26.3033, Review: Discourse; Ling Theories; Socioling: Glapka (2014)

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Subject: 26.3033, Review: Discourse; Ling Theories; Socioling: Glapka (2014)

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Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2015 11:28:36
From: Weimin Toh [a0019282 at u.nus.edu]
Subject: Reading Bridal Magazines from a Critical Discursive Perspective

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36015417


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-4760.html

AUTHOR: Ewa  Glapka
TITLE: Reading Bridal Magazines from a Critical Discursive Perspective
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Weimin Toh, National University of Singapore

Review's Editors: Malgorzata Cavar and Ashley Parker

SUMMARY

This book is a monograph covering the discourse analysis of bridal magazines
by combining the three frameworks of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA),
Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA) and Critical Discursive
Perspective (CDP). The book is well structured into two main components. The
first three chapters cover the theoretical foundation of the main concepts
which the researcher/analyst utilises for the discourse analysis of the bridal
magazines. Chapters four through six cover the analytical tools used, that is,
interviews that are used to explore the gender-mediating process of the text.
There is a high degree of interaction between the material covered in the
different chapters, in terms of the relations between the discourse frameworks
used and gender (identity) of the interviewees.

The book focuses on the qualitative instead of quantitative analysis of the
lived experiences of the interviewees. Due to space constraints, an in-depth
discussion of the interview findings of four out of the eleven interviewees
are discussed in chapters five and six. The findings are framed using the
three discourse analysis frameworks which include both the top-down approach
involving the hegemonic discourse, symbolic power (CDA) and the
researcher/analyst’s interpretation of the text (bridal magazines) from a
discourse analysis perspective and the bottom-up approach which includes the
interviewees’ discussion/interpretation of the text, based on their lifeworld
experiences (FPDA). There is triangulation of the data analysed in the sense
that the findings from the discourse analysis of the text (bridal magazines)
is not coming solely from the researcher/analyst’s interpretation/perspective
but is as a result of the negotiation between the researcher/analyst and the
interviewees during the interviews.

“Introduction” is a very useful quick summary of the book chapters. It also
clearly defines the scope of topics discussed in the book.

In Chapter 1, “Discourse and Power,” the author attempted to outline the
theory of discourse underpinning the whole volume. These include concepts that
are used for the critical inquiry of the discursive mediation of femininity.
Although some of the concepts outlined in the chapter -  such as Critical
Discourse Analysis, hegemony and symbolic power - are purely theoretical
constructs, others - such as the interviews discussed in the analysis section
- serve in the book as both theoretical insights and as units of analysis. The
chapter also emphasises the reduction of the ambiguity of the object of
critical discourse studies by the triangulation (Cicourel 1969) of data. The
triangulating method consists of relying on more than one method of data
collection in the investigation of the same problem (Taylor [2001] 2009:322).
The media reproduction of gender is explored from both the sites of production
and reception. It is also not a purely linguistic undertaking and is
accompanied by a critical appraisal of relevant insights from sociology and
feminist theory. Another perspective that a CDA-based view of the relations
between discourse and power provides a decentralised view of text, where the
authorship of meaning is problematised. This is the reason why the book
retains the focus on the socioculturally and historically available
discourses. The macro-level investigation is supplemented with the micro-level
investigation of how the discourses are drawn upon both in the construction of
media texts and in the local contexts of text interpretation.

In Chapter 2, “Women as Subjects of Discourse,” the Feminist Poststructuralist
Discourse Analysis (FPDA) perspective is explored to illuminate the aspects of
the discursive mediation of gender that are underplayed in the paradigms
presented in Chapter 1. The author explains that poststructuralism has been
included in the study as a way of foregrounding the experience of individuals
involved in power relations. The focus of analysis using the FPDA perspective
is on the local contexts of power negotiation. The use of the FPDA perspective
enables a critical mode of research that takes the mechanistic view of media
reception. This perspective also implies that media content is not passively
absorbed, and that media reception is a process where meanings are negotiated
in ways that are related with power. The author regards the lifeworld
practices and discourses as necessary for the critical study of gender from
this perspective. Thus, in the analysis, there is a confrontation between the
media discourses of femininity with the subjectivities that women work up in
relation to them and in their accounts of their lifeworld experience. An
important distinction this chapter highlights is between two major forms of
subjectivity. Readers of media texts can be seen as “subjects-in-discourse”
(D. Smith 1990: 192), that is, as prepositioned by socially and culturally
shared discourses, or they can be approached as the “subjects of their
actions”, that is, as subjects who are able to speak in their capacity as
knowledgeable practitioners of the discourse of femininity. The author also
highlights that the book is interested in the women’s constructions of their
embodied experience of femininity but also cautions that the analyses is
unable to render the women’s ‘actual’ actions because of their inevitably
mediated character.

In Chapter 3, entitled “Bridal Femininity in Wedding Magazines,” the author
provides a critical discourse analysis of bridal magazines based on the
investigation of a sample of British wedding magazines. This chapter focuses
on the researcher/analyst’s perspective to identify discourses by means of
which the magazines address/position their readers. The analysis is separated
into two main modes. The first half of the chapter focuses on the discourse
analysis of the linguistic mode while the second half of the chapter focuses
on the discourse analysis of the non-linguistic mode. These two modes form the
“multi-modal” analysis of the text (bridal magazines). For the analysis of the
linguistic mode, the author focuses on specific aspects in the bridal
magazines such as the editor’s letter, the use of lexis to construct hegemonic
femininity, the creation of a heteronormative narrative of romance, the
creation of a hybrid identity of the ‘project-manager superbride’ followed by
non-traditional brides and the bride as the object of gaze. For the analysis
of the non-linguistic mode, the author includes the modalities of the gaze,
iconicity in the imagery of the bride in Western popular culture, and the use
of colour such as pink traditionally associated with femininity. The
distinction between the modes is blurred as there are discussions of both
modes in each section, although emphasis is placed more on a specific mode in
each section. The remaining portion of the chapter discusses
recontextualisation, hybridisation and commodification strategies that are
used to identify the role of the local discourses and genres in the formation
of the naturalness of the magazines’ local ideologies.

In Chapter 4, “Reading a Magazine: Methodological Considerations,” the author
introduces the analytical tools from Critical Discursive Psychology that are
used in the study of media reception by the interviewees. Interviewees’
accounts are considered as local, which is contingent on the pragmatic rules
of an interview, and also intertextual,  that is related with other texts,
discourses and contexts. The author concludes the chapter by introducing the
interview data and the criteria for selecting the interviewees.

In Chapter 5, “Reading a Magazine: The Interviews,” the author analyses the
interviews of four selected interviewees based on the approach outlined in the
previous chapter. Selected interview extracts were discussed according to the
researcher/analyst’s interpretation. The findings from the first interviewee
highlight the ambiguities and contradictions in her accounts of media
consumption, marriage and motherhood. The analysis of the first interviewee
revealed that media reception cannot be considered in terms of the crude
distinction between submission and resistance. Although she was invested in
the discourse of the wedding magazines, she was still able to establish a
polemical relation to its specific aspects. The second interviewee’s bridal
experience and lived identity of getting married was mediated by religious
discourse. Because of how she negotiated her gender subjectivity based on the
religious discourse, this shows the analytical value of contextualising media
reception in the extended self-accounts of the recipient’s lived experiences
that are not directly related to the media. The second interviewee added to
the study’s findings the subjectivity of a woman who is familiar with the
media texts of bridal femininity. Her subjectivity is established by relying
mainly on the religious discourse. Similarly, the analysis of the third
interviewee highlights that her subject positions do not directly concern her
reception of the magazine, but is reflected in her lived experience. For
instance, her account about her parents’ divorce concern the social and
emotional experiences which accompany getting married but are not discussed in
the wedding magazines. The other finding is that even though the third
interviewee recognised the media discourse  of normative femininity as
oppressive, she reproduced it too by drawing on the normative notion of
masculinity. The way she defies the stereotypical femininity is also related
with how femininity is used to construct the bridal subjectivity in wedding
magazines. The analysis of the fourth interviewee also supports the
interpretation of the earlier interviewees by highlighting that a complex
independent bridal subjectivity can be constructed that is not directly
related to the media frame.

In Chapter 6, “Reading a Magazine: Discussion,” the author discusses the
findings of the analyses in the previous chapter according to the shared
patterns observed in the majority of the interviews conducted for the purpose
of the study. The first pattern identified in relation to the interviewees’
reader position was their rare mention of specific articles. This might imply
the marginal relevance of the magazine to their lived experience. The findings
that the interviewees do not believe in the authenticity and the underlying
consumerist ideology of the real-life wedding texts paralleled the author’s
critical discourse analysis of the magazines. Next, in general, the
cross-analysis of the data presented in the critical discourse examination of
the interviews and bridal magazines cautions against the text-centred
approaches in eliciting meaning from the formal features of texts. There are
two reasons for this cautioning. Firstly, most interviewees constructed a
relationship of distance from the texts and secondly, when they relate
polemically to the same articles, their critique often differs. This shows a
variety of subject positions from which the participants accounted for their
criticism based on their lived experiences. Thus, the autobiographical
information of the participants are important. Even though they are not
strictly related to the prompt texts, they cast some light on the
participants’ relationship to the discourses that circulate not only in the
media but also in the wider sociocultural circuits of the people’s lifeworlds.
Data gathered in the study complicate Foucault’s notion of subjectivity in
terms of subjectivation (Foucault 1982, 1988) and subjectification (Foucault
1985). In the data, subjectification was present when the women were able to
position themselves in relation to the magazine’s discourse as independent
subjects. Subjectivation was present in the participants’ contradictory
positioning where women remain anchored in the dominant gender paradigm in
spite of their insubordination to its underlying discourses.

“Conclusion” provides a succinct summary of the findings through a review
structured according to the three themes of how women are spoken about (and
to) in the media, how women speak, and how to approach these two kinds of
discourse practices analytically.

EVALUATION

An important merit of this book is that it adopts multiple frameworks to
provide a holistic view in the analysis of the bridal magazine texts. That is
to say, the analysis of the bridal magazines is examined from the tripartite
frameworks of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Feminist Poststructuralist
Discourse Analysis (FPDA) and Critical Discursive Perspective (CDP). This is
rarely done in a single study. It also makes this book an excellent resource
for scholars who are simply looking for specialised discussions of the
analytical approach taken in analysing bridal magazines as a text.

The author opens the book with the chapter on discourse and power which
focuses on the top-down perspective in highlighting the specific subject
positions that the bridal magazines text constructs for their readers through
the use of multi-modal resources. I would be very keen to see the use of
multi-modal discourse analysis frameworks used to analyse how the linguistic
and non-linguistic semiotic resources such as the visuals interact with each
other to provide the subject positions for the readers of the text. In the
discourse analysis framework proposed by the author, the discussion of the
semiotic resources were mostly isolated. It would be interesting to find out
how the intersemiosis between the semiotic resources is related to the
construction of specific subject positions for the readers. Furthermore, it
would also be interesting to include more visuals in the book for analysis. At
present, there are no visuals used in the book and the author simply describes
them. As the bridal magazines do not simply consists of the linguistic
semiotic resource, but also non-linguistic semiotic resources like visuals, it
would be useful to include an equal proportion of visuals to the linguistic
analysis for a more balanced analysis of the text.

In Chapter 2, the author focuses on the bottom-up perspective in highlighting
how the readers of the bridal magazines are able to subvert or “challenge” the
subject positions offered through the multi-modal resources used in the text.
The use of the Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA) framework
enables an understanding of the multiplicity and subjectivity of the gender
identity of women interviewed by the researcher/analyst. However, one of the
limitation of the method used for the study might be that it is overly
subjective and it would not be easy to understand why a specific interviewee
chooses to distance herself from the text. In using interviews and
conversational analysis (CA), it is not easy to access the cognition or
emotional standpoint of the interviewee, and there might be personal issues
that the interviewee chooses to withhold from the interviewer. Much of the
findings would have to depend on the interviewer’s interpretation. The author
has noted this limitation in the discussion of the framework’s limitation.

In Chapter 3, the author includes a short section to discuss the role of men
in bridal magazines. I would be very keen to see more discussion of men in the
bridal magazines and how the traditional role of men and women is inscribed
into the magazines and how the interviewees as well as the interviewer/analyst
interprets the representation of both men and women in bridal magazines. This
would contribute to a more balanced analysis of both men and women instead of
simply focusing on women in the textual analysis and interviews.

Another limitation of the study is related to the selection of participants
for the data. The author indicated that the interviewees were selected based
on their availability for the interview during the period of data collection.
As a result, individuals selected did not fulfil all criteria. These criteria
include women from diverse background, immediacy of wedding experience, and
reading preferences. This means that the study is more of an explorative study
and the findings cannot be generalised to the general female population or
target audience of the magazines. Perhaps a future study can be conducted to
build on the qualitative findings. Specific research questions might be
formulated based on the data gathered from the qualitative study.

This book is generally an excellent piece of academic writing and suffers only
from very infrequent spelling and formatting errors. Each chapter links to the
next chapter cohesively and complements each other very well. This book is
meant for more advanced students and scholars of linguistics, specifically
discourse analysts and presumes a certain level of familiarity with discourse
analysis concepts. Overall, “Reading Bridal Magazines from a Critical
Discursive Perspective” provides insightful and detailed analyses of a
specific area of linguistics, i.e. discourse analysis of the bridal magazines
texts. The analyses are firmly grounded in the three frameworks outlined in
the first few chapters. Additionally, Chapter 6 on the discussion of the
findings of the analyses and the conclusion section round out the book, and
make it a good source of information and inspiration for future work to be
conducted by applied linguists in the discourse analysis of (bridal) magazine
texts.

REFERENCES

Cicourel, Aaron V. 1969. Method and measurement in sociology. New York: The
Free Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1982. “The subject and power”, in: Hubert Dreyfus and Paul
Rainbow (eds), Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester,
208-226.

Foucault, Michel. 1985. The use of pleasure: The history of sexuality. Vol. 2.
London: Penguin Books.

Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of the self”, in: Luther H. Martin, Huck
Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the self: A seminar with
Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 16-49.

Smith, Dorothy. 1990. Texts, fact and femininity: Exploring relations of
ruling. London: Routledge.

Taylor, Stephanie. [2001] 2009. “Evaluating and applying discourse analytic
research”, in: Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor and Simeon J. Yates (eds),
Discourse as data. A geode for analysis. London: Sage, 311-330.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Toh Weimin is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and
Literature in the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research
interests include social semiotics, multimodality and the study of new
technologies like offline and online gaming worlds. Besides his interest in
researching gaming worlds, he is also interested in anime and film analysis
using a multimodal discourse analysis approach. His current PhD research work
involves the creation of a ludonarrative model for video games to understand
the different relationships between narrative and gameplay in video games.
This theoretical model is supported by the empirical study of players.





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