Negotiating alternative masculinities in men’s magazines: transitivity in the formation of counter hegemonic identities
With social transformation and male empowerment, the archetypes of traditional masculinity are being deconstructed and rendered obsolete. The changing view of masculinity demands for an exploration of how popular media, particularly men’s magazines rewrite the discourse of masculinity. Attempt...
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Main Authors: | , , |
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2021
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Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17260/1/46892-156866-1-PB.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17260/ https://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1397 |
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Summary: | With social transformation and male empowerment, the archetypes of traditional masculinity
are being deconstructed and rendered obsolete. The changing view of masculinity demands for
an exploration of how popular media, particularly men’s magazines rewrite the discourse of
masculinity. Attempting to answer the overarching question of ‘what does masculinity mean
today?’, this paper explores identity as a linguistic phenomenon. Drawing on both Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Halliday’s Transitivity system of the Systemic Functional
Linguistic (SFL) frameworks, we examine ideational meanings realised by lexicogrammatical
selections and discourse-semantic-choice involving process types and participants’ role that
form counter hegemonic masculinities. This study argues that as men negotiate their identities,
magazines play a critical role in challenging patriarchal masculinity and normalising alternative
masculine practices via ideologies embedded in a text. The investigation focuses on how
transitivity is drawn on to produce counter hegemonic formations and how different
enactments of masculinities are articulated in magazine texts to present alternative forms of
male identities. Drawing from 584,600-word corpus of selected men’s magazines titles
published from 2016 to 2020, findings revealed the use of material, mental, relational and
behavioural processes that manifests counter hegemonic identities or non-traditional
representation. Evidence from the corpus reflects various projections of men as emotionally
vulnerable, aesthetically conscious, domestically competent and antihomophobic. The
implication highlights the different ways media language creates and facilitates the changes in
masculine practices and how magazine texts infuse or indoctrinate alternative identities as a
stable performance of masculinity. |
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