Diskurzivno konstruisanje „savremene žene”: analiza lingvističkih sredstava reprezentacije feminiteta u časopisima
Discursive Construction of “Modern Woman”: Analysis of Linguistic Means of Representation of Women in Magazines

Summary/Abstract: Drawing on recent debates in feminist sociology and sociolinguistics, this paper deals with mechanisms of discursive representations of woman’s identity in the print media. Accepting the poststructuralist understanding of gender as a performative category that is constructed through language, I explore the performativity of gender by analyzing the topics and linguistic solutions found in articles in women’s magazines. The problem of the modern woman has arisen from the analyzed data - most of the material in the print media addresses the modern woman (forming in this way its imaginary construct), whether it is directly put (in the texts in which the very phrase „modern woman” is used), or the discourse is about what “a woman” should know or do in a particular area. The specific focus of interest here are advice columns. The paper presents the analysis of such articles, which include two groups of magazine texts: those that are in the form of questions and answers and those that are composed of listing pieces of advice and recommendations, usually formulated as imperatives. Final results of the analysis point to the existence of divergent types of construction of modern women that are made through the construction of various types of discourses used in a particular magazine. In other words, different linguistic solutions refer to different styles of discourse, and they, in turn, continue to point to the construction of completely different lifestyles that are promulgated by a particular magazine. From this perspective, magazines can be construed as a mechanism of regulating normative femininity.

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