New Insights into Gendered Discursive Practices: Language, Gender and Identity Construction E-Book

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Fremdsprachen
• Serie: English In The World Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 426

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

This volume adopts a discourse and feminist approach to post-feminist media cultures and provides cutting edge knowledge of discourse analysis methods as they apply to the study of language and gender in different contexts. Editors Antonia Sánchez Macarro and Ana Belén Cabrejas Peñuelas bring together key discourse analysts to write about topics such as the construction of gendered identities in the (new) media; young women's online and offline gendered and sexualized self-representations; and the analysis of discursive practices in the context of higher education. This volume will serve as an invaluable tool for researchers and students interested in language, gender and discourse analysis.

Leseprobe

New Insights into Gendered Discursive Practices:Language, Gender and Identity Construction

ENGLISH IN THE WORLD SERIES

GENERAL EDITOR

Antonia Sánchez MacarroUniversitat de València, Spain

ADVISORY EDITORIAL BOARD

Professor Enrique BernárdezUniversidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Professor Anne BurnsMacquarie University, Sydney, Australia

Professor Angela DowningUniversidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Dr Martin HewingsUniversity of Birmingham, Great Britain

Professor Ken HylandCity University of Hong Kong, China

Professor James LantolfPenn State University, Pennsylvania, USA

Professor Michael McCarthyUniversity of Nottingham, Great Britain

Professor Eija VentolaUniversity of Helsinki, Findland

© The authors © 2014 by the Universitat de València

Design and typeset: Celso Hdez. de la FigueraCover design by Pere Fuster (Borràs i Talens Assessors SL)

I S B N : 9 7 8 - 8 4 - 3 7 0 - 9 6 9 3 – 3

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors

Prologue, by Edward R. Barret

Introduction, by Judith Baxter

PART IMEDIA DISCOURSE

1Enforcing gender via directives in female adolescent magazines: a contrastive view in English and SpanishMercedes Díez Prados

2Official and unofficial propaganda: old sexism (and, racism and classism) in new guisesJoanne Neff Van Aertselaer

3Deconstructing ‘mean girls’: impolite verbal behaviours, on/offline self-representations and evaluative beliefsAntonio García-Gómez

4Help! The negotiation of discursive practices on domestic violence in an online public discussion forumSandra Vázquez Hermosilla and Gora Zaragoza Ninet

5Claiming women’s rights through cartoons: the demand for a work-life balanceMaría del Mar Rivas Carmona

PART IINEW TECHNOLOGIES

6The construction of adolescents’ peer identity through hyperbole on social networking sitesCarmen Santamaría-García

7A pragmatic and multimodal analysis of emoticons and gender in social networksCarmen Maíz-Arévalo

8Adolescents’ language in blogs: a case study of female and male bloggersRosa Muñoz Luna and Antonio Jurado Navas

PART IIIHIGHER EDUCATION CONTEXT

9Representations of gender in English and Spanish maritime engineering journals: a contrastive analysisSilvia Molina Plaza

10Genre and professional identity: an exploratory study on the female student teachers’ evaluation of experience in EFLIsabel Alonso Belmonte

11Gender styles in teaching: the use of hyperbole in teachers’ follow-up movesLaura Cano Mora

Notes on Contributors

ISABEL ALONSO BELMONTE holds a M.A. in Spanish as a Foreign Language Teacher Education and a Ph.D. in English Philology from University Complutense of Madrid (Spain). She currently works as an ELT associate professor at the University Autónoma de Madrid, where she has been training Primary and Secondary EFL pre service and in service teachers for more than 10 years now. During this time, she has participated in several international projects on foreign language teacher training in primary and secondary education in a European context. As for her research, her areas of specialization are discourse analysis and applied linguistics to language teaching (both Spanish and English as a foreign language), areas in which she has extensively published. Her most recent work can be read in prestigious journals such as Text & Talk, Journal of Pragmatics and Discourse and Communication.

LAURA CANO MORA developed an early interest in the study of figurative language in general, and hyperbole in particular, as a research fellow at the Universitat de València, where she read her Ph.D. thesis. Her contributions to the field of non-literal language have also greatly benefited from research stays at the University of Surrey Roehampton in London. In an attempt to dissociate figures from literary theory, her articles focus on everyday spoken hyperbole from multidisciplinary areas, such as corpus linguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, conversational analysis, gender and genre theory. More recently she has been involved in the coordination of several immersion projects in Ireland and Canada and engaged in research on intercultural pragmatics and ESL.

MERCEDES DÍEZ PRADOS is an Associate Professor at Alcalá University (Spain). Her research fields and publications deal with diverse areas of the English language: issues on discourse analysis, pragmatics, TEFL (particularly on the writing skill), Anglicisms (e.g. “English Loanwords in Computer Language” in the ESP Journal, 2007), and the interplay between language and gender, the most influential work in this area being “Gender and L1 influence on EFL learners’ lexicon” (Palgrave, 2010). Her most recent publications are works analyzing political discourse, co-authored with Ana Belén Cabrejas Peñuelas: “Cohesion devices of three political texts: The Gettysburg Address, I Have a Dream and Obama’s Inaugural Address”, in the journal Revista de Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2012); “The evaluative function in three political texts”, in Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics (Mouton de Gruyter, 2013) and “Positive self-evaluation versus negative other-evaluation in the political genre of pre-election debates” in Discourse and Society (to be published in 2014).

ANTONIO GARCÍA GÓMEZ is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Alcalá de Henares, Madrid (Spain), where he teaches discourse analysis and functional linguistics. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His expertise lies primarily in discourse analysis and discursive psychology. Professor García-Gómez’s first and most developed research interest is conflict talk. A main strand of his research has focused on the pragma-discursive strategies employed in conflictual episodes in talk show interaction. Other current research interests include gender, identity and language use in new media. He has published numerous articles and authored two books: Habla conflictiva como acción social. Discurso y cognición. (Oviedo: Septem Ediciones, 2007) and La Conversacionalización del Discurso Mediático en la Televisión Británica. Ideología, Poder y Cambio Social (Oviedo: Septem Ediciones, 2009). Professor García-Gómez was an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, UK (Department of Psychology). He presents regularly at conferences across Spain and Europe.

ANTONIO JURADO NAVAS received his MSc (2002) and PhD (2009) degrees in Telecommunication Engineering, both from the University of Málaga (Spain). He has worked as a consultant at several mobile companies, and as a research assistant at the Communications Engineering Department at the University of Málaga, where he worked as an assistant professor. He is currently working in Ericsson advanced research department, and at the same time he collaborates with the Department of English, French and German Philologies at the University of Málaga. His research interests include topics as mobile communication systems, atmospheric optical communication, statistics, English phonology teaching and applied pedagogic research.

CARMEN MAÍZ ARÉVALO obtained her PhD in English Linguistics in 2001, being an English teacher since 1995. Currently Dr. Maíz-Arévalo holds the position of full time lecturer at the Universidad Complutense, where she is teaching Pragmatics, English and Translation, among other things. Her fields of interest are mainly speech act theory, politeness, gender and language and applied linguistics. She has published several articles on these issues and taken part in numerous congresses, both national and international. Besides her research and teaching activities, Carmen Maíz-Arévalo is also the secretary of the Revista de Estudios Ingleses, published yearly by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

SILVIA MOLINA PLAZA (PhD) is Associate Professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Her research interests are Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Translation and ESP. She serves a reviewer for Atlantis, International Journal of English Studies and International Journal of English Linguistics among other journals. Three of her latest publications are: 1) “Collocations and the translation of news: An English-Spanish electronic dictionary of multi-word combinations as a translation tool in Perspectives”, Studies in Translatology, Volume 19, Issue 2, 2011, pages 135-152, Dr de Gregorio (2011); 2) “Non-verbal markers of modality and evidentiality in MarENG”, published in Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos, ISSN: 1133-1127, 45-70, (2012) and 3) Alonso, Molina & Porto, “Multimodal Digital Storytelling: Integrating information, emotion and social cognition”. Pinar Sanz, Maria Jesus (ed.) [RCL 11:2]. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 2013.

ROSA MUÑOZ LUNA received her BA on English Language and Literature (2006) from the University of Málaga (Spain). She specialised in English linguistics finishing her MA on English Applied Linguistics (2008) from the same university. Muñoz-Luna obtained BAs in Education and Psychopedagogy from Salamanca Pontifical University (Spain), and MEd in TESOL from Exeter University (United Kingdom). After her academic formation years, she finished her European PhD on English Linguistics in 2012 at Málaga University, where she is currently working at the English Department as an interim teacher. Her research interests include English for specific purposes, motivation in language learning, phonology teaching and writing. She has published several papers in international journals on English academic writing and other aspects within applied linguistics.

JOANNE NEFF-VAN AERTSELAER is professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Universidad Complutense, Madrid. Her areas of investigation include Critical Discourse Analysis, Feminism, Sociolinguistics, Academic Writing linked to L2 acquisition. She has published widely in feminism and critical discourse analysis, including co-editing a critical discourse analysis volume: Pütz, M., Neff-van Aertselaer, J. and van Dijk, T. (eds.). 2004. Communicating Ideologies: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Language, Discourse and Social Practice. Berne/Frankfurt/New York/Paris: Peter Lang.

MARÍA DEL MAR RIVAS-CARMONA is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cordoba. She has previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Seville. Her classes focus on Discourse and Pragmatics and her research interests include discourse analysis, gender studies and literary translation. In addition, she has coordinated and participated in over a dozen research and teaching innovation projects on these matters, and she has supervised various doctoral theses and numerous master’s theses on discourse, gender studies, language teaching and specialized translation. As regards her publications, she has published several books and numerous articles on women writers, pragmatics and translation. Standing out among her recent publications are two international co-editions on the cultural aspects of literary translation, published by Peter Lang and Narr Verlag.

CARMEN SANTAMARÍA GARCÍA, European PhD in Linguistics from Complutense University, Madrid, is a tenured Professor of Linguistics at Alcalá University, Madrid, Spain. Her teaching includes pragmatics, discourse analysis and methodology of the English language at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. These are also her areas of research together with corpus linguistics and computer-mediated communication. She has participated in several research projects such as “Functions of Evaluative Language in Different Discourse Types” (FUNDETT) coordinated at UNED, Madrid (2010-2013) “Small heroes in trouble – Boys searching for their identity” (2006-2009) and “Education and Gender” (EDGE) (2011-2014), both coordinated at EHSAL, Brussels. She has more than fifty articles published in national and international academic journals and books. In her most recent publications she focuses on the combination of corpus linguistics together with conversation and discourse analysis and on the use of evaluative language in social networking sites.

Mª SANDRA VÁZQUEZ HERMOSILLA is a teacher of English at the Official School of Languages. For the past few years she has also worked at the University of Valencia where she has taken part in different research projects related to Language and Gender within the research group GENTEXT. Her research interests and her published works are centred upon gender and language issues, the phenomenon of (indirect) linguistic sexism and its manifestations in computer-mediated communication.

GORA ZARAGOZA NINET is a lecturer at the University of Valencia. For the past few years she has published works which deal with the translation of 20th Century women novelists into Spanish. She has also translated and annotated a collection of short stories by Winifred Holtby, who was censored during the Spanish dictatorship. Beyond Gender and Translation she also works on Gender and Language together with the GENTEXT Research group at the University of Valencia and has also reflected on her English teaching practice and the implementation of ICT in the class (ANGLOTIC project).

Prologue

This volume of the English in the World series is a welcome addition to language and gender studies. The chapters in this volume demonstrate the broadening range of vibrant and insightful research in the field. The interesting and exciting data presented in these chapters is a testament to the degree to which language use is permeated by gender across contexts. The papers here examine language data from magazines, advertising, social media, blogs, classroom interactions, and engineering journals. The authors approach this impressive range of data with an equally impressive range of methodologies, including corpus linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, contrastive analysis, and conversation analysis. The authors of this volume also break new ground with papers that challenge a number of commonly presumed divisions within the field.

Since Lakoff’s pioneering work, the study of language and gender has typically been divided between studies of representation (sexist language, discourse about women, etc.) and studies of language use (gendered differences in language use, gender in interaction, etc). The papers in the volume suggest that representation and language use are intimately related. In data drawn from a range of sources, these papers map the ways in which gendered representations are also forms of interaction. The research presented here demonstrates that individual construction of gender identity cannot be divorced from the constructions of gender that circulate through public discourse and the media. Similarly, the papers in this volume challenge other assumptions in the field such as divisions between personal versus professional identities, the separation between public and private discourse, and the distinction between written and spoken discourse. This volume thus suggests new perspectives that integrate the various strands of language and gender research.

Although the papers in this volume provide new directions and suggest new possibilities for the field of language and gender studies, they also stand firm in their recognition of the original feminist goals of the field in fighting sexism and promoting gender equality. Across a diverse set of contexts, the authors remind us of the central role of language in reproducing forms of sexism and exerting forms of power. The authors also demonstrate the innovative and creative ways in which women (including linguistic researchers) use language to promote human rights and challenge forms of inequality.

EDWARD R. BARRETUniversity of Kentucky

Introduction

The first paper I ever gave on the subject of gender and language outside the United Kingdom was at The University of Valencia in 2006. My paper on the gendered practices of women in leadership was delivered at IGALA4, the International Gender and Language Association’s fourth conference. This was a momentous occasion, not only for me personally, but because it was the first gender and language conference to be held outside America and Britain, and in many ways marked the first step towards internationalisation of this now flourishing field. In my view, the Valencia conference was the first in which a fruitful debate took place between gender and language researchers from English-speaking countries and their counterparts from Spain and other Mediterranean countries. Since then the field has gone global, with researchers from Africa, South America, Asia and the Middle East all working to one purpose: to critique and reveal hidden assumptions about gender and sexuality within discursive practices that continue to constrain the daily lives of both women and men.

It is easy to forget that gender and language is a relatively new subject area with a short history. Associated in the early 1970s with ‘second wave’ feminism, gender and language has now shifted its primary focus from the study of sexism and ‘differences between men and women’ to the discursive practices that produce gendered identities in general. Early research focused on two aspects: first, the presumed differences in how women and men used language, and secondly, how females and males were represented in language –as a code, as discourse, and in actual texts. Today, these quests appear more integrated in a postfeminist concern to explore how and why individuals’ identities are discursively constructed in gendered ways, and to critique the potentially constraining effects of such identities within different social contexts.

All the scholars in this volume embrace this social constructionist perspective of gender as relational, a process, something that is done, and a vital resource for constructing social roles and identities. According to this perspective, gender is a highly fluid and unstable social category, whereby constructs of masculinity and femininity are always negotiable and often competing. So, for instance, just as there are many inconsistencies and contradictions within any individual woman, there are always differences between women, governed by their age, class, sexuality, ethnicity, education, and so on. Gender is just one of many defining aspects of a person’s identity, and therefore not considered to be a macro-social category that always ‘behaves’ in predictable ways. Rather, gender is best identified and investigated within specific, local contexts or communities of practice (or CofPs), where it may emerge as relevant (or not) through detailed, micro-analysis of linguistic interactions. Arguably, this new focus on the context, complexity and fluidity of gender has depoliticised the category to a certain extent. Nonetheless, a consensus remains that gender is still highly pertinent to the way people interact through language, and to the way they are positioned and represented by gendered discursive practices. The authors in this volume focus upon identifying the linguistic markers that index gender within spoken, written and multi-modal texts by deploying ‘fit for purpose’ discourse analytical tools such as conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistic analysis.

All the authors show that by grounding their analyses within highly specific contexts, they can pave the way for identifying wider, gendered discourses that circulate within broader cultural settings and can create exclusion and inequality. Their chapters provide fresh, critical insights about the ways in which our use of language constructs, reinforces and challenges gender identities that are approved by, and naturalised within hegemonic institutions such as the mass media, the internet and higher education. The papers in this volume move the field of language and gender forward by investigating the most up-to-date ways in which people today negotiate their sense of identity via the multi-modal resources of the mass and social media. The authors assess the ways in which digital interactions actively produce and sustain gendered identities in both the online and offline worlds. On the positive side, social networking forums such as Facebook or weblogs are shown to be a crucial resource by which young people negotiate their identities dynamically and thus maintain social relationships. However, less encouragingly, media artefacts such as female adolescent magazines naturalise gender-stereotypical identities and behaviours that continue to constrain women’s full participation in social and professional life. In the final two chapters on teacher education and classroom practice, the respective authors show that gender is still a salient category for understanding professional identity construction, but this moves away from the stereotypical profile often assigned to women.

Overall, this volume contributes new, postfeminist insights on identity construction to the field of gender and language. Each of the authors shows that people can proactively manage the discursive resources at their disposal in order to negotiate different versions of their gendered identity, some highly conventional, others more contesting, within specific contexts. While gender differences are identified in some of the chapters, these are viewed as resources that people may exploit to achieve strategic and relational goals. Finally, the volume reminds us that if we can deploy discourse analytical methods to reveal hidden assumptions about gendered identities, we can play an important role in making this world a better place to live as scholars and human beings.

JUDITH BAXTERAston University, UK

PART IMEDIA DISCOURSE

1

Enforcing gender via directives in female adolescent magazines: a contrastive view in English and Spanish

MERCEDES DÍEZ PRADOSUniversidad de Alcalá

Abstract

Teenage magazines are discourse manifestations that can be considered sites for the construction of gender roles to naturalize certain behaviours and foster certain values, beliefs and norms of action. Thus, this type of publication can be used as a tool to enforce gender by certain discursive practices. The aim of the present study is to shed some light on how this engendering process is enforced in English and Spanish, to discover similarities or differences between the two. In order to do so, advice columns extracted from American and Spanish publications are analyzed to try to unveil the way magazine writers and young female teenagers interact. After a brief revision of previous research on teenage magazines as socialization devices, the analysis of the extracts selected is tackled. The main line of argument is that gender is enforced via directives in magazines written in both languages, particularly in the form of imperatives and fulfilling different speech acts (command, advice, suggestion, invitation, permission, prohibition and warning); as far as the type of behaviour reinforced is concerned, the values transmitted belong mainly to a traditional ideology in both cultures, although some differences are found regarding treatment of sexual desire in female adolescents, which is more naturalized in Spanish than in American magazines. All in all, magazines for female adolescents cannot be considered a stepping-stone to gender equality, since little progress has been made in the last two decades: the analysis reveals stagnation of topics and gender roles, when compared with previous studies.

Keywords: Gender and language, directive speech acts, female adolescent magazines, advice columns, persuasion.

1Introduction

Gendered beings perform gendered actions so that new members of society learn how to do gender according to their biological sex, so as to be considered members of the club. This learning to be male or female is a process that starts with birth and goes on for life; no individual escapes from this socialization process, even if we are aware of the asymmetry that this enculturation process may impose on others or on ourselves. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2013: 20) claim that three principles govern gender: it is learned, collaborative and performed: “gender is not something we have, but something we do” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2013: 20). According to these principles, gender must be taught and is, thus, enforced, which makes engendering a collaborative process (i.e. it is a social practice, Eckert and McDonnell-Ginet 2013).

Language is one of the main instruments to enforce gender and teenage magazines (teenzines, as Currie (1999) calls them) are language manifestations that can be considered sites for the construction of gender roles to naturalize certain behaviours, among others, heterosexuality, concern over physical appearance, a quest for popularity or playing certain gender roles (for this latter issue, see, for instance, López Rodríguez (2007) or Jiménez Calderón and Sánchez Rufat (2011)). Language is both the process and the product of gendering: language reflects pre-exiting categories and, by doing so, constructs and maintains them (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2013: 22).

Teenage magazines have been the focus of study of numerous academic publications, predominantly those written in English, and, principally the ones published in the U.S. context; there also exists research on teenage Spanish magazines (e.g. Plaza Sánchez (2005) and (2009)), but, to my knowledge, none adopts a contrastive view between the discourse used in magazines written in these two languages and published in these two countries to gain insights into their linguistic and cultural similarities and/or differences. The phenomenon of an ever-growing globalized world and the obvious influence of the American culture on the Western world favours the hypothesis that magazines for American and Spanish female adolescents will have more points in common than discrepancies. Nevertheless, a contrastive study like the present one can provide some empirical evidence on the issue.

Thus, the main purpose of the present paper is to study language as manifested in teenzines to gain access to the set of values, beliefs and norms of action being enforced in these publications; in order to do so, the language used in advice columns will be analyzed to try to unveil the way magazine writers and young female teenagers interact. The final aim of this investigation is to discover the role teenzines may play in “female teenage identity construction” (García Gómez 2010: 136) by means of the discursive devices used in them.

The research questions that guide this study are the following:

1.What issues are raised by girls1 in teenzine advice columns? How do the concerns depicted in these texts contribute to enforcing gender?

2.How is advice phrased (i.e. linguistic realizations) in English and Spanish in order to enforce given attitudes or behaviour? In what way are these linguistic devices persuasive?

In order to answer these questions and thus elaborate a discursive approach to the exploration of how gender is enforced in adolescent magazines, the linguistic realization of the exchanges in advice columns will be examined. The questions posed by the female readership will show their main concerns when facing a period of self-construction and self-identification and the answers provided by teenzine writers will most surely be affected by their perception and interpretation of their readers’ attributed gendered roles. According to Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2013: 9), studies show that male and female children are interpreted and interacted with differently by adults. Extrapolating this idea to magazine writers, they must be influenced by their perceptions and beliefs when they address a teenage female readership. Thus, by examining the messages addressed to female teenagers and the linguistic strategies used for it, it will become clear the way female gender is interpreted in teenzines for girls and how this interpretation may condition the construction of a gendered identity in a young and easily-influenced female readership (Currie 1999, Saz Marín 2007).

After a brief revision of studies dealing with the role magazines for adolescent girls play in their socialization process, the empirical study carried out to tackle the issue of enforcing gender in teenzines is presented: the theoretical framework used in the analysis, the methods for data collection, the results gathered from the analysis, together with an interpretation of those results. Finally the concluding section recalls the main aims for the present study and the results obtained.

2Teenzines as socialization devices within a community of practice

Teenzines can be considered a linguistic social practice (i.e. discursive manifestation) of a community of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992) conformed by two hierarchically organized groups of members: magazine writers (constrained themselves by given editorial policies) and female adolescent readers. The relationship between the groups is asymmetrical, because the latter (i.e. female adolescents) resorts to the former (i.e. magazines writers) in order to receive orientation to participate in the world around them (Eckert 2006: 1). The community of practice is a “prime locus” of the process of identity and linguistic construction where certain discursive conventions take place (Eckert 2006: 4), and teenzines represent one of those discourses.

A large body of literature on teenzines has been carried out within the discipline of sociology (Pierce (1990), Currie (1999, 2001), Evans et al. (1991), Jackson (2005), Joshy (2012), among others), since female adolescent magazines are considered socialization devices. Peirce (1990: 492) examines the “socialization messages” teenage girls receive from Seventeen, number one American magazine for female adolescents, from 1961 to 1985, and concludes that, although the feminist movement in 1972 had an effect on the content of issues around that period (e.g. promoting self-development), the magazine mainly reinforces traditional ideologies (Pierce 1990: 498-499). Traditional roles stress “looking good, finding a man, and taking care of home and children [whereas] (…) feminist messages emphasize taking care of oneself, being independent, and not relying on a man for fulfilment or identity” (Pierce 1990: 497). According to Pierce (1990: 499), magazines for female adolescents can be “a powerful reinforcer of the traditional ideology of womanhood”.

In the same line of argument, Currie (1999: 141) claims that “girls give the realities which they identify in texts ontological status: “realistic” messages offered by the text are seen to convey truth about the social world”. If this is so, the messages transmitted in teenzines can wield a significant influence on their readership since young readers construct reality as they read. One vital issue to consider is what types of role models are being displayed in teenage magazines: are the values of education, hard work, perseverance and discipline being promoted? Or, on the contrary, are rapid and easy success and popularity prioritized? Teenzines, like the media in general, present celebrities whose lifestyle is not generally worthy of imitation as idols (García Gómez 2010: 149), which makes our youngsters to try to emulate them (Plaza Sánchez 2009: 133). This absence of constructive role models for women-to-be in teenage magazines is also highlighted in Currie’s (1999: 44) sociological study.

In a survey as early as 1889, Bok observed that magazines have historically fulfilled the traditional mothers’ role of confidante (in Currie 1999: 41); in fact, most teenzines include advice sections, which perform this role. Eckert (2006: 364) points out that, as children approach adolescence, much of the authority exerted on them by adults (mostly parents and teachers) is replaced by “the age cohort”; by extrapolation, magazine writers seem to assume, in part, parents’ advisory role, and, thus, their messages become of utmost importance. But what is true is that adolescent readers seem to willingly accept this kind of authority from magazine writers, while tending to reject parents’ and teachers’ control. What, then, makes adolescents not to feel controlled or bossed around by magazine publishers as they do when parents or teachers try to impose their rules or principles? According to Currie (1999: 41), girls’ magazines, from their inception, adopted a personal form of address, since textual messages targeted the intimacy of readers’ lives. The present study argues that, although power exerted via the directive function is pervasive in teenzines’ discourse, the linguistic realization of the speech acts that fulfil this function is redressed with in-group markers, which can be considered a form of positive politeness strategy; thus, advice writers adopt a friendly tone that helps them gain the reader’s trust, becoming her confidantes.

Teenzines are almost exclusively read by girls, regardless of their cultural background (Currie 1999, Plaza Sánchez 2009). This is demonstrated in the amount of magazines for girls published, as opposed to those directed to boys, as pointed out in a report published in 2004 (Tweens, Teens, and Magazines) by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit American foundation. This study mentions the difference in themes addressed in magazines for girls and for boys: beauty, cosmetics, people, and relationships in female magazines versus electronic gaming, sports, music, cars and other hobbies for boys, assertions which are in line with other studies. For instance, Signorelli (1997: 28) claims that the articles she studied (a total of 378 in four issues of the four leading teen girl magazines, Sassy, Teen, YM and Seventeen) “typically focused on gender-stereotyped topics”. Curiously enough, themes in girls’ magazines do not differ from those found in magazines for female adults and, likewise, perpetuate traditional roles (Cabellos Castilla and Díez Prados 2000).

The themes in teenzines may be chosen by editors according to (presupposed) girls’ and boys’ interests, but, if that dichotomy in topics is cemented, the social distance between the sexes is also encouraged, which, in turn, is an obvious manifestation of gender enforcement. Why couldn’t teenzines for girls include articles on electronic games, or on different sources of entertainment, such as in boys’ magazines? Aren’t girls interested in those free-time activities? And, why not dealing with personal relations and physical appearance in magazines for boys? Wouldn’t that help overcome the stereotype that men don’t cry and are not concerned with their looks? Media would certainly be “the avantgarde of cultural and social change” (Kruse, Weimer and Wagner 1988: 261) if they contributed to the achievement, once and for all, of emancipated women and new men by promoting a reconciliation of topics and, consequently, interests, irrespective of sex. As García Gómez (2006) points out, gender stereotypes still play a crucial role in people’s lives, and being aware of the different roles men and women are assigned can be a stepping-stone to avoid the recurrence of inflexible traditional male or female behavioural patterns. As Eckert and McConell-Ginet (2013: 9) assert: “With differential treatment, boys and girls do learn to be [emphasis in the original] different”.

All in all, the aforementioned studies on the topic seem to obtain the same results: girls’ magazines hold a stagnant ideological stance, since they defend traditional sexist roles. Likewise, García Gómez (2009: 627), in his study on the construction of identity by Spanish and British teenagers in weblog writing, observed that bloggers use discursive strategies that present them as “subservient to or subsumed into the loved one when romance is blossoming”; contrariwise, when romance fails, female bloggers represent the self as powerfully rejecting their ex-boyfriends by the use of discursive strategies that remind stereotypical patterns of male language use (i.e. insults, taboos, obscene metaphors). Therefore, when in love, girls seem to adopt a submissive role towards their lovers, but react with “androgynous behaviour patterns” (García Gómez 2009: 631) when they feel rejected by their couples. However, this masculinization of girls’ reactions does not seem a step in the right direction for gender equality, but an attempt by women to switch roles with men.

3Theoretical framework

Building upon the sociological studies aforementioned, particularly the work carried out by Currie (1999, 2001) and developing her argument that “the textual format itself facilitates the acceptance of the ‘adolescence’ constructed on magazine pages” (Currie 2001: 265), I argue that gender is enforced via directives in magazines written in English and Spanish. My intention is to develop a discursive approach to the study of how linguistic form may facilitate assimilation and acceptance of advice by female adolescents in a very vulnerable period of their lives in which they are forming their identities and are searching for their self-esteem (Saz Marín 2007: 40).

Since the main function of advice columns is to ask for and provide guidelines for a form of behaviour, these sections in magazines abound in directives, which can be defined as speech acts that speakers use to get something done by someone else: “In using a directive, the speaker attempts to make the world fit the words (via the hearer)” (Yule 1996: 54). According to Tsui (1994: 116), directives are discourse acts that expect a non-verbal action from the addressee, not giving him/her the possibility of non-fulfilment. This function can be verbalized in different ways, depending on the degree of directness: whereas the most linguistically unmarked realization of the directive function is the imperative, they can be expressed via declarative and interrogative structures, which make the realization of the function more indirect (i.e. indirect speech act) and, thus, more polite.

In politeness terms, directives are face threatening acts (Brown and Levinson 1987), since they imply an imposition by the addresser on the addressee, and, consequently, it is more socially acceptable to avoid direct imposition via a direct request (i.e. using the imperative). Choosing a more indirect way to impose something on somebody implies less risk of refusal or causing offence (Yule 1996: 57). On the other hand, the threat of the imposition will vary depending on the relationship among the participants in the interaction (their degree of friendliness) and the range of the imposition itself (whether it implies a great cost for the addressee or not). The more social distance between the speakers and the heavier the imposition, the more politeness devices should be used to utter socially accepted directives. If the degree of friendliness among the participants is high, the use of politeness devices is reduced, and more direct speech acts are acceptable. Furthermore, not all directives are equally threatening for the addressee, since some of them (e.g. suggestion, advice or invitation) are done for his/her own sake.

In fact, Tsui (1994: 119) distinguishes between two types of directives: those which demand the addressee to perform an action for the speaker’s benefit, which she calls mandatives, and those which advocate an action to be performed by the addressee for his/her own benefit, called advisives. Tsui (1994: 127-132) further subdivides mandatives into instructions and threats. Instructions demand an action complied by the addressee for the addresser’s own benefit; besides, the addresser should be a person who has the right or is sure of getting the addressee to comply. Threats, apart from not being beneficial for the speaker, explicitly state that an undesirable consequence will be brought about by the addresser if the addressee does not comply with the requested action. Advisives are also subclassified into two types (Tsui 1994: 120): advice and warnings. The former (i.e. advice) highlights the desirable consequences of complying whereas the latter (i.e. warnings) the undesirable ones of not complying.

4Data Collection and Methodology

In order to explore how gender is enforced via directives in teenzines, I offer a “close reading” (Currie 2001: 267) of 25 advice texts (13 in Spanish and 12 in English);2 attested examples taken from a corpus of teenzines written in English and Spanish were analysed (see Table 1). The texts for analysis were chosen randomly among a number of issues at my disposal. Firstly, the Spanish publications were selected (both of them published in 2008), which contained 13 enquiries in total (5 in one magazine and 8 in the other). Then, an equivalent number of cases were taken from three American magazines (12 in total, extracted from three magazines which had been accessed on line in 2009), taking also all the enquiries on the advice pages consulted. As for the magazines written in Spanish, the two magazines selected were Bravo and Super Pop (both published in paper format); as for the magazines written in English, texts were extracted from the American magazines Jellybean Magazine, Girls’ Life Magazine and Latinitas (all of them in their on-line version). The reason for choosing paper or on-line format was strictly one of availability and the fact that the Spanish ones were consulted in print whereas the American ones were accessed via Internet did not alter the question-and-answer pattern, typical of these publications (Currie 2001), which was the focus of my study.

The sections selected for analysis were, in all of them, advice columns: “Desahógate” [Pour your heart out] (in Bravo), “Pregunta lo que quieras” [Ask whatever you want] (in Super Pop), “Advice” (in Jellybean Magazine), “Dear Carol” (in Girls’ Life), and “Q and A” (in Latinitas).The reasons for choosing advice columns of all sections included in these magazines were two: On the one hand, they are one of the favourite sections among adolescents (Currie 1999: 20), which makes them more prone to be read and, hence, potentially exert a greater influence on the readership. On the other hand, since the main purpose of this section is to give advice, it seemed the most suitable to analyze how gender was enforced in female adolescent magazines.

5Teenzines under analysis

In what follows, I examine advice-columns within the conversational framework of the adjacency pair (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974), due to their question-and-answer pattern. In the first place, I take a close look at the issues raised in the first pair-parts of the adjacency pairs (i.e. questions), as a reflex of both female adolescents’ concerns and teenzine writers’ enforcement of a given gendered identity. Secondly, I examine the linguistic manifestations (i.e. form) chosen by magazine writers to construct their advice (i.e. function) in response to the enquiries posed by (real or fictional) female adolescents. Finally, I argue that magazine writers get close to their readers by using features proper of adolescent language, in order to gain their confidence and be trusted, while, at the same time mitigating the face-threatening act of enforcement by redressing directives with positive politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson 1987).

5.1. ADVICE COLUMNS AS ADJACENCY PAIRS

Teenzines are divided into sections that respond to rhetorical conventions associated with this genre. One of these sections is advice columns, which are interactions that can be equated with what Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) termed question-answer adjacency pairs. According to Currie, “this format invites readers to identify with textual messages through membership in the world of teenage girls” (1999: 203), because the reader is made to believe that her everyday problems are only logical. According to Currie (1999: 203), the solutions provided, which are frequently framed as medical or scientific advice, promote a male point of view, reassuring the readers that editorial solutions will receive male approval in a patriarchal society. Since readers demand from the writer some advice on a form of behaviour, this format is prone to fulfilling the directive function.

5.1.1. Questions (1st pair-parts): female adolescents’ concerns

This section deals with the questions or enquiries posed by adolescents; as such, their utterances constitute the 1st part-part of the adjacency pair and, from an ideological point of view, they are less powerful than their corresponding 2nd pair-parts: enquiring is a recognition of a lack of knowledge from the utterer that requests (wise) advice from an authorial source. Table 1 gathers all enquiries taken from American and Spanish magazines. All magazines, except for Latinitas entitled each enquiry with a question or a statement that raised the issue on which advice was sought; in the case of Latinitas, enquiries were not entitled but it were headed as Q (for “question”) and all enquirers posed their questions with the formulaic convention “Dear Latinitas:”, thus, an extract from the enquiry is included in the table to illustrate what topic was dealt with.

As can be seen in Table 1, all the issues raised in the advice texts examined deal with the personal domain, regardless of the language they are written in. Considering the magazines chosen are illustrations for this type of genre and taking the themes dealt with as a snapshot of female teenage concerns, we can claim that the problem which overwhelmingly worries them is their romantic relationships (3S, 7S, 13S and 2E, 3E, 4E, 9E). Furthermore, the only type of romantic relation tackled in magazines written in both languages is that of heterosexual love. Another topic that is represented in both languages but with different relative weights is family relations (4S and 4E, 6E, 7E), which is more much more prominent in English. “School achievement” (11S and 12E) and “sexual harassment” (S5 and 8E) are equally dealt with in both languages and the rest of the topics are only addressed in one language: relations with friends (10E), disruptive behaviour of an acquaintance (5E) and racism (1E) are only tackled in American magazines, whereas physical appearance (1S), the female body (2S), idols (6S, 9S and 12S) and sex (8S and 10S) are just found in the Spanish publications. Not coincidental topics may be due to their different cultural backgrounds; the Spanish magazines studied address some of the superficial issues found in other studies more than the American ones: the former includes mentions to beauty and the female body, whereas the latter addresses moral-ethical principles like ideology, proper behaviour and empathy.

Despite the discrepancies, themes in general are fairly coincidental with those found in other similar studies aforementioned (e.g. Signorelly 1997, Currie 1999, 2001 or the one by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation 2004, Evans et al. 1991): relationships, people and beauty. According to Currie (2001: 264) the three main topics she found (i.e. “getting boyfriends”, “looking good” and “caring for their female bodies”) constitute “the embodiment” of adolescent femininity. Hence, the Spanish magazines studied fit this traditional pattern more closely.

Magazine editors, when choosing the issues to deal with in questions for the advice column, impose on readers what concerns to focus on, and the same time, presuppose those concerns will be, to a certain extent, shared by their readership (if not, why choosing those issues and not others?). Consequently, readers who do not feel identified with the problems dealt with are somehow invited to feel marginalized, alien to that way of feeling. Undoubtedly, editors’ selection of topics should depict what they believe to be the adolescents’ main concerns in order to attract readership and fulfil their commercial goals. This selection is, thus, the result of taken-for-granted gender preferences; as a consequence, when dealing with traditional topics (i.e. heterosexual love, beauty, personal relations), teenzines are enforcing gender by perpetuating traditional female roles. That heterosexual love is the main issue addressed in advice column is not a novelty, since many studies support this result (Currie (1999), (2001), Jackson (2005), among others).

A related topic that seems to receive different treatments depending on the culture is sex. While one the Spanish magazines selected, Super Pop, includes two enquiries dealing with sex (8S and 10S) and provides answers which denote a tolerant attitude towards this issue, some American magazines tend to avoid it: “the social nature of adolescent problems surrounding sexuality is avoided” (Currie 2001: 272). Thus, whereas sex may be a ‘naturalized’ concern for female adolescents in the Spanish culture, it may not be the case in other cultures, adopting a more conservative stance. In fact, one of the cases in Super Pop deals with the correct use of a contraceptive method to avoid unwanted pregnancy (i.e. “Preservativos fiables”), contrary to what seems to happen in American teenzines: “Also conspicuously absent is the reassurance that the problem of unwanted pregnancy is shared by others, and that questions about birth control and contraception are ‘common’” (Currie 2001: 273-274), despite the fact that female adolescents turn to teen magazines for information about sex (Medley-Rath 2007: 25). Can we conclude that sexual desire in female adolescents is naturalized in the Spanish culture? Two isolated examples cannot be extrapolated to make such generalization, but I dare say the open treatment given to the topic of sex in the Spanish magazine Super Pop is an index of equalization of women in a domain that was before exclusively naturalized for men, as Currie (2001: 274) states.

On the other hand, there are certain topics, which may be considered relevant for teenager’s education and general formation, that are absent in these publications, such as discussion of political issues, personal development through intellectual pursuits, sports, or women’s independent professional development. In fact, an advice column in a different section of Girls’ Life called “Best of: Advice” addresses the issue of getting a job (“Snag that job: Dos and Don’ts”), but the sort of advice provided exclusively focuses on superficial, or even frivolous, issues, such as physical appearance (“look cute when you fill your application”), the body language the applicant should use when talking with the potential employer (“Don’t look at the floor when you’re talking”), even if it is on the phone (“Smile big on the phone when you’re talking to your future boss”), or the external support the applicant may have (“Bring phone numbers of people you know who can give you a good reference”). As can be observed, there is no promotion of the intellectual or professional assets needed for a given job. That way of addressing this issue favours a sexist view of the employee, who has to gain a job mainly by her physical appearance, rather than thanks to her professional qualifications.

In the following section, the second part of the adjacency pairs, the writers’ answers to girls’ enquiries, is analysed in order to observe the linguistic devices used together with their pragmatic meaning.

5.1.2. Answers (2nd pair-parts): the use of directives

In what follows the linguistic coding in which magazine writers construct their advice is analyzed (i.e. how they phrase their directives). Table 2 displays the different types of directives found in each of the magazines studied, both in English and in Spanish. The first column displays the linguistic forms and the second one provides a gloss of the message content (i.e. what form of behaviour was suggested). This latter is a gloss of the message being sent, rather than the actual words, in order to reveal generalizations among answers regarding the type of advice provided.

As far as form is concerned, Table 2 shows that imperatives are present in all publications. It is, in fact, the most prevalent form, with no reddressive action, what Brown and Levinson (1987) term bald-on-record. However, taking into consideration that the advice provided has been requested by the reader herself, the degree of imposition of the directive is low. Furthermore, imperatives do not seem to be mandatives (Tsui 1994), since they actually function as advice given for the reader’s own sake; that is, they are, in Tsui’s (1994) terms, advisives. Despite this, directives are phrased at times with other expressions which do contain mitigating devices. In Spanish, a confirming question tag is used at the end of an imperative sentence to soften the degree of imposition of an example of prohibition: “Nada de ponerse a mirar la tele y eso, ¿eh?” [No TV watching and things like that, OK?]. On the other hand, when unsure of the advice provided, some softening devices are used in several examples in English: “The one thing we can probably deduce with some certainty is that this guy did like you, at least for a while” or “Maybe he found a new girl to crash on … or he could even have a girlfriend now”.

When having a closer look at directives, it can be observed that they actually fulfil different sub-functions depending on their degree of imposition. Here are some examples from English and Spanish, classified according to their sub-function; the structure used to phrase de directive is also mentioned in square brackets:

a) Commanding. When contrasting both languages in the examples below, it can be observed that, in the case of commanding, both English and Spanish use imperatives, but neither of them sounds threatening, since the actions commanded are beneficial for the reader:

(1) “Habla con un adulto y explícale la situación” (Speak with an adult and explain the situation to him/her, Bravo) [Imperatives].(2) “Take your time, really get to know him well, and push yourself to keep things innocent until you feel that you no longer can” (Jellybean) [Imperatives].

b) Advising. Advising is very similar to commanding (at times, difficult to distinguish). The use of imperatives is seen in both English and Spanish and the action benefits the addressee (it may actually be interpreted as an emergency to help her, as exclamation marks seem to indicate in Spanish):

(3) “¡Rodéate de gente que realmente te quiera!” (Surround yourself with people who truly love you, Bravo) [Imperative].(4) “So my advice to you is, don’t move past friends with this guy if it feels like rushing” (Jellybean) [Imperative + conditional clause]

Furthermore, there are certain social circumstances where using a direct command is considered appropriate among social equals (Yule 1996: 64). As I will argue in the following section, the discourse that writers use in teenzines establishes a good rapport with their readers, which makes them, apparently, equals. And I say ‘apparently’ because they are not actually so, since the writer, by suggesting the form of action, is actually the one in power, even if not felt as such by the reader. Even in the case of Latinitas, where readers and advisers are of the same age, the adviser exerts (subliminal) power on the advisee controlling the latter’s behaviour.

c) Suggesting. When suggesting, writers use, in both languages, mitigating devices: the modal verb poder (‘can’) in Spanish and the verbal periphrasis try to + verb in English, which presupposes that the reader may not commit the action suggested:

(5) “Puedes empezar con el ‘juego de miradas’” (You can start with the glances game, Bravo) [Declarative with modal verb poder “can”].(6) “Keep the conversation going, and try to stay calm and maturein other words, argue rationally –try to get your voice across” (Jellybean) [Imperatives].

d) Inviting. Inviting has only been found in Spanish, and the invitation in the imperative (i.e. take the test) is rather implied than explicit:

(7) “¿Has hecho ya el test de falsos amigos? (Mira en la pág. 48)” (Have you already taken the false friends text? (Look at page 48), Bravo) [Imperative]

(e) Permitting