Troubling masculinity and the media (original) (raw)
Related papers
Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. 2018. Introduction - ‘Miss Man’: Does the Gendered Body Matter?
Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. 2018. “Introduction - ‘Miss Man’: Does the Gendered Body Matter?”. In Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. (eds), Miss Man? Languaging Gendered Bodies, pp. vii-xii. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. , 2018
This book draws together chapters that contain original interdisciplinary research and offer a range of critical perspectives on some linguistic and semiotic understandings of gender in the context of recent contrasting debates about gender non-conforming people, including different ways of ‘doing’ masculinity. It may seem surprising that the contributors to this volume are all from Italy, a country with a strong humanistic and philosophic tradition, but also a land of mind-boggling contradictions. It is, indeed, not widely acknowledged that Italy is the country where the first university record booklet for transgender students – which identifies the gender they choose – was issued, long before transgender people were granted legal recognition on official documents by the Government. Yet, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica has recently reported a sad episode about a group of young students bullying a twelve-year-old schoolmate for being gay (Moreno 2017). Ivan, the boy who was repeatedly bullied and cyberbullied, wrote in a beautiful ‘liberating’ school-essay: “Sono diverso, non sbagliato” (‘I am different, not wrong’). Needless to say, Ivan lives in a country where being gay is still a difficult stigma, and where part of the Catholic Church is still convinced that policies of gender create ‘transhuman beings’ (Rodari 2015). Such contradictory practices result from the fact that, at the time of writing, much of the sensitive action, which was won by several liberation movements, is bearing the brunt of a Catholic and right-wing backlash against being ‘politically correct’, or simply human, when addressing gender non-conforming policies. The editors’ original idea was to directly contest the several constraints, stereotypes, and prejudices concerning gender nonconformity by sparking academic inquiry and (hopefully) social change through discussions relating to gender in linguistic, literary, artistic, and cultural contexts. It is a large and challenging project, and it is one that our contributors have embraced, with somewhat mixed but remarkable results.
2019
Laura Coffey-Glover, lecturer in Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University, has greatly contributed to the studies on gender construction with insightful articles published on the international core journals, such as “Ideologies of masculinity in women’s magazines: a critical stylistic approach” (2015). The reviewed book, sharing the same research domain with the above article, covers a sweeping topic and methodology. It examines how masculinity is constructed through language from the perspective of labelling, describing, representing and decoding underpinned by the integration of Critical Stylistics and corpus linguistics techniques. The extensive scope and combined parameters enable this book to stand out and arouse great interest in the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics and gender studies. The book consists of nine chapters. From my point of view, it can be divided into four parts. The first (chapter 1) specifies some key notions and research ai...
Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. (eds) 2018. Miss Man? Languaging Gendered Bodies
Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. (eds) 2018. Miss Man? Languaging Gendered Bodies. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-5275-1096-8., 2018
This volume draws together contributions containing original research on a number of linguistic and semiotic understandings of gender in the context of current debates about gender non-conforming people and diverse ways of ‘doing’ masculinities. It contests the constraints, stereotypes, and prejudices concerning gender nonconformity by sparking academic inquiry, possibly leading to social change. The book explores various gender non-conforming tropes as they apply either to same-sex related desires, identities, and practices or to other dimensions of gender non-normative experiences, such as weak or socially-perceived as unacceptable representations of manliness. The volume demonstrates that language matters in the everyday experience of gender diversity beyond traditional gender binarism. By modelling some of the approaches that are now being explored in linguistic and gender studies and by addressing language use over a range of diamesic, diastratic and diatopic contexts, all contributors here discuss cogent issues in language and gender.
“There’s a lot of woman in him”: the feminine as a deviance from the norm
Organizações & Sociedade
This article seeks to understand how femininity is understood by organizations from the perspective of masculine homosexuals, with a special focus on the concept of Ableism. In this qualitative research, data was collected through in-depth interviews with 13 masculine homosexuals living in the state of Rio de Janeiro and the corpus was analysed using Content Analysis (Bardin, 2009). Our field research showed that effeminate gays and women are considered to be inferior to those people with heteromasculine behavior. In this context, femininity within the organizational environment is considered as a deficiency, and those who have this deficiency are excluded from this environment or encouraged to overcome this deficiency.
"„In the late twentieth century, after all, we are ourselves literally embodied writing technologies. That is part of the implosion of gender in sex and language, in biology and syntax, enabled by Western technoscience.“ Donna J. Haraway (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, p. 128. These thoughts were the stimulus for this paper’s effort to treat the notions of ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and ‘identity’ through the controversial points of view, emerged among the feminist writings of the 1970s, the historians and psychoanalysts of the 1980s.While post-stucturalists like J. Butler are passing from gender denaturalization to the undoing of gender, brain scientists speak about a potential underestimation of innate biology at its equation with the anatomical sex; hormones and neurochemicals, constantly changing the brain state, not taken into account. ‘Gender’ constitutes in this sense the key term that is being posed and reposed, thought and rethought, done and undone. My paper will be thus divided into three parts that shall refer to a critical vision of gender categories in various discursive domains. First part will treat the intrinsic introduction of gender as notion during the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to contest the naturalisation of the bipartite sex difference of men from women, male from female, in multiple arenas of struggle. Despite having passed from the ‘biological’ (sexual difference) to the ‘ontological determinism’ (desire) through the ‘social constructivism’ (power), the notion of “gender” remains trapped within the oppressive Western binarism culture/nature, and therefore the second part will explore the new ways of thinking gender that emerge in the 1990s towards a deconstruction or denaturalisation of this notion; that is, gender as representation and as subjective identity. Although Butler’s theory of performativity did succeed not only to disqualify normative analytical categories leading to univocity, such as sex or nature, but also to release both genders and their social frame of reference from any determinism, the third part will not only show in what extent this very notion of gender (as doing) is nowadays again in crisis but also inquire the possible explanations for the impoverishment of gender and therefore for the necessity of its undoing. A mysterious elsewhere will emerge as a sort of agency that motivates us and establishes our sexuality, whose full meaning we ignore. The innate neurochemical biology of Brizendine will thus broaden up the cognitive fields and open new perspectives of rethinking gender, the mysterious elsewhere and -why not?- biology itself. "