic procedures and beauty products in the media will be of interest to scholars researching at the intersection of language, gender, individualised body projects, and sexuality.

The Language of Hate
The Language of Hate

Author: Andrew Brindle

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1317552601

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In this book, Andrew Brindle analyzes a corpus of texts taken from a white supremacist web forum which refer to the subject of homosexuality, drawing conclusions about the discourses of extremism and the dissemination of far-right hate speech online. The website from which Brindle’s corpus is drawn, Stormfront, has been described as the most powerful active influence in the White Nationalist movement (Kim 2005). Through a linguistic analysis of the data combining corpus linguistic methodologies and a critical discourse analysis approach, Brindle examines the language used to construct heterosexual, white masculinities, as well as posters’ representations of gay men, racial minorities and other out-groups, and how such groups are associated by the in-group. Brindle applies three types of analysis to the corpus: a corpus-driven approach centered on the study of frequency, keywords, collocation and concordance analyses; a detailed qualitative study of posts from the forum and the threads in which they are located; and a corpus-based approach which combines the corpus linguistic and qualitative analyses. The analysis of the data demonstrates a convergence of reactionary responses to not only women, gay men and lesbians, but also to racial minorities. Brindle’s findings suggest that due to the forum format of the data, topics are discussed and negotiated rather than dictated unilaterally as would be the case in a hierarchical organization. This research-based study of white supremacist discourse on the Internet facilitates understanding of hate speech and the behavior of extremist groups, with the aim of providing tools to combat elements of extremism and intolerance in society.

Digesting Femininities
Digesting Femininities

Author: Natalie Jovanovski

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-18

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 3319589253

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This volume addresses how the rhetoric of feminist empowerment has been combined with mainstream representations of food, thus creating a cultural consciousness around food and eating that is unmistakably pathological. Throughout, Natalie Jovanovski discusses key texts written by women, for women: best-selling diet books, popular cookbooks produced by female food celebrities, and iconic feminist self-help texts. This is the first book to engage in a feminist analysis of body-policing food trends that focus specifically on the use of feminist rhetoric as a harmful aspect of food culture. There is a smorgasbord of seemingly diverse gender roles for women to choose from, but many encourage breaking gender norms and embracing a love of food while perpetuating old narratives of guilt and restraint. Digesting Femininities problematizes the gendering of food and eating and challenges the reader to imagine what a genderless and emancipatory food culture would look like.

Discourse and Psychology
Discourse and Psychology

Author: Saumya Sharma

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2019-09-06

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1000691535

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This book presents a unique understanding of the interdependence between language and psychology and how one’s speech is shaped by and in turn shapes one’s thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. Drawing on the tenets of discourse analysis and psychology, it presents a comprehensive guide to a new and burgeoning area in linguistics and critical theory. The volume focusses on individual and group behaviour to show how identity formation is as much dependent on the psychological state as on social surroundings and context. It introduces various concepts from the sociocognitive framework, discursive and critical psychology, highlighting the myriad ways of approaching the complex interface between text, sociocultural factors, and cognitive processes. An indispensable guide to the complex world of language and the unconscious, the volume will be of interest to students and scholars of linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology and behavioural science, language, and critical theory. It is also a must-read for the general reader interested in language, communication, and social intelligence.

Seasonal Sociology
Seasonal Sociology

Author: Tonya K. Davidson

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1487594089

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Seasonal Sociology offers an engrossing and lively introduction to sociology through the seasons, examining the sociality of consumption practices, leisure activities, work, religious traditions, schooling, celebrations and holidays.