Bibliographic details and abstracts are available to all. Downloads of full-text dissertations are restricted to University of Portsmouth members who must login. MPhils may be accessed by all.

Abstract

Gender identity has arguably been shaped through the media, particularly in women’s magazines. The purpose of this dissertation was to unveil magazine ideologies to establish whether gender stereotypes are present in British media when celebrities are on the red carpet. This study examined both visual and textual representations.

The data consisted of 14 magazine articles from 9 different magazine brands; OK! Magazine, British Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Hello! Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Popsugar UK and Glamour. All magazine articles covered the same red carpet event; The Grammys 2020.

The analysis implemented various aspects of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Machin & Mayr, 2012), focusing on Social Actor analysis, Evaluative language and Transitivity analysis. The Social Actor analysis revealed that gender stereotypes relating to women’s appearance are apparent in women’s magazines and that Evaluative language often unveils a magazines opinion towards certain female appearances.  The transitivity analysis finally suggested that females are not involved with completing any actions that have consequences in the real world. Overall traditional stereotypes relating to women were present.

Course: English Language and Linguistics - BA - C2742S

Date Deposited: 2022-02-10

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis13759.html