"Men For Women": A Critical Discourse Analysis On How American Vogue Constructs Men's Identity

The portrayal of gender has been a major topic of discussion in recent decades.Women's movement would come to blows by the early 1970s along with Playboy,an American men's lifestyle and entertainment magazine known for its nude and semi-nude female models and sexual materials.Some researchers(e.g.,Zillmann&Bryant)and a majority of feminists(e.g.,Brownmiller)decried Playboy's "playmates" and bunnies,the female presentations,as objectifying and degrading.With the change of time,women's fashion magazines have gained great attention of the public,where men are also presented and criticized as objectifying.Therefore,this thesis will examine how American Vogue,a popular women's fashion magazine,portrays men for its women readers and how it may mislead the audienceIn order to explore the construction of men's identity in American Vogue and how,a content analysis of all 120 issues of American Vogue from the year 2010 to 2019 will be conducted first,and this paper intends to fill the research gap by further providing a critical discourse analysis on 12 sample texts of 16 males,which will detect ideology and the power exertion through linguistic analysisThrough the examination of the American Vogue in the recent decade,this thesis finds that,unlike "New Lad" who is only concerned with sports,drinking and shagging women,the man image presented by American Vogue is a disciplined,confident man with a successful career,who shows great concerns on social and cultural issues yet less concerns about family or sexual relationships.Though the presented male images are more diversified in terms of their sexuality and skin tone,some of the male stereotypes keep being reproduced,and so do traditional sexual relation and identities.Besides,text producers from American Vogue use "balancing" as a strategy for winning more readers at the same time maintaining its the power and authority in fashion and culture.