This volume takes a critical discourse approach to the ways women's magazines contribute to the social construction of particular kinds of female body - as ideal, beautiful, ugly, overweight or engineered. Looking at the language used, it provides an insight into the experience of the female reader, and the likely impact upon her self-image.

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores Victorian representations of femininity in fairy tales and sensation novels by authors such as George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens. In the clash between fantasy and reality, these authors create a new type of realism that exposes the normative constraints imposed to contain the female body, and illuminates the tensions underlying the representation of the Victorian ideal.

Women in the first decades of the 21st century encounter competing ideologies of femininity. This book traces the existence of two such ideologies â " traditional femininity and resistant femininity â " in language, in womenâ (TM)s magazines, and in relation to the body. The book then uses a Discourse Analysis of womenâ (TM)s fitness magazines to investigate how these ideologies, or discourses, are encoded and ultimately merged into a single discourse of femininity. The extremely thin female body encodes traditional femininity in that it represents social values of beauty, smallness, and others-orientation, but it also encodes resistant femininity in that it represents determination, dedication, and strength. Similarly, fitness instructional texts from womenâ (TM)s fitness magazines demonstrate a hybrid discourse which integrates the language of traditional femininity and the language of resistant femininity. This hybrid discourse, which the author calls empowered femininity, appears as a seamless combination of the two â oeparentâ discourses by placing itself in the middle of a continuum between traditional femininity and resistant femininity through two themes: limited achievement and celebrating objectification. The empowered femininity discourse also supports a sociological trend of many women wanting to balance competing demands of portraying highly valued but traditionally male traits while still being seen as traditionally feminine.

Should women be priests? Should women submit to their husbands? Is premarital sex okay? Inflammatory questions such as these have splintered Christianity and polarized the church. In Sex, Gender, and Christianity, a cadre of seasoned college professors offers the modest proposal that honest, fruitful conversations about these questions will take place only if we develop the ability to deal with sex, gender, and the Christian faith with the academic rigor and perspectives of our various disciplines. This volume contributes an unprecedented collection of first-rate articles from a variety of disciplines--from the social sciences to history, from literary criticism to theology--that will challenge college administrators, professors, and students to address fractious questions in an atmosphere of scholarly inquiry. Contributors: David G. Allen, Karen Trimble Alliaume, Brian Bantum, Mikee C. Delony, James G. Dixon III, Antonios Finitsis Theresa J. FitzPatrick, Allyson Jule, Patricia O'Connell Killen, Caryn D. Riswold, and Tina Schermer Sellers

Reducing Bodies: Mass Culture and the Female Figure in Postwar America explores the ways in which women in the years following World War II refashioned their bodies—through reducing diets, exercise, and plastic surgery—and asks what insights these changing beauty standards can offer into gender dynamics in postwar America. Drawing on novel and untapped sources, including insurance industry records, this engaging study considers questions of gender, health, and race and provides historical context for the emergence of fat studies and contemporary conversations of the "obesity epidemic."

This book presents an analysis of masculinity construction in a large corpus of women’s magazines, adopting a feminist Critical Stylistic approach to reveal how men are talked about and ‘sold’ to women as part of a successful performance of hegemonic femininity. This novel approach identifies women’s magazines as sites of ‘lad culture’ that perpetuate ideologies more commonly associated with the ‘laddism’ of male-targeted media. It examines how stereotypical images of men as naturally aggressive and obsessed with sex are promoted, as well as considering some of the ways in which women’s magazines contribute to the social construction of normative understandings of gender and sexuality more broadly. This engaging work will offer fresh insights to students and scholars of (Critical) Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Stylistics, and Gender and Communication Studies.

Lesley Jeffries introduces a phenomenon which has not been given the attention it deserves - the contextual construction of oppositional meaning. These are opposites not recognisable as such out of context but that are clearly set up this way in the text concerned. The significance of oppositional meaning is well-known, and has been discussed by scholars for millennia, from Philosophy to Politics. But the main emphasis has always been on the conventional opposite: the opposite recognised by lexical semantics. Starting from socio-cultural viewpoints, moving to original research and then concluding with a new theoretical formulation, this book introduces and consolidates a significant new approach to the analysis of oppositional meaning. It closes with a discussion of the importance of constructed opposition in hegemonic practice and makes a case for the inclusion of opposition as a central tool of critical discourse analysis. It will be essential reading for researchers and graduates in stylistics, linguistics and language studies.