Conceptualizing masculinity and femininity in the British press

Abstract

Newspapers are a form of media that people use to gain knowledge about the world, and despite recent declining sales many readers now engage with free online versions of newspapers. This chapter considers the representation of masculinity in the British national press, arguing that in order to examine masculinity, we must also consider what it is not – femininity. Our analysis is thus comparative, enabling us to identify the range of ways that masculinity and femininity are discursively and linguistically realized in the press. Similar to an earlier study ( Baker & Levon, 2016 ), which examined racialized and classed masculinities in the British press using critical discourse analysis, we use the database Nexis UK to collect national newspaper articles from the last decade containing reference to the terms masculinity and/or femininity. Using methods from corpus linguistics we then consider typical and atypical contexts that these two words occur in, by considering collocates (words which co-occur near or next to each other more than would be expected according to chance) and clusters (frequent fixed sequences of words), in order to identify the semantic prosodies of the terms. For example, masculinity is the object of verb collocates l like prove , rediscovery , reaffirm , question and assert which implies that it is not a given but can be lost and must be authenticated, while adjective collocates like raw , pugnacious , rampant , pumped , smoldering , sweating, and throbbing suggest a metaphorical conceptualization of masculinity as a physical body.

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