Masculinity and Representation: a Multimodal Critical Approach to Male Identity Constructions

This book is a brief attempt to discuss some emerging ways of representing ‘masculinities’ in contemporary media discourses. The confluence of diverse discourses on gender, men, and hegemony has often resulted in the creation of a general and rather fuzzy category that scholars frequently refer to as ‘hegemonic masculinity’. This arbitrary phrase has been misapplied for over 60 years, and surprisingly, it still carries considerable weight today. On the one hand, ‘hegemonic masculinity’ tends to anchor the extensive field of men’s studies, also known as masculinity studies (the critical studies of men) within feminist accounts of patriarchy and sociological models of gender. On the other hand, and this is the main acceptation in this book, the expression is often held accountable for the dissemination of popular anxieties about men as social actors. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological framework, this book outlines how masculine identities interact with the consumption of products, desires, and passions in consumer cultures. Representations of the male body are seen as discursive ‘ploys’ construed at the intersection of consumption and marketing across cultures in multimodal discourses. The book analyses a small corpus, the MALEcorpus, comprising 10 print covers from the British edition of the well-known and bestseller magazine Men’s Health. In view of this, the book investigates how masculinity is constructed, both verbally and visually, on ten covers of the British men’s magazine.