Textual Construction of The Female Body
Textual Construction of The Female Body
Textual Construction of The Female Body
Lesley Jeffries
© Lesley Jeffries 2007
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Preface: Code and Body – an Intervention x
vii
viii Contents
Notes 200
Bibliography 202
Index 206
Acknowledgements
L ESLEY J EFFRIES
ix
Preface: Code and Body – an
Intervention
This book deals with two issues that are very important to me; the
question of how women live their lives physically, and the way in which
language both constrains us and enables us to live fuller lives. As a
preamble to the main business of the book, I would like to draw these
two strands together in an exercise inspired by Rob Pope’s intervention
techniques (Pope 1995) in which the re-writing of an extract from a
feminist theory text about the body explores the similarities between
the lived and constructed body on the one hand, and the material or
experienced language and its core system on the other.
The extract is taken from J. Butler’s Bodies that Matter (1993) as
reprinted in Price and Shildrick (1994: 240):
x
Preface xi
processes of menstruation and lactation that link the inner body to the
outside world.
The problems associated with the code, I would argue, are closely
analogous to those of the female form. Whilst it would be neat and
controllable to have a finite code that defined the language human
beings use, it is neither the situation we find ourselves in, nor a seriously
desirable situation. Just as the ‘leakages’ of the female form are often
associated both with literal creativity (motherhood) and metaphorical
creativity (art), so the creativities of language (whether artistic, political
or social) are dependent on the essential existence of the code and at
the same time could not exist without the contextual flexibility of the
code. And in both cases, I would argue, to lose the essential – the body
of the mother or the coded core of language – would be to lose the
whole. To repeat myself (and Butler) somewhat, the recognition of these
existences is not direct or unmediated. It can only happen through
discourse, which may be theorized discourse in an academic context,
but may just as well be everyday discourse too.
Where does that leave the feminist/linguist who wishes to describe
what she sees around her? I think it leaves her using the tools available
to her, from theories that seem to her to model best the fluctuating
body/mind complex or code/contextual meaning complex. It leaves the
human being who has a female form dealing on an everyday basis with
the realities of that body and the speaker/hearer of a language likewise
dealing with the language and needing enough commonality of under-
standing (that is, code) for her to climb out of the purely contextual and
start to make contact with other users. Theorists, surely, have to start
from these positions too?
That is not to say that description is all there is to do. Feminists assess
the current state of the female body in order to improve the position
of women. Linguists ought to (and some do) work towards a better
understanding of how human beings communicate in order to improve
communication.
L ESLEY J EFFRIES
1
Studying the Language of the
Female Body: Some Context
What the reader will find in this book is a critical study of the language
of texts taken from women’s magazines in 2000. These texts are all in
some direct way connected with the female body, and include texts
concerning everything from fashion to plastic surgery, but exclude
articles on furniture, holiday destinations and other similar texts not
referring to the body. Later in the chapter we will see how the data
were chosen, but here it is important to emphasize that the motivation
for choosing these data was to try and avoid the ‘trap’ of choosing an
easy target, such as pornographic texts or tabloid newspaper representa-
tions of women, which are known to continue certain representational
practices that demean women and treat them as sexual and/or domestic
objects (see Lanis 1995).
This study, then, had as its hypothesis the idea that although things
have changed greatly since I was a small girl in the 1950s and 1960s,
nevertheless, the magazines which many (most?) girls and women read
at formative points in their lives may still influence the reader’s percep-
tion of her body. Though the hypothesis was that some of this potential
influence would still reflect patriarchal and thus, from a feminist stand-
point, unacceptable, images of women’s bodies, I had no specific ideas
about how such ideologies would be embedded linguistically, or indeed
precisely what they would turn out to be.
The impetus behind this research came from two directions. One was
the desire to investigate how far feminist movements had succeeded
in influencing the public construction of the female form, potentially
giving women a less patriarchal view of their bodies. The other was the
wish to try out and develop the methods and ideas of Critical Discourse
1
2 Textual Construction of the Female Body
2001) and thus may be both vulnerable to and also resistant to the
ideologies embodied in the texts they encounter. This approach, though
deriving from CDA, reflects feminist views about the constructed nature
and performativity of gender:
The role of magazines, then, as we will see in the analysis in this book,
is to provide women and girls with just the exemplars they need to cite
in their own lived experiences.
As for history, the work represented here is contextualized in two
ways. Firstly, it considers the representation of the female body at the
turn of the millennium and in what is sometimes called a ‘postfeminist’
Western cultural context (see Terry and Schiappa 1999). The consider-
ation of what effect the various forms of feminism have had on these
representations is probably outside the scope of this study, though
I hope that the findings reported here will contribute to that debate.
Secondly, this study also occurs at a point in the development of CDA
when the considerations of mediation (see Jäger 2002) and contextual
definition (see van Dijk 2002) have all but erased the detailed text analyt-
ical origins of the discipline, and it proposes a particular kind of return
to analysis, drawing upon the traditions of CDA, but, I hope, enhan-
cing some of its methodological features so that others may take up and
develop them
Finally, the relation of this work to ideology is probably already
quite clear and reflects Fairclough’s view that one of the inequities
of power is reflected in an ‘unequal capacity to control how texts
are produced, distributed and consumed in particular sociocultural
contexts’ (Fairclough 1995: 1). We will assume, in general terms, that
the reader of women’s magazines will ‘normally’ be women themselves.
The cultural imperative for women to look good remains strong and
4 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Lucy surveys the research into linguistic relativity and concludes that
more, and particularly more empirical work needs to be done. What
he does not do is to contest the notion that there is some influence
from language to thought, though the nature of this relationship is still
not fully understood. The assumption in the current work is that the
everyday repetition of ideology in discourse is indeed likely to have an
effect on the perceptions of women in relation to their bodies. The ques-
tion remains to what extent, under what conditions and how do the
answers to those questions affect our understanding of, and theoretical
model for, language.4
Widdowson summarizes the theory of language espoused by Kress as:
I have argued elsewhere (Jeffries 2000) that Lyons is right to take this
view, and
that if we try in any one model to take into account the full
complexity of the communicative situation, we will fail to adequately
explain anything. This does not mean that models should not focus
on different aspects of the context as well as the text, as indeed they
do, but that it is often counter-productive, and anyway theoretically
nonsensical to aim for a fully integrated or comprehensive theory.
(Jeffries 2000: 5–6)
of prototypicality, and Croft and Cruse (2004) argues that even proto-
type theory is too simplistic and needs to be enhanced by Barsalou’s
model of ‘frames’. In the current context, we may conclude that
the perceptions of female bodies may be both relatively stable and
langue-like on the one hand and also subject to change over time, influ-
enced by both technological and social change and by the discourse
that reflects and constructs these changes.
These ideas are not new. And to that extent Widdowson is right
to suggest that the CDA adherents have been guilty of ignoring some
of the debates in other sub-disciplines of linguistics such as socio-
linguistics, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, literary theory and,
one might add to Widdowson’s list, pragmatics. I am drawing most
here on the uses which sociolinguistics has made of variation theory,
though the insights of pragmatics and Conversation Analysis into the
patterning of what was once thought unpatterned, is another analogy.
Despite these de facto omissions by CDA in communicating with other
areas of the discipline, it seems to me that one could hold an entirely
coherent theory of language based on a flexible code and its use, even
though modelling it is somewhat more difficult than modelling the
two-category theories (for example langue and parole or competence
and performance) we were accustomed to rely upon throughout the
twentieth century.
Levinson (1983) demonstrates this view of the mutability of the
langue/parole boundary in discussing conversational implicature:
He correctly points out the circularity that is evident in the rather small
pieces of ‘analysis’ which are included to illustrate the CDA ‘manifestoes’
of Fairclough, Fowler and Kress. He picks on Fairclough, for example, in
the following way:
questioned in the recent past (see Mackay 1996 and 1999; Short et al.
1998), but there is a consensus that it is possible to build rigour and
replicability into such studies, so that while scientific levels of objectivity
(which are also not absolute) are not achievable, we can demonstrate a
reasonable level of independence in literary stylistics. I would add that
CDA is very similar to stylistics in that it uses textual evidence to support
certain interpretative conclusions. The difference is that the interpret-
ations will normally be ideological in one and literary or affective in
another, though it would be possible, of course, to look at ideology in
literature too.
If we were to make explicit what Widdowson calls ‘the essential
instability of language and the necessary indeterminacy of all meaning’,
and to build it into our model of language more clearly, perhaps the
practice of critical discourse analysis would not be seen as so far in
rigour from any other branch of linguistics. Indeed, in Wodak (2002: 16),
Meyer points out this inevitable circularity in the hermeneutic model
of interpretation that underlies almost all linguistic analysis, and yet is
accepted, with all its difficulties, as a reasonable methodology:
As for the methods and procedures used for the analysis of discourses,
CDA generally sees its procedure as a hermeneutic process, although
this characteristic is not completely evident in the position taken by
the various authors. Compared to the (causal) explanations of the
natural sciences, hermeneutics can be understood as the method of
grasping and producing meaning relations. The hermeneutic circle –
which implies that the meaning of one part can only be understood
in the context of the whole, but that this in turn is only accessible
from its component parts – indicates the problem of intelligibility of
hermeneutic interpretation. Therefore hermeneutic interpretation in
particular urgently requires detailed documentation.
Where this work stands, then, in relation to CDA and its detractors, is
as an example of how one might bring as much rigour into the process
of qualitative textual analysis as possible, whilst not abandoning the
motivated impetus behind CDA, and whilst acknowledging the presence
of an inevitable circularity in the hermeneutic approach.
Hallidayan functionalism
This inevitable circularity of the process of analysing texts is also
evident in the Hallidayan processes that are normally favoured by
CDA practitioners. The descriptive tools, in the form of categories and
Studying the Language of the Female Body: Some Context 11
When a research project, like the one reported here, focuses largely on a
body of textual data, it may simply be investigating more thoroughly the
ideational process, though some of the interpretation of the analysis will
question the interpersonal context, and consider the effects suggested
by the context of production and reception of these magazines. As Fair-
clough (1995: 9) says:
But there is a danger here of throwing out the baby with the
bathwater, by abandoning textual analysis in favour of analysis of
audience reception Textual analysis is therefore an important part,
if only a part, of the picture, and must be defended against its critics.
This reluctance to claim that the list is complete, coupled with the rather
shaky grounds given for choosing the structures (from ‘experience’) have
Studying the Language of the Female Body: Some Context 13
helped to give CDA its critics and, unfortunately, with the possible
exception of Simpson (1993) who is using CDA in a new, stylistic way,
there is no real attempt elsewhere to construct a rationale for the tools
to be used, nor a comprehensive set of such tools.
In some senses this is understandable, since CDA, like stylistics more
generally, is dependent on the developments in theory and practice
from linguistics and has not so far developed its own general theory of
language, though this has been mooted by some as one of its ultimate
aims (Fairclough 1995: 10, referring to Kress 1993). The tools of analysis
are also problematic for CDA analysts in some ways, as van Leeuwen
(1996) points out:
In this project, one of the aims has been to identify systems which
are similar to transitivity and modality, but are not as well-recognized
as them. What these other systems have in common with the ‘tradi-
tional’ tools of CDA is that they reflect van Leeuwen’s comments and
are simultaneously formal and functional at the level at which the
naturalization of ideology and hegemony may work. They each seem to
depend on a standard form–function relationship (such as modal verbs
for modality) but also have other manners of delivery so that the style
of the text performs certain meaningful functions. We will see more of
these functions later in the chapter (pp. 16–17), but here I will explain
a little more what is meant by this particular level of functionality
in texts.
If we take modality as a classic case of this kind of textual function,
we can note that there is a typical, or core, form, which delivers certain
kinds of modality in English; the modal auxiliary. Thus, the epistemic
uncertainty of a speaker might be introduced by a modal verb as in Susan
might come to the party, and the speaker’s view or opinions as to what
is desirable may equally well be delivered by a modal verb as in Susan
14 Textual Construction of the Female Body
should come to the party. Note that with the right context (including
intonation), these meanings can be reassigned in reverse:
Critical stylistics
The approach taken here is to set aside for now the question of the
influence (or otherwise) of texts on readers, and to take it for granted
first of all that all texts present ideologies (as propositions, assumptions
or implications) and secondly that, as a result of this, the analysis of
meanings as created by texts in particular ways (that is, stylistics) is
fundamental to CDA. The fact that some ideologies are more manip-
ulative and/or undesirable than others should not blind us to the fact
that the technical means of achieving meaning are similar, whether we
wish to criticise that meaning or simply wish to analyse that way of
achieving a particular effect.
The remainder of this section will discuss and exemplify the main
analytical tools that are used in discussing the texts analysed in this
book. As explained above, they are Hallidayan in the sense that they
take a basically functional approach, so that the meanings and the
way that they are delivered textually are both incorporated into the
analysis throughout. The potential problem with this, of course, occurs
if you try to demonstrate a complete lack of circularity in the investiga-
tion, and yet I hope to have argued convincingly above (and elsewhere –
Jeffries 2000) that this aim is neither realistic not necessary as long as
certain key principles are in place.
This research was carried out in the context of an expectation that
certain key perceptions of women’s bodies are likely to be ubiquitous
in texts that clearly denigrate or demean women’s bodies (such as the
‘page 3’ type text in tabloid newspapers, or the new male magazines
that are proliferating at the moment). I can also make an educated guess
16 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Analytical categories
The last section gave a sense of what the collected tools of analysis
in this study were attempting to bring to the practice of CDA, which
is a rationale for the kind of feature that is being analysed. With the
Studying the Language of the Female Body: Some Context 17
exception of the first two categories below (genre and rhetoric), which
are more global in their reach, the tools of analysis used here are aimed at
finding out what the text is doing ideationally – and thus ideologically –
in certain key ways. I have therefore analysed the data in terms of the
‘textual-ideational’ features listed below. Their main formal realizations
are listed beside the function label:
This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all that texts can do,
but it attempts to draw together some familiar and some less familiar
operations which might be considered in some sense independent of
particular languages and in principle independent of text-type, though
it is likely that some genres are more prone to some of these functions
than others.
feminist linguistic theory relating to the body. This section will attempt
to contextualize the work in such a way.
The motivation for the research reported here, apart from a personal
one, was that women have to deal with their material bodies on a daily
basis,7 and in the face of whatever construction the culture currently
puts on their bodies. I wanted to see what some of the apparently helpful
texts in women’s magazines were actually doing to perceptions. At first
sight, the texts studied all appear to be aimed at helping the contem-
porary female cope with the ‘problematic’ body. This construction of
the body as a problem is one of the overwhelming impressions one gets,
even just flicking through the pages of women’s magazines. Though
this is not a comparative study, the same impression is not given by the
increasing number of men’s magazines on the market. In the women’s
magazines, even the texts which aim to celebrate the body’s normal
functioning, such as pregnancy texts, operate within the mainstream
ideology of the problematic body.8
Cameron (1998: 11) makes the point that it is not only the way that
a language names the world that might be seen as sexist:
The way forward was not to reclaim and revalorise the body, but
to argue that the ideal standard of disembodied subjecthood was as
appropriate to, and attainable by, women as it was to men.
What may seem strange at first is that the first wave of feminism has
had such success, whereas the second wave of radical feminism, which
attempted to put bodily difference at the centre of its politics, has
had less apparent effect on mainstream portrayals (constructions) of
the female body. Thus, the ‘revaluing’ of the specifically female – and
maternal – body as a site of empowerment, seems to have had less
impact on the mainstream magazines investigated here, except perhaps
20 Textual Construction of the Female Body
What first, second and more especially third-wave feminism have offered
to the powerful patriarchal producers of mass-circulation magazines is
a rationalization of whatever position it suits them to take. If selling
diets or plastic surgery is the aim, then the control of the body by
technology and mediated willpower can be framed within a first-wave,
rationalist perspective, where women, just as much as men, can ‘rise
above’ the dictates of their bodies. It is a challenge that many readers
would be reluctant to avoid taking up, since succumbing is weak, and
being weak is not acceptable. However, and without any sense that it is
contradictory, these texts simultaneously use the second-wave argument
that the female is different, and should be valued as such, to underpin
the selling of sexual technique, the rationale for the search for perfection
(to attract a mate) and the excuse for women being at times ‘at the
mercy of’ their bodies.
The rise of ‘third-wave feminism’, first as a reaction against the domin-
ance of white women’s experience and later as younger generation’s
reaction against second-wave feminism (see Henry 2004), provides the
media with the opportunity to serve both their commercial interests and
also pay lip-service to feminist concerns. As Price and Shildrick (1999:
7) point out, there is now a postmodern feminism that asks a different
kind of question, rather than ‘Can we change our bodies to become
more acceptable?’:
This ‘different kind of question’ is ‘can we change the way that discourse
shapes our bodies?’ They argue that what is needed to avoid the traps
of both first and second wave feminism is ‘the constant reinterpretation
of the body, textually constructed’. The advantage of this approach,
from a practical point of view is that instead of trying to deny the
material physicality of bodily experience, the emphasis is on denying its
stability. We will see some examples in the textual analysis later, which
demonstrate the problems with the stable materiality of the body, and
the pressures it puts on women to preserve a particular (young, slim,
pre-maternal) version of their body throughout life.
Theorists such as Susan Bordo (1993) and Sandra Barky (1988) have
been in the forefront in analysing how the processes of surveillance
and self-surveillance are deeply implicated in constituting a set of
normativities towards which bodies intend. The practices of diet,
keep-fit, fertility control, fashion, health care procedures and so on
are all examples of disciplinary controls which literally produce the
bodies that are their concern. (Price and Shildrick 1999: 8)
Gatens argues that it does not make sense to simply decide that women
should have access to power, since the cultural formation of their bodies
does not fit the shape of the power.
Butler (1999: 240) makes clear that it is not that discourse actually
creates the body, but that the body cannot be accessed or referred to
without discourse. This means that every reference to the body will
construct the body in some way. The ideological effects of this are
unavoidable:
Her argument rests on the notion that unlike the ‘universal’, that is
male, body, the female experience is one of permeable boundaries, where
another being may grow inside one’s own body and then separate itself
(through labour), where the constructed experience of (heterosexual)
sex is one of penetration and intrusion into the female body, and as a
result of both the lived experience and its lack of match to the discursive
‘norms’ of the body Battersby (1999: 346) explains her ‘failure to register
my body as a container with a self safe “within” and the dangerous
other on the outside’ as partly due to the fact that this permeability and
penetrability is ‘typical of women’. In other words, the normalizing of
the female form as aberrantly unsafe and ‘leaky’, in opposition to the
sealed and ‘clean’ masculine form, is one of the sources of the female
anxiety in relation to the body, including its extreme forms such as
anorexia and bulimia.
The data for this research were collected in the month of February 2000.
In order to reflect the publications that would be available to teenagers
and women at that time, the data were collected from all the women’s
magazines available in the main newsagents (W.H. Smith) in the centre
of Leeds (West Yorkshire, UK) in that month. Some of these were dated
March, some Feb/March and some February, but they were all available
on the same day.
The only specialist magazines included in the data were those which
concerned the body in particular ways. These included slimming, preg-
nancy and plastic-surgery magazines. All other magazines were generic.
I did not include magazines which concerned the house and garden or
cooking alone. A quick glance at them confirmed the assumption that
there would be no data of interest in them as there were very few refer-
ences to the female body. This choice, however, does explain one of the
features of the data in this study, which is that it tends to assume that
the reader is relatively young. There are a small number of magazines
(for example, Woman) which address more mature women as well as
including articles about the bodily experience of that age group. A very
large number of other magazines, however, seem to assume that the life
of middle-aged and older women is almost entirely taken up with the
concerns of creating a beautiful home, garden or dinner party.
24 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Another factor in the choice of data that has influenced the direction
of this book is that I have had to leave out the early stages of a girl’s
life, since it is in books, rather than magazines, that early perceptions
may be founded and they are not comparable with the data analysed
here both because of this fact and also because they do not constitute
comparable entertainment for children as for women and teenage girls.
Children will rarely freely choose such reading matter and the range of
genres and topics tends to differ considerably.
One slight dissatisfaction with the data, which turned out to be
beyond my control, was the fact that having decided to choose data that
would be readily available to all women, I discovered that there were no
specialist magazines for lesbian women, and only two for black women
in the shop at that time, though it is probably the largest outlet of
magazines in a large northern English city. These latter were published
in the USA and in some ways, therefore, are not comparable to the
other magazines, all of which are either UK-based or have UK editions.
Specialist magazines for lesbian women do exist, as my students have
pointed out, but as they are not readily available in the usual outlets,
readers would have to make a concerted effort to acquire them. The
result is that the market is dominated by magazines which assume a
heterosexual, mainly white and probably middle-class readership.
Once I had acquired the magazines, I extracted all articles, advert-
isements and other texts which had references to the female body. In
the end, some of the more culinary articles had too little in the way of
bodily references to include, though those which dealt with dieting or
pregnancy were included. The final total of texts was 86, though some
of these were compilations of short texts on the same topic or from the
same publication.
The next stage was to write a comprehensive commentary on each
text, using the textual functions listed in the first section of Chapter 1
as the analytical categories, keeping in mind that these functions do
not have one-to-one relationship between form and meaning, and
the analysis is therefore not an automatic process. Each text, there-
fore, was analysed a number of times, using each function as a ‘filter’
through which to see what kinds of structure and strategy were being
employed. The potential effects of foregrounded features were noted in
the commentary, but repetitive features of relevance were also noted for
their potential in naturalising ideology.
Originally, the plan for this research was to divide up the data
according to the stage of life that the texts related to; puberty, sexually
active, pregnancy, menopause and so on. However, I soon found that
Studying the Language of the Female Body: Some Context 25
the analysis done that way would be excessively repetitive, since the
same strategies and features kept appearing across the data. The result
is that instead of organizing this book according to the stages in life
of women, I have organized it according to linguistic and rhetorical
features. This has resulted in less repetition, though, as we shall see;
there is a certain amount of overlap in the effect of some of the features
included here.
2
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical
Strategy
26
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 27
We could, therefore, use the terms sub-genre and type to refer to the data
in this study, though in order to discuss what Fairclough (1995: 171)
calls ‘genre mixing’, we need to be aware of both Stockwell’s terminology
and the Swales and Trask definitions.
The most general observation that can be made about a text’s style
is that some characteristics, both of language and layout, can indicate
that it belongs to a particular sub-genre or text type that the reader
will recognize. The placing of a text in a particular context (such
as a women’s magazine) will narrow down the anticipated range of
text types in the reader’s expectation though, as the analysis in this
volume will show, these expectations can be undermined and played
upon by disguising one text type as another (most obviously advertise-
ment as article) and blurring clear divisions between types (for example
advice and entertainment genres (see Cook 1992). In some contexts,
the reader will know exactly which genre or text type s/he is faced
with at any one time, so that the mixing of styles is playful and enter-
taining. More insidiously, in the data considered here, the confusion
of types may mean that the reader is not consistently aware of the
genre, and is thus less well-prepared for critiquing or resisting any
naturalized ideologies that may be implied. Fairclough (1995: 172)
describes the potential effect on the audience in the following way:
The generic mix I have sketched out above leads to a text with
complex and contradictory meanings, in terms of the identities set
up by/for participants and audience, the relationships between parti-
cipants and between participants and audience and the ‘knowledges’
which are constituted in the text.
Although, as we will see, there are links between text type (or genre)
and rhetorical strategy, they are also independent of each other, as
Halmari (2004: 23) found in relation to a range of rhetorical studies of
political data:
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 29
What emerges from the chapters is, on the one hand, an under-
standing of the sensitivity of the linguistic form to the genre in
question; on the other hand, what also emerges is the – in many
ways surprising – similarity in the linguistic realization that persua-
sion may take across a range of very different genres. As long as the
goal of the language user is to influence, change, and manipulate,
persuasion will find its discourse-pragmatic and lexico-grammatical
realizations, no matter what genre is used as the outlet.
Although we may use the word ‘genre’ quite happily in everyday life,
and feel that we know what it means, it is much harder to pin down
30 Textual Construction of the Female Body
its meaning for academic purposes. Thus, whilst on the one hand we
might wish to refer to the genre of women’s magazines, we may also find
ourselves wishing to refer to readers’ stories, or glossaries (see below) as a
different kind of genre, which cuts across the more reader-oriented labels
such as ‘health magazine’ or ‘angling magazine’. It would be difficult to
order these cross-cutting categorizations in anything like an econom-
ical hierarchy, since there will always be repetition, wherever the first
division is made. Thus, one could divide the world of magazines (to
restrict ourselves to these) into sewing magazines, angling magazines,
health and beauty magazines and so on, and each of them would
then be divided into the types of text, including, for example, letters
and responses; ‘how to’ instructions/advice; advertising and so on.
Conversely, one could identify these latter ‘types’ of text, and then
divide them into those which occur in the different kinds of magazine.
Neither of these priorities is intrinsically superior to the other, though
one may serve a particular purpose better than another.
The solution, as all librarians know, is to postulate a set of character-
istics which can be attached to any text, and these will jointly confer
sub-genre and text-type status in a way that unordered categories do
in many computer-databases that we are familiar with. This ‘keyword’
approach is one that underlies internet search engines, and thus is
becoming a more readily-assimilated sorting mechanism for present-day
readers.
This preamble sets the scene for my use, in the current context, of
the category ‘women’s magazines’ as the sub-genre, and its division into
text types as they occurred in this data. No assumption is being made
about the hierarchical relationship, but since I was interested to invest-
igate the nature of the language in women’s magazines, the ordering of
categories was essentially one of the ‘givens’ of the project. What I hadn’t
expected at the outset was to find that the sub-categorization itself would
prove to be an interesting journey, and that the text types to be found
would be so uniform across the range of women’s magazines that I was
studying.
I had wrongly assumed that there were a certain set of basic text types
that I could predict, including, for example, problem-pages, advertise-
ments and feature articles, and these would be established before, rather
than in response to, the data. In fact, the text types were so much more
interesting than this crude categorization that the analytical method
had to change to incorporate a record of the text type as the first obser-
vation on each data item. The results of these observations are reported
below.
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 31
LUMP ALERT
At the top of my vagina I can feel a slimy ball the size of a 2p
piece with a space in the middle. My tampons must hit it and
it’s bound to get in the way when I have sex. Am I deformed?
Very worried, 16, Cambridge
You’ve located the neck of your cervix – the neck of your womb.
Your womb is the size and shape of an upside-down pear, positioned
at the top of your vagina. The bottom 0.5 cm, the cervix, projects
into the vagina and feels like a nose with a dip in the centre. This
dip is the opening to the womb, and it’s the diameter of a thin
straw, so tampons can’t go through it (although sperm slips in easily
and it’s capable of expanding to fit a baby through). Don’t worry, it
won’t get in the way during sex. It’s good to find out how your body
works, but don’t push fingers or other objects too hard into yourself
in the process.
Whether or not this is a genuine letter is academic, since the tacit agree-
ment between the magazine and the reader is that this is how it is to
be treated. What is more relevant to the question of defining a genre
in this context, is the use of headings above each letter, which is not
universal, but fairly common, and the entirely predictable first and then
second-person narrative to be found in the letter and its answer respect-
ively. With regard to the heading, it is noticeable that in this case, far
from being a useful shorthand ‘headline’ to help readers locate topics
that they might be interested in, it is rather misleading, and also quite
sensational, given that the letter itself does not hint at cancer, the most
likely interpretation of the word ‘lump’ in this context. Not all problem
pages entitle their letters in this way, and some are quite straightforward,
32 Textual Construction of the Female Body
with titles such as ‘Are we bulimic?’ and ‘I weigh so much’ being typical
of this more direct approach.
Of the 24 examples of problem pages or question and answer pages
in the data, most follow the format shown above. There are, however,
some variations, such as a reminder of the identity of the respondent
at the beginning of the answer, as in the examples from Sugar where
the response begins with ‘Sarah says’. This text as we shall see is also
interesting in that it consists of a single letter and answer, on the topic
of breast cancer, and is followed by a ‘how to’ advice section (see below)
on the importance of self-examination and instructions for doing so.
This otherwise straightforward approach is somewhat undermined by
the heading used over the ‘how to’ article on breast examination,
which is It’s good to fondle. Such a sexually suggestive heading belies the
content, and serves no obvious purpose, except possibly to entertain or
simply to attract attention. We shall see, later, that there is considerable
blurring of sub-genres or text types (Fairclough’s genre-mixing) in
these data, and this suggestive title on a health-related piece is just one
symptom of the larger issue.
Another of the variants of the problem page is one where there are a
number of questions posed by the writer of the article on behalf of the
readers. This happens in a question and answer piece themed around
the topic of periods from Fresh, a teenage magazine. The questions are in
the first person, such as ‘When will I start?’ and ‘What kind of protection
should I use?’, and the answers read very much like the answers in a
conventional problem page, as they are written in the second person
and could be interpreted as written either for a single correspondent or
for the general reader:
Anything you normally do, you can do during your period. You can
even go swimming if you are wearing a tampon.
weeks 0–4
For the last six months I’ve been getting ready to conceive, following
my GP’s advice on diet and exercise, and we’ve been trying for about
three months now. I can’t wait to be pregnant.
swimming is one of the best forms of exercise for Mel (and pregnant
women in general) because the water makes her weightless.
The consistency of narrative style in this text makes for some oddly
uncomfortable reading in which the reader knows that points are
aimed at her, but they are narrated apparently all for Mel’s benefit. This
kind of genre-merging is perhaps less successful than a straightforward
juxtaposition of a range of genres, such as where an advice-giving
feature article incorporates text boxes containing small reader’s stories
relating to the topic. This happens in a text from Pregnancy and Birth
which discusses the issues surrounding the size of an embryo, and
gives examples of people who had small or large embryos. A similar
technique is used in an article from Woman which discusses infertility
problems and pregnancy complications, and uses text boxes to tell
readers’ stories – all conspicuously about people who successfully
conceived and bore a child in the end.
One of the stranger stories told in the pregnancy texts (Pregnancy and
Birth) is the celebrity newsreader Katie Derham’s story of her pregnancy.
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 37
This is written in the third person, but with a lot of direct speech and
free direct speech too, so that the result is a ‘voice’ that mixes Katie
Derham with the writer. The point of stories like this in pregnancy texts
is similar to celebrity stories elsewhere – to give readers a role model who
can provide answers to the questions that arise, in this case in relation
to how to deal with pregnancy in the context of a busy professional life.
The result is extracts like the following:
She’s selected her maternity wear with care – a few pieces from Nine
over Twelve that she’ll get maximum wear from until the baby’s born.
The caterpillar walk was really lovely and sensual. But then he started
sucking my toes and I just couldn’t stop myself from thinking ‘Oh
my God, my size sevens are in Mike’s mouth!’ I’m afraid it took me
quite a while to get back in the mood after that experience.
When Diane Dowling walked down the aisle on her wedding day,
she wore a long white gown, just as she’d always dreamed she would.
Unfortunately, she didn’t quite fit the fairytale princess figure of her
childhood fantasies. She couldn’t. Not in a size 24 wedding dress.
Although only 25 years old, Diane was 18st and looked old and
matronly. Her vast double chin protruded beneath her big, moon-
shaped face, the tops of her arms spread massively beneath short
sleeves.
Although people who lose large quantities of weight may indeed feel
disgusted with their earlier selves, it is hard to imagine them describing
their overweight version in quite such vivid terms as this. It is therefore
a convenience to use the impersonal narrator to carry out this function,
and to use direct speech to give the protagonist a voice. The prurience
of these extreme stories of weight loss is partly achieved by the graphic
description of the excess weight, and this is absent in the more solution-
oriented articles, such as a text from Best Diet Now which has the stories
of six successful slimmers in first-person narratives, and with no graphic
description:
Amy took herself to a local Meeting and, for the first time in years,
got on the scales.
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 39
Factual articles
The use of straightforward feature articles to discuss issues of the female
body is reasonably well-represented in the data, though they tend to
be short and are often restricted to the ‘expert opinion’ in a text box,
or as a comment on a personal story. They deal with a range of topics
including breast cancer, ectopic pregnancy, pregnancy itself, surgery,
exercise, clothes and looking young. Not many of these more conven-
tional articles occur in the teenage magazines.
Such articles, then, tend to be less significant in terms of giving advice
than many of the other text types that we have already met, and others
which follow, in particular those that use either instructions and step-by-
step advice or divide the advice they are giving into sections according
to the kind of woman they relate to, the time scale that they refer to,
or even, and this is quite common, the body part they are focussing on.
The reason for the lack of long, textually dense, factual articles can only
be surmised, but is again probably related to the expectation that the
attention span of readers for this kind of article is limited.
Diary-style articles
We have already noted that some of the readers’ stories may overlap with
a diary-style presentation, but this also seems to be a text type that occurs
independently. There are some bodily topics that lend themselves to
this kind of presentation, most obviously the menstrual cycle, and preg-
nancy, though there are also some texts which treat sex in this way. In
this data, one text from More is a day-by-day guide to ‘out-of-this-world
orgasms’, and is therefore broadly-speaking in a diary format, though
it also divides each day into a number of steps, and thus crosses into
another text type which is considered below. In this case, the text is in
the second person, and since it is advice-based, its style is also marked
by a number of imperatives:
40 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Step two: exercise your bits. If you can’t ‘grip’ his penis with your
vaginal muscles during sex, then your internal vaginal muscles are
too flabby!
We will consider other aspects of this text later, including the presuppos-
ition that the reader is and wishes to be pregnant, and that it took a long
time to achieve this state. For now, let us just observe the norms of a
fairly standard text type, and note that in this particular case it is supple-
mented by a set of question-and-answer boxes, answering imagined
concerns, such as ‘Should I avoid hot baths now I’m pregnant?’.
The variation in the style of these diaries depends on their focus.
Texts in Our Baby and Bliss are explicitly directed at the reader, the latter
having a circular-shaped ‘diary’ of the menstrual cycle, which sets out
the different stages in each month with sentences such as ‘The days
when you bleed are called menstruation’. There are other diary-style
texts, such as one from Our Baby, which chart the first-person diary of a
particular woman, in this case Jayne:
Weeks 9–12
I’m a bit fed up about things but I don’t want to blame my hormones –
not all moods should be blamed on pregnancy! I’m finding it hard to
concentrate on my studies to be a hypnotherapist, plus I’m nauseous.
Here, as in the readers’ stories, the link to the reader is implicit, and is
based upon the rhetorical strategy of the role model (see below p. 46 f ).
The main stylistic feature of such advice is, of course, the imperative
verb aimed at the reader, as we see from the following extract from
text from Women’s Health, recommending an exercise regime for after
pregnancy:
Buttock Squeeze
Breathe in, then out, lifting your hips off the floor slightly. Contract
your abdominals and your pelvic floor muscles, then squeeze your
buttocks. Hold for five seconds, release and relax. Build up to eight
repetitions.
There is some advice that seems less likely to attract this kind of direct
imperative approach. This is mainly in relation to sexual activity, where
the second-person address mode is usually mixed with third-person
reporting of trials of the advice given. This happens in texts from Shine
and Minx, both concerning sex tips. Though the heading of one is an
imperative, Turn your body into a playground, much of the article is either
general (The feet have a meridian line that runs through them) or third-
person (When I started sucking Rachel’s toe, she stopped relaxing) and very
few imperatives are included (Get your partner to try a caterpillar walk
with his fingers working down the sole of the foot, taking little bites as he
progresses).
Not all sexual advice articles are as reluctant to be directive as this,
however. Cosmopolitan, for example, advises the reader to give sex as a
present, and follows up the general advice with very specific instructions:
When he can’t hold on for much longer, allow him inside you then
slowly squeeze your pelvic muscles.
Compared with the implicit advice to follow the example of role models,
these articles are very straightforward in recognizing that the (typical)
reader is looking for advice on particular subjects.
Categories of women
Slightly more unexpected, perhaps, than sections by time or by activity,
are those which are divided according to categories of women – normally
by bodily shape, but sometimes also by star-sign or even in one case
by overeating style in a text (Woman’s Own) which asks What type of
overeater are you? and then names seven categories, including comfort
eater, habit eater and problem binge eater, alongside a list of signs that
will allow you to recognize your category and ‘Self Help’ tips for
each case.
Another text from Woman concerns health and fitness, and uses
individuals in different age groups to exemplify the issues and solu-
tions that present to that particular decade. Each age is introduced in a
general way:
30s
Juggling family life and a career is the biggest stress for women during
this decade. Or you may hear your biological clock ticking louder and
louder and wonder if Mr Right will ever come along. If you’re in a
rut, now’s the time to make healthy, positive changes in your life.
The specific advice under each heading is filtered through the experi-
ences of a woman who fits that age group.
The most frequent categorization by type of woman is to be found in
the teenage magazines, where there are exercises advised according to
star sign (Bliss), advice about bra styles according to breast shape and
size (Mizz) and implicit advice on breast satisfaction from two different
readers (Bliss), which begins:
Whether you’re big, small, pointy, saggy or pert, chances are you
wish your boobs were different.
You are Long and slim, with narrow hips, a small bust and long legs.
Star with your shape Gwyneth Paltrow.
Wear it Make the most of the gingham prints, which are sooo trendy
this season.
Advice in sections
In addition to dividing up advice according to reader-type, there are
many articles, on all topics, which divide the advice that is being given
according to body parts. Thus, as well as beauty advice by body part there
are a number of texts giving advice about sex which are organized into
body-part sections. These include a text from Body Beautiful which has
an emphasis on sex as exercise, and advises on the top five calorie-burning
positions as well as proposing the best sexual positions for enhancing
the look of bodily features:
DOGGY STYLE
BEST FOR: Big bums
With the added bonus that all men love this position, it makes even
the largest of bottoms look pretty attractive.
Feeling a bit baggy in the upper arm area? Yeah, yeah we all know
exercise is the solution, but we want results and we want them now!
Glossaries
Diary-style texts and many other health-related articles about the female
body have an overt pedagogical aim, as I have noted earlier, though
this may be mixed with the aim of entertaining. Perhaps the clearest
example of this desire to teach is the glossary text type, which tends
to occur most often where there is a plethora of technical terms (for
example in relation to pregnancy), but also in teenage magazines where
there is an assumption that some readers will not know the meaning
of both technical and also more everyday words. One text from Bliss,
for example, as well as having the diary of the menstrual cycle, also has
a glossary covering toxic-shock syndrome and pre-menstrual syndrome
as well as tampons. Texts from Our Baby and Pregnancy and Birth explain
terms relating to labour and pregnancy respectively, in the first case in
a column alongside the readers’ stories, called Explaining the jargon and
in the second case on the photo of a clipboard alongside the description
of an ante-natal clinic visit, and headed ‘Breaking the codes’.
What this apparent pedagogy confirms ideologically is that knowledge
is power; that others (such as medical staff) have authority and thus
power over us and that the magazine is on the side of the underclass,
that is the reader. That this ideologically strong effect may be present
does not necessarily negate any informational content that is actually
given, and which may indeed help some readers to negotiate ante-natal
clinics, doctors’ surgeries or slimming regimes.
Advertising
The other main genre that is found throughout these magazines is
the advertisement. We will see in the next section that there is no
clear boundary between advertisements and other text types, but here
we will simply establish the fact that magazines, being dependent
on the income they produce, normally include a large number of
them. The few to be mentioned here are those advertising tampons
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 45
Note that we have no evidence that the writer is actually a man in this
case, and there can be considerable doubt about the identity of authors
in this kind of material. However, the implied author is indeed a man
here, and this is the information on which the reader will base her
reactions to the text.
Quizzes2
The final text type to mention here is the quiz, which is perhaps the
stereotypical genre from the young-adult magazines for women, such as
Cosmopolitan. However, there has either been a change in the market in
relation to quizzes, or perhaps it is more the case that the topics I am
interested in, relating to the body and bodily perceptions, do not lend
themselves so readily to the quiz format, which is normally concerned
with attitudes. The two quizzes that do occur in the data relate to sex
(Slimmer Magazine) and fitness (Woman’s Own) respectively. Here is a
short extract from the former, to demonstrate:
46 Textual Construction of the Female Body
This illustrates the ideological issue with quizzes, which is that they are
constructed around ‘correct’ answers, though of course they sometimes
soften this with intermediate positions, where you can find yourself in
the middle of a range between right and wrong. We will see a great deal
more about correctness in the chapters that follow, but this structural
feature of the quiz genre helps to naturalize such ideas.
Blurring of categories
The discussion of sub-genres and text types in the previous section has
referred more than once to the fact that these category boundaries are
not absolute, indeed that there are many texts in this data which either
combine two or more text types or blend the features of text types,
producing a hybrid text type. This is usually simply a question of ringing
the changes, often also a way to make the potentially dry information-
transfer a bit more interesting by breaking it down into manageable
chunks or using different styles and approaches to get the same message
across. Prototype theory from Katz and Postal (1964) was referred to
in Chapter 1 as a way of avoiding the pitfalls of strict categories in
describing the perceptions of female bodies as influenced by texts like
the current data. Here, we may again invoke the prototype as a model
of the related text types that appear to be distinct in their most central
examples, but which overlap and merge at the boundary.
In this section we will consider a slightly more insidious and question-
able practice, where the boundaries between informational text types
are blurred with those of advertisements, and we find that the clarity of
function that we might wish for begins to be clouded.
The cases of advertising being blended with the problem page format
seem to occur mainly in the teenage magazines, and normally in
conjunction with tampon advertising. One text from Sugar has a
problem page relating to periods and also a diary-style description of
the menstrual cycle. In the centre of the problem page is a photo of a
Tampax box, and the further information section refers to the Tampax
Consumer Careline. At first glance, this page would not look like an
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 47
There’s also The Body Code, by Jay Cooper and Kathryn Lance (Piatkus
Books, £9.99) – a new age eating plan which divides dieters into four
groups: warriors, nurturers, communicators and visionaries.
Rhetorical strategies
The ten rhetorical strategies identified here are all those recognized in
the data and it was interesting to find how many of them were repeated
in different contexts, and relating to different topics. The division of
this chapter into the previous section on text types and this section on
rhetorical strategies raises the question of how these differ, and to what
extent the choice of text type is in itself a rhetorical choice. Thus, the
blended genre categories in particular could be said to have a rhetorical
aim in making the reader feel that they are being given neutral informa-
tion, when in fact they are having a product-name reinforced. I will refer
to such overlaps where relevant in the sections below, but there does
seem to me to be a qualitative difference in principle at least between
texts which are if not overtly, at least intentionally persuasive, and the
choice of text type or other features which may have the effect of natur-
alizing an ideology, though this effect may of course be an unconscious
result of the writer’s own cultural assumptions.
Pseudo-science
This strategy involves the use of scientific terminology and
authoritative-sounding experts to make the product or process appear
up-to-date and technically well-grounded. It is not as common in the
data as one might have expected given its ubiquitous presence in TV
advertising, particularly in relation to household products and electrical
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 49
goods. One text from Slimmer Magazine discusses ‘Feminine Foods’ and
gestures towards a scientific rationale for its assertions about gendered
eating habits:
The way that men and women vary in their food choices has recently
been closely examined by Katherin O’Doherty Jensen, Assistant
Professor of Sociology at Copenhagen University.
During the operation, a narrow tube is inserted through a tiny cut and
used to vacuum the fat layer deep under the skin This technique
is known as tumescent or wet liposuction
For whatever reason, though, there is generally very little of this kind
of rhetorical appeal to the more rational side of the reader. We can
speculate about the reasons, which may include the fact that the topics
relating to women’s bodies are too personal to the reader for a cold, tech-
nical, approach to be appealing. It is certainly interesting that the preg-
nancy texts, though they often explain all the ‘jargon’, do not emphasize
the technical side of the processes involved, and usually minimize the
detail, as in this text from Our Baby:
Certain tests check for birth defects. Most take place at 16–20 weeks;
a few hospitals offer a nuchal scan at 11–13 weeks, which checks for
Down’s syndrome.
Unlike in the cosmetic surgery texts, then, the pregnancy texts, on the
whole, do not give a detailed, some would say graphic, description of
what actually happens. The mystification of all such procedures under
the term ‘test’ is quite a surprising finding within a context of apparent
support for information and education of pregnant women. The ambi-
valence that these texts seem to feel towards women readers reflects the
tension between first and second-wave feminisms, where the treatment
of women as rational beings with the same mind–body split as men is in
conflict with the revaluing of intrinsically female experiences, including
the bodily experiences of menstruation and childbirth.
The result, in texts like these, is often a rather unhappy combination
of appearing to be scientific and full of information, but not really
50 Textual Construction of the Female Body
going into the kind of detail that would help, for example, a reader who
needs to take decisions about which tests to have. For these decisions,
the health services normally have specific leaflets and pamphlets, so it
leaves the magazine articles really only performing an orientation task,
in which the information content is quite low.
Fictionalized heroines
Some readers’ stories frame the person at the centre of the tale as
a fictionalized heroine, using the style and narratorial techniques of
fairytales or horror stories. One text from Bliss, for example, has sections
dealing with different consequences of puberty, and each section has a
sub-heading The scenario, which explicitly sets it up as the setting of a
horror movie:
You’re minding your own business sitting on the loo, when you
suddenly spot something in your knickers. It’s alien stuff – whitish
or yellowish gunk, almost like a gel.
That sense of the abject as both the alien other who threatens the
corporeal and psychic boundaries of the embodied self, and as an
intrinsic, but unstable, part of the self resonates with the widespread
cultural unease with bodily, and especially female bodily, fluids. In
the effort to secure the ‘clean and proper’ male body, the body that is
sealed and self-sufficient, it is women who are marked by the capacity
of that which leaks from the body – menstrual blood is the best
exemplar – to defile and contaminate. (Price and Shildrick 1999: 7)
They point out the cultural unease with which women’s bodily functions
are viewed, and though the article quoted does try to give girls some
strategies for dealing with the ‘horrors’ of the body, the opportunity
to challenge this view of them is not taken up, indeed the horror is
emphasized, and thus confirmed.
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 51
Happy endings
There is a widespread tendency for all stories in the data, whatever the
topic, to have happy endings. This is not surprising, as magazines which
make the readers feel upbeat about their lives are more likely to sell.
An example of many from the slimming and fitness-related texts is an
article from Slimmer Magazine which tells the story of Lynne Robinson,
the UK face of Pilates:
Other slimming texts also tell happy stories, and in some cases, they
include a direct exhortation to the reader not to give up. One reader’s
slimming success story from WeightWatchers magazine does just this, in
the words of the slimmer herself:
Real women
The use of ‘real’ women, as opposed to celebrities with impossibly
perfect bodies for example, is one of the strategies used to persuade
the reader that the magazine/article is down-to-earth and realistic in its
view of the ideal woman. This technique has been used more frequently
recently, even by advertisers, but in the women’s magazine it is
not new.
One of the techniques related to this strategy is to choose women
with different extremes, such as large/small breasts (Bliss) or who have
a range of different experiences in relation to labour (Our Baby) or who
are willing to tell their own story in detail, as an example of one possible
scenario for the reader to experience vicariously. This happens in an
extreme form in Our Baby where a home birth is recorded photograph-
ically as well as in a commentary:
Midwife Marlene (right) arrives soon after Claudia goes into labour.
Claudia, who’s 31, can’t believe how much stuff Marlene’s brought,
especially as she’s planning to give birth without medical pain relief.
But a midwife has to be prepared for all eventualities.
Exemplary women
Related to, and sometimes the same as, real women, are the exem-
plary women who are held up as an example in a slightly more explicit
way. The ancient Christian practice of setting up saints and other good
women as ‘exemplary women’, which is shared by other world religions
(see Clancy-Smith 2006) seems to happen quite regularly in the context
of these magazines, emphasizing the importance of women behaving
virtuously in relation to their bodies. Whilst this virtue may no longer
emphasize chastity as the highest form of female virtue, there are never-
theless aspects of the current data which approximate to this kind of
pressure. The new orthodoxy is the responsibility we each have to look
after our bodies. Whilst not a religious message in itself, the rhetor-
ical stance is not dissimilar to the Christian notion of stewardship,
which is normally related in the Christian context to the idea of looking
after a God-given Earth, but also encompasses the personal body. This
includes, in the current data, dieting, sexual health, proper behaviour
in pregnancy to ensure health and a return to the perfect body shape
afterwards, the importance of making the most, visually, of the body
you have, the use of technology (for example surgery) to enhance your
natural features, and the responsibility on us to exercise for health and
attractiveness.
One kind of exemplary woman, despite what we might know about
their flaws, is the celebrity, and Body Beautiful discusses the relative
merits of those stars, like Pamela Anderson, who have:
However, the following extract from the same text indicates that the
celebrities are criticized for being subtle too:
She said that those stars who had obviously had it done and looked
better for it, but wouldn’t admit to going under the knife, were being
dishonest. They were encouraging other women to have unrealistic
expectations about how they themselves could look naturally, and
to believe that they should look as good as the stars without having
the surgical help.
54 Textual Construction of the Female Body
These exemplary women, then, are not blamed for the amount of surgery
they have, nor for wanting to look younger than their years, but for not
being open about how they achieved this effect. The example that the
commentator wishes them to make, apparently, is to praise the effects
of cosmetic surgery.
Another kind of exemplary woman is based on the real woman of
the last section. Most of these are women who are presented as a good
example of how to react to different bodily issues. In the case of an
article in Woman it is the importance of keeping your body fit and
healthy at different stages of life:
I’m still opting for a vaginal birth if possible, but I’m well aware that
how the baby comes into the world is less important than his or her
safety and health.
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 55
Puncturing myths
One rhetorical strategy in this data appears to be the setting-up of myths
that are presupposed to be popularly believed, so that the article can
knock them down. This is sometimes paired with a set of facts that are
questioned, but turn out not to be myths after all. The first example in
this data comes from the teenage magazines, where part of a text from
Bliss gives the lie to myths about the menstrual cycle:
Myth 1
You can’t get pregnant when you’ve got your period
Busted: A sperm can live inside you for days, which means it may
still be alive in your womb when you start ovulating. And what does
egg + sperm equal? Er, a baby.
Notice that the so-called ‘fact’ is not a scientific one in the usual sense
that the mind is working less-well chemically, but relates to the obses-
sion which dieters can build up. Notice that the rather vague reference
to studies gives no clue as to what kind of research we are talking about.
The message of this paragraph is ironic in the context of an article on
dieting in a special issue of Woman’s Own on dieting. It contrasts inter-
estingly with the next myth, which is not letting the reader off the hook
as regards obesity. The message, presumably an implicature, is that obese
people should diet, though they can expect their brain function to be
less effective as a result.
Sermon-style
Whilst we may recognize a more straightforward preaching style as being
a kind of sermonizing rhetoric which tells the reader directly what she
should or should not do, there are only two texts in this data that can
be characterized as having something of the sermon about them. They
are both claimed to be written by men. The first text (Jump) is a diatribe
against the dressing up of young girls in a sexually enticing fashion.
On the surface, it appeals to many of the ideas that sensible adults
would concur with, such as the notion that it is important to give girls a
chance to be children before putting them under pressure to look sexually
attractive, and advises the reader to develop other attributes instead:
We will encounter this text again later, but here it is just worth noting
that the preaching is not overt here, but is achieved by the technique
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 57
The diet isn’t much fun it must be said, but it is only for two weeks
and if you are not prepared to make small sacrifices for your child’s
well being then maybe you should consider if you are ready to become
a parent.
Damascene conversions
Continuing on the religious, particularly Christian, theme, there is a
common rhetorical strategy which is familiar to many as the ‘sinner
58 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Both teenage girls in a typical text from Bliss, for example, are
described as having been unhappy with their breasts at an earlier stage,
and both now claim to be happy:
Whilst the reason for this change is not clear here, the change of heart
is probably the point of the story as an example to other teenagers who
are going through the earlier phase of being dissatisfied. The slimming
texts tend to have a clearer conversion moment. Here are two examples,
from Slimmer Magazine, and Woman’s Own respectively:
Amy took herself off to a local Meeting and, for the first time in
years, got on the scales: ‘I was dreading it. The lady who helps out
said to me in a very quiet voice, “You’re 20 ½ stone” and I thought,
Genre, Text Type and Rhetorical Strategy 59
Oh God, that’s even worse than I thought! But then I thought, That’s
the worst bit over and you’ve taken the first step.’
Summary
Fairclough’s notion of genre-mixing, a term he used to describe televi-
sion interviews and debates, turns out to be useful here to describe the
patchwork combinations of text types that these texts seem to favour.
There may, however, be a justification for talking in terms of genre-
blending where there is no clear dividing line between two or more
genres, but rather a merging of their features. This, still more than
the confusion of role predicted by Fairclough, may confuse or mislead
the unwary reader, most particularly where advertising is slipped into
the structure of another genre, or wears the clothes of a different genre.
As for rhetorical strategies, whilst these texts are not obviously using
classical rhetorical figures, they nevertheless seem to exploit at times
the logos or appeal to the intellect (for example in puncturing myths)
and at others the appeal to the pathos or emotions (for example in
the emotional appeal of readers’ stories). Perhaps the most interesting,
because the most clearly ideologically-loaded, are the appeals to ethos,
or the sense of correctness or morality. Many of the texts of different
genres appear to construct a sense of the ‘right’ thing to do, whether
it is in relation to what to eat in pregnancy or how to deal with being
overweight.
The mildly religious connotations of the exemplary women, the
sermon-style and the idea of steps towards a goal are echoed in many of
the slimming stories, particularly where they are a covert advertisement
for a particular regime or exercise class. One text from WeightWatchers
magazine, for example, uses the terms Meeting, Programme and Leader
as proper nouns, and uses Goal without a determiner, which is another
60 Textual Construction of the Female Body
This chapter takes as its theme two related textual processes which both
have the potential to cast the topics they describe in specific ideological
terms. Whilst the impetus for these analyses was the grammatical process
of nominalization, we will see that very similar analyses can be made
of nominals that are not derived from verbs. The term nominalization
itself refers to the morphological derivation of a noun from a verb. These
would include, for example, introduction, sleeping and significance from
the verbs introduce, sleep and signify as in:
Notice that as well as being explicit, this re-writing has also shown up
the fact that we sometimes use nominalizations for general reference, as
in the second sentence here. Once we try to undo the nominalization it
turns out that we do not have a clear grammatical Subject for the verb
61
62 Textual Construction of the Female Body
sleeping. What early accounts of CDA realized was that this perfectly
useful grammatical process, whereby the verb changes into a noun and
various other participants may be left unmentioned for good reason
(such as not knowing their identity) may also be used for less straight-
forward processes, including hiding the identity of participants, reifying
the process and creating existential presuppositions. Fairclough (1989)
for example, glosses nominalization as:
He also notes (Fairclough 1989: 124) that references to time (that is,
tense) get lost in nominalized versions of events and processes, and that
modality and agency are lacking in addition.
One of the clearest statements of the potential of nominalization
comes from Fowler (1991: 80):
Fowler points out that the loss of tense, modality and agency is only
one part of the power of nominalization. The other, reification, refers
to the creation of existential presuppositions. Thus, the use of a nomin-
alization, confirmation in the sentence ‘The confirmation that we are at
war is a real blow to anti-war campaigners’ focuses not on the process of
the announcement, but on the outcome. This has the effect of making
the confirmation more like an entity and less like a process, and it is also
presupposed to exist, as we can see by the fact that it stays constant in
the negated version: ‘The confirmation that we are at war is not a real
blow to anti-war campaigners’. This reification is not, in fact, limited to
grammatical nominalizations, but is also true of all definite and some
indefinite noun phrases, particularly where there is other modification
in the form of adjectives or subordinate clauses:
Naming and Describing 63
The disastrous outcome of the trial will be felt for years to come.
This unique opportunity to see the world is available to all soldiers.
The presuppositions – that the trial was indeed disastrous and that there
is a unique opportunity to see the world – are not in question here.
I would propose, therefore, that the analysis of nominals in general
is one of the more useful tools for critical discourse analysts, and this
chapter takes such a position as its starting point. Naming is one of the
major ways of incorporating ideologies into texts and because the modi-
fication of head nouns is part of that naming process, I have decided
to include ‘describing’ in this chapter as a related textual constructor of
meaning.
these areas of their body just as they do about their knees, faces and
hands.
One of the tasks of the analysis, then, was to establish the naming
habits of women’s magazines in relation to all parts of the female body,
both sexual and non-sexual, given that the topics of many of the articles
and advice columns is the body, and particularly its sexual attractive-
ness and other functions (such as reproduction). There was no particular
expectation that the magazines would do other than reflect and rein-
force the usage of ‘polite’ society, but the range and detail of the body-
part naming, particularly in relation to descriptors, such as adjectives,
was revealing.
The other main aspect of naming and describing that was investig-
ated here was the construction of women, mainly as readers, but also
as professionals and advisors, and the relationship that such women
appear to be constructed as having to their bodies and bodily processes.
The identification of people by body parts, and the use of evaluative
adjectives in relation to women and their bodies are of particular interest
in this regard. Whilst the analysis is not quantitative, there are some
features of language in the data that one might wish to describe as over-
whelmingly present, and in these cases one might argue that there is
the potential at least for a very strong ideological influence over readers’
perceptions of women’s bodies.
As we saw in Chapter 1, there are no simple one-to-one relation-
ships between textual features and the stylistic functions that we are
concerned with in this analysis. However, there are certain features
that most obviously line up with each of the functions, and in the
case of naming and describing, the obvious textual features relate to
nouns, noun phrases and related adjectival modifications of nouns.
Whilst this narrows the field a little, for example by enabling us
to ignore verbs for the time being, it nevertheless leaves open a
large number of considerations relating to nominal and adjectival
constructions. These potentially include everything from the lexical
semantic structure of the texts, in terms of lexical fields or use of
hyponyms, for example, to the choice of euphemistic lexemes or
the premodification of head nouns by definite articles or possessive
adjectives.
The texts which form the data of this study were scrutinized for
the manner of naming body parts and processes, the manner of
naming women and the kinds of descriptions attached to these names.
The checklist of textual features which were considered included the
66 Textual Construction of the Female Body
What emerged from this particular analysis of the data was a remark-
able set of consistent habits of both labelling and describing women
and their bodies, though some of the features investigated were not as
fruitful as others. For example, though the study of lexical fields can
be of great significance in relation to the style of a poem or poems,
the nature of the texts in the current data is such that the occur-
rence of certain lexical fields (of body parts, processes, and others)
is firstly not surprising, and secondly of little significance in stylistic
terms. What turned out to be much more interesting in this data is the
precise choice of terms from the relevant lexical fields, and the implic-
ations that these choices may have for the reader’s perceptions of the
female body.
People
It is no surprise, perhaps, that many of the texts address the reader
directly using the second-person pronoun, you, and they just as often
indicate that the referent of the pronoun is female:
Naming and Describing 67
Find out what’s happening to you and your baby (Our Baby)
Turn your body into a playground (with the highly underrated art of
foreplay) (Shine)
Identify the reasons why you can’t say no to food and you’re more
likely to succeed with your diet (Woman’s Own)
Use your fingertips gently to ease the area around the kneecap. (Body
Beautiful)
Buy yourself a pocket-sized notebook and each day write down
(Woman’s Own)
There will, of course, be readers of these texts who do not fit into the
construction of very particular kinds of women, and this will include
women who are not pregnant/overweight/sexually active/heterosexual
as well as male readers. However, I would hypothesize that there is
a particular reader-position of empathy which female readers tend to
adopt in relation to their magazines and which would be less likely in
the case of male readers.
One text from Bliss in the teenage data, consists of a set of exercises –
a ‘workout’ – according to the star sign of the reader:
The clothes advice is all about how to ameliorate the look of a flawed
body and the advice of only one or two of the sections may be relevant
to a particular reader, though as we saw in Chapter 2, readers tend to
read all sections and imagine themselves to have the relevant body type.
The pronoun is therefore of shifting reference here too, and the reader
of such magazines will become accustomed to decoding the pronoun
reference in such cases as they are very frequent.
A slightly different case holds for the many texts that take the form
of some kind of question and answer, such as problem pages. In these
cases there may be an actual referent of the pronoun, that is the letter-
writer or assumed questioner (they are not always given an identity).
But the referent of the second-person pronoun in the answers slides
between the individual addressee, and the wider group of addressees in
the readership:
I would suggest that there is contextual evidence here that the first and
second occurrences of you refer to the letter-writer, and that the third
one refers to ‘people’ or ‘one’, which may be taken as being addressed
to the wider readership. These contextual clues include the use of This
at the beginning, which has definite reference (to a particular lump) and
the main clause introducing the second sentence: I know. This indicates
that the advisor is aware of the feelings of someone, and it is likely to
be someone specific, rather than the readers in general. The final use of
you is in a generic sentence introduced by It’s better and the phrase a
major worry is used, rather than a particular concern about a lump in the
breast, leaving the possibility open that other worries might also require
the same kind of advice.
A similar move takes place in another answer to a teenage letter writer:
First things first hun, you’re completely normal. It’s very common
for bleeding to be irregular when you start your periods. It can take
months for your body to settle down If you’re still worried then pop
along to your GP. And don’t be embarrassed, after all, all us girls have
‘em! (Mizz)
Naming and Describing 69
All bodies are beautiful, so they’re nice to look at (especially girls ones,
less messy and no dangly bits). In addition, we normally cover our
bodies up with clothes, so it makes it kinda weird when we see them
naked, that why it makes us feel a bit funny inside sometimes. (Mizz)
We will return to this text a number of times, as it is one of the very few
in the data which deals with sexuality. Here, we need only note that the
advisor uses the first-person plural pronouns, we and us, to generalize
about people, and thus to include the letter-writer as well as herself and
the readers in the generalizations. The function of this usage is to make
the letter-writer feel ‘normal’. We will return to questions of normality
below.
Whilst the naming of individuals and groups of people is not, in
itself, necessarily constructing the female body in particular ways, it is
noticeable that the population of these texts, apart from the addressee
(usually the readership in general) is made up of allies (your mum,
my closest friends, my parents), experts (expert, your GP, midwives, their
plastic surgeons), exemplary women (celebrities, readers and others who
do the ‘right’ thing) and the ‘other’, that is men (guys, boys, he, my
husband).
The ideology of women being to some extent helpless victims of their
bodies is partly supported by these categories of people surrounding the
subjects of the texts, despite the many exhortations to take action. The
women at the centre of the texts, whether real or generalized, famous
70 Textual Construction of the Female Body
And finally, there are a number of texts in the data which divide subjects
into various ‘other’ categories, whilst simultaneously trying to assert
their similarity to us women:
The hot stars; A-list celebrities; the stars; the women who seem to
naturally look good; a heavyweight star; actress, wife and mother
Cher.
These two letters, and the answers given, use the nominal form of
lesbian (indicated by the definite article, a), though the second one has
a heading which uses the adjective gay: Am I gay? It is clearly the case
that the use of a nominal form indicates a characteristic which is repres-
ented as more permanent and intrinsic to the person than the adjective.
Thus, to call someone ‘Jewish’ is potentially less aggressive than to call
them a ‘Jew’. Whilst the permanence and intrinsic nature of Jewish-
ness is not in question, the effect of using a label (that is, a noun) is
more stark and likely to sound like a categorization than the use of
an adjective, which simply notes a particular characteristic. Similarly,
to use the noun, a lesbian, rather than the adjective, is to make clear
that there are two kinds of people; those who are, and those who aren’t
lesbians, rather than, as some might prefer to argue, a heterosexual-to-
lesbian continuum (Rich 1993), or if not a continuum then at least more
categories of female sexuality than two. The answers to these letters,
though willing to concede that some people might indeed be in the
‘other’ category, lesbian, nevertheless try their best to reassure the letter-
writers that they are probably not ‘in’ that category (it doesn’t mean you’re
a lesbian).
The reinforcement of strict categories of sexuality here is one of the
byproducts of what is intended to be a reassuring answer. By contrast,
the one text in the data which deals with bulimia, uses the adjectival
form, rather than a noun:
Step onto right leg and kick left foot across in front. (Diet and Fitness)
Shiny tights can turn large calves into two pork sausages! (Body
Beautiful)
Girls are often unaware of the changes in their sex organs because
most of them are inside their body
It is easy for a boy to tell when his sex organs are developing because
they increase visibly in size.
This distinction between the accessibility of the male sex organs and
the relative inaccessibility – and thus mystery – surrounding the female
organs remains implicit in much of the data under consideration here.
As we shall see in the sections that follow, the distinction is reflected
in the vocabulary and structure used in naming the female body parts
in this data, with the reproductive organs (inside) being treated differ-
ently to the outer body parts, including those which provide sexual
attractiveness.
Once we start considering the sexual or reproductive body parts of
women, the vocabulary of English begins to be deficient, as discussed
above, and these texts find themselves using a range of connotative
forms which are, at one extreme, scientific or medical, and at the other
very informal, verging on the taboo. There are also occasions when the
writers resort to euphemism as a way out of the problem of what to call
things.
The use of scientific or technical jargon is found particularly in rela-
tion to the inner body parts, mostly because there is no alternative
available, these parts having been largely ignored (or not known about)
over the centuries, and there being no neutral equivalent. Note that
this is not a problem with all internal organs, as testified by the words
kidney, heart, lungs, liver and so on. The internal sexual organs of the
female, however, seem not to have developed a detailed everyday vocab-
ulary, with the exception of the word womb. The texts dealing with these
74 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Your fertilised egg (the zygote) is wafted down the Fallopian tube. It
reaches the uterus around five days later (Our Baby)
At the top of my vagina I can feel a slimy ball the size of a 2p piece
with a space in the middle You’ve located your cervix – the neck
of your womb. (Bliss)
Womb – the size and shape of an upside-down pear. (Bliss)
The opening to the womb, the diameter of a thin straw. (Bliss)
Girls have an orgasm by having their clitoris (tiny, pea-shaped knob of
flesh at the top of the inner vaginal lips), stimulated. (Bliss)
Your cervix is about the same size as a pin. (Bliss)
Naming and Describing 75
I noticed a lump under the centre of my nipple. It’s about the size of
a 2p coin (Sugar)
The embryo now measures about half the length of a grain of rice.
(Our Baby)
And your baby now measures around 13 cm (5in) – about the length
of a pen. (Our Baby)
And your baby weighs 500 g (17 oz, about half the weight of a tin of
beans). (Our Baby)
She’s the size of an envelope (21 cm or 8.2 in long). (Our Baby)
‘My privates’ are smelly I’ve noticed a strong smell coming from
‘down below’. (Woman)
76 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Once upon a time, stretch marks were a taboo issue. If you had them
it was assumed you were a bit of a porker (Looks)
This example aims to puncture the myth that people with cellulite are
necessarily fat, and so it is ‘safe’ to use the uncomplimentary term ‘porker’,
in the knowledge that it will not be taken to be applied to the readers,
even if they have cellulite. One of the potential effects on some readers
is to make them feel that they are in the category of non-fat women,
and to allow them a small glow of satisfaction at not being a porker.
Perhaps the most noticeable vocabulary choice tendency in this data
is the use of informal vocabulary, often in the same context as the
formal and technical, and apparently used to undermine any sense of
being over-serious or too pompous. The result is that the references to
the stomach very often use the terms tum or tummy, and texts generally
use bum in preference to the only slightly more formal buttocks:
It is unusual to find anything more taboo than this, though there is one
reference in the data to a huge arse (Body Beautiful).
The references to more obviously sexual body parts than the stomach
or bottom, however, tend to vary a little more, as we have seen above,
with euphemism often being the only alternative to the formal or tech-
nical. The possible exception is the range of words used to refer to
breasts, which are often called simply ‘breasts’, but may at times be
referred to as the ‘chest’ or the ‘bust’. Quite often these terms are replaced
with the more informal, and slightly jokey ‘boobs’, as we can see in the
following examples:
Naming and Describing 77
You are long and slim, with narrow hips, a small bust and long legs.
(Sugar)
If you have a bigger chest, try wearing (Shout)
Girlies who have got small breasts; bigger-chested gals. (Mizz)
I’m much more comfortable with my breasts now. I like them and I’m
glad they’re not big. (Sugar)
My problem is I have huge boobs. (Shout)
In summer it is much harder to look good in a T-shirt and other tops
when your boobs are uncomfortably big. (Bliss)
You are curvy figured, with broad shoulders, wide hips, a slim waist
and probably big boobs! (Sugar)
Such patterns as exist here seem to clearly associate the word boobs
with large breasts, and there are, indeed, more extracts mentioning large
than small breasts anyway, the latter tending to use the neutral terms
breasts or bust in preference to boobs or chest, both of which have a
humorous connotation. So, whilst it is likely that in fact both extremes
of ‘abnormality’ give women cause to worry, the greater obsession in this
data is with large breasts, which are both celebrated and seen as a burden
or cause for amusement simultaneously. It is hard to know whether
magazine producers are consciously aware that this usage, read by the
right readers (males who enjoy soft porn?) could encourage a kind of
prurience. It certainly seems unlikely that it’s purely there to be informal
and colloquial, since the word boobs never collocates with small.
Notice, incidentally, that the examples above include one with a clear
sense relation of hyponymy:
Here, the reader is, as it were, taught that the term breast enhancements
is the superordinate to three kinds of procedure, and we are thus intro-
duced to some of the terminology of cosmetic surgery. This field of
activity in relation to the female form is particularly fond of nominal-
izations, which sound both reassuringly scientific and also, because of
their nominal nature, quite simple:
Fat can be removed from the lower lids with a procedure known as
transconjunctival blepharoplasty. The surgeon makes incisions inside
the lower eyelid that leave no visible scar. (Body Beautiful)
78 Textual Construction of the Female Body
In some examples, like the first one here, the nominalisation is accom-
panied by a description of what is involved. In other cases, such as the
second, the terms are assumed to be understood from the wider context
of the article, where the need for loss of abdomen fat has been discussed
at length. Other nominalizations in the data are not always so formal
or technical, so we have more informal, everyday usages, such as nose
job, tummy tuck, overeating, childbirth, dieting and so on.
The analysis of naming conventions in the data has demonstrated
some tendencies towards constructing the reader in particular ways,
sometimes by categorizing her as a particular kind of woman, and at
other times referring to her as though she were identified with her body
parts – particularly the sexually significant ones. The choice of nouns to
refer to body parts reflects the problem in English more generally, where
there is a lack of everyday words for some of the more sensitive or taboo
parts, and the result is a tendency towards euphemism or technical
jargon. Nominalization itself seems to be the preserve of the over-formal
scientific topics such as surgical operations.
Whilst the naming itself is interesting ideologically, the ways in which
the nominals are modified is also very important. The next section,
therefore, examines noun phrase modification and other kinds of textual
describing.
Describing
Determiners
The use of determiners before body parts and processes is not the most
obvious place to look for features of interest in describing bodily features,
but in this data it turns out to be one of the more significant character-
istics of the texts.
In listing the nominal phrases that were used to describe body parts
and processes, individual texts which were written in the second person
with the reader in mind, seemed to be showing a pattern that was not
universal, but nevertheless had a tendency to use the definite article in
relation to internal and taboo body parts, and a possessive adjective in
relation to external and less taboo parts. Let us take some longer extracts
from a complete text to illustrate this point:
Naming and Describing 79
breasts, and the following answer also manages to maintain the second-
person theme, by using the euphemism your flow. However, the need to
mention where tampons are worn means that the vagina uses a definite
article in the middle of a possessive sequence, which finishes with
another euphemism, inside yourself, rather than resorting to a possessive
adjective, followed by vagina.
There is no universal law operating here, and some texts do
use possessive adjectives with vagina, womb and so on, particularly
in magazines written for adults. Nevertheless, there are some texts
throughout the data that seem to have a similar pattern of determiner
use. One text from Our Baby which we have already considered and
which has a second-person ‘diary’ of pregnancy, contains the following
body parts/processes:
your + the +
parts are normally only muscles, such as your deep postural muscles (Marie
Claire).
However, there is some indication that the distinction I have made
above between the use of the definite article and the possessive adjective
also distinguishes between body parts in some of the other data, not
on the basis of whether it is internal and taboo (versus external and/or
not taboo), but on the basis of whether it is evaluated as good or bad.
Woman’s Own, for example, on the merits of lipsuction, begins by
addressing the reader:
Go one step further, and you could also say goodbye to those baggy
folds of skin and get those unwanted slack muscles tightened up.
You’ve given up junk food, taken up exercise and STILL you can’t
manage to shift your lingering roll of fat. So, is surgery the answer?
Go one step further, and you could also say goodbye to your baggy
folds of skin and get your unwanted slack muscles tightened up.
It seems unlikely that the reader would respond well to being told so
plainly that she has these problems (even if it is true) and so the distan-
cing deixis is perhaps less likely to alienate the reader.
82 Textual Construction of the Female Body
There is a very fine balance being struck by these writers, and the inter-
play of the different determiner usage seems to be an important part of
this process. The article does ‘frame’ the potentially disturbing detail of
the process with more personal references to your body shape, but the
level of detail in these sentences is very much less:
As there are now fewer cells to take up fat, any changes to your body
shape should be long-lasting Current surgery techniques can help
to improve your body shape but only under certain circumstances.
These two sentences occur near the beginning and end of the article
respectively, and between them there is much more detail about the
procedures, none of it related to the reader through the second-person
pronoun. The writer thus manages to relate the article to the reader in
general ways, whilst not causing her to be put off by imagining these
processes actually happening to her. One of the sentences that appears
to be actively avoiding such an outcome is as follows:
Here, the use of someone, specifically avoids referring to the reader, and
the procedures are then dealt with hypothetically by use of the passive
voice. This is another method of separating the action from the reader,
so that those with a squeamish reaction to the detail may not relate the
procedures too closely to themselves, whilst still considering themselves
amongst the addressees of the article.
Naming and Describing 83
You may have beautiful skin, but wearing pale colours will make you
look tired.
Your wardrobe should consist of about 60 percent colour (blues,
green, pinks etc.) and 40 per cent basics (navy, black, white, stone,
brown and grey).
We will revisit this text later in relation to modality, but the interesting
aspect of the language for us here is that after the generalizations, and
once the text begins to tackle perceived problems of body shape, the
second-person progressively drops out and the definite (or indefinite)
article takes over:
Therefore, a white, silky blouse will make the bust appear larger; satin
trousers will enlarge the bottom they encase; a shiny dress or suit will
add inches to the entire body; and shiny tights can turn large calves
into two pork sausages!
Although, in the early stages of this article, there were some references
to the reader’s own body shape (If you are short or overweight ), the
example above, towards the end of the article, represents the climax of
a more and more negative picture of the possible problems with the
female form, culminating in the pork sausages reference. It is therefore,
perhaps, not surprising, that though the article may intend the reader
to identify with some of the problems, it is left to her to make the
connection, and the second-person possessive is omitted in favour of
articles or plurals with no determiner (large calves). The article, like the
cosmetic surgery article discussed above, finishes as it starts by referring
more directly to the reader again, but not with any uncomfortable detail
about unattractive body parts:
You must be realistic about your assets and faults. If short jackets are
fashionable and they suit you, wear them and vice versa.
Here, the reader is reminded that they have faults, but only in general
terms, and the alternatives of wearing something fashionable that suits
84 Textual Construction of the Female Body
you and not wearing it if it doesn’t suit you are opposed, but the latter,
where there is the potential for negative feelings, is subsumed into the
phrase vice versa. Thus, the reader is left with more of an impression
of the good side of that equation – what it’s like to be able to wear
fashionable clothes, knowing that they suit you.
This pattern of article, starting and finishing with second-person
addressee, and tending toward the more distancing effect of definite
articles and demonstratives in the central part of the article, where poten-
tially the most disturbing information is found, is repeated again and again
throughout the data. Here are three sentences from the beginning, middle
and end of an article on nutrition and weight gain in the menopause
years from Diet and Fitness, which demonstrate the same phenomenon:
Keeping your weight in check can help keep the ageing process at bay.
around the time of the menopause and thereafter, the decrease in the
amount of oestrogen produced by the body increases the likelihood
that fat will be deposited around the abdomen.
Exercise will help to maintain muscle tone, keeping your body in good
shape and preserving your physical strength.
Note the use of the second person in the first sentence in relation to the
relatively safe topic of keeping your weight in check whereas the second
sentence discusses the technical aspects of the relatively taboo meno-
pause, while the last sentence returns to the here and now and discusses
external features like the body shape and muscle tone and returns to
using the second person again.
Adjectives
The patterning of determiner usage discussed in the previous section
was less anticipated than some significance in the patterns of adjectival
modification of nouns, either within the noun phrase, as a premodifier,
or as the complement of an intensive verb, as for example, in clauses
like her weight was excessive.
Perhaps the most overwhelming pattern amongst the adjectival usage
was to find that the large majority of adjectives could easily be inter-
preted in the context as hyponyms of either good or bad:
I used to have quite large breasts but after breastfeeding they became
empty and floppy. So I decided to have them filled up again, which is
exactly what the surgeon did for me. They’re brilliant.
Naming and Describing 85
I used to have quite large (= good) breasts but after breastfeeding they
became empty (= bad) and floppy (= bad). So I decided to have them
filled up again, which is exactly what the surgeon did for me. They’re
brilliant (= good).
Some texts are built entirely upon the distinction between what is
normal and what is not. For example, a problem page in Woman has
the heading ‘Am I normal?’ as a summary of all the problems dealt
with on the page. These questions and answers deal with a range of
sexual problems, from pain and vaginal dryness to lack of desire. The
subheading sums up the rhetorical thrust of the piece:
But remember: not all women come every time they have intercourse,
some women do not come at all. So relax, you are perfectly normal!
The implant was inserted behind the breast tissue so when you touch
the breasts they actually feel very soft and normal I had silicone
put in so they’re firmer than normal tissue but they still feel like part
of my body. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything there at all. I think
it feels very natural. (Body Beautiful )
As for your correct weight, this depends on your height and frame,
not your age. (Sugar)
Are you wearing the right bra? (Mizz)
What is the first thing you do with a part of your body that you
don’t like? Cover it up? If you do it correctly that is great. But if you
do it incorrectly, you may hide your assets at the same time. (Body
Beautiful)
Stop reminding everyone who will listen that you’ve got a huge
arse. One advantage of this superficial world is that everyone is too
88 Textual Construction of the Female Body
This type of bra is perfect for girls who love slipping into a boob
tube (Mizz)
Long, slinky catsuits look amazing on slim frames; a whole outfit in
one dark colour makes the most of those gorgeous curves. (Sugar)
many doctors recommend that, prior to pregnancy, women should
try to get as close to their ideal weight as possible (Ebony)
To achieve a perfect body all you need to do is understand which
lengths and styles work for you (Body Beautiful )
The use of words like perfect and ideal are both a reflection of the type
of overstatement that women and girls might use in a conversational
context and also a reinforcement of the targets that they may be setting
themselves. Since such words are used frequently in the data, they rein-
force the ideology of the ideal body each time they occur.
In many texts, there are multiple examples of negative adjectives and
corresponding lists of positive adjectives relating to the health and/or
fitness of the body. One text in Women’s Health deals with getting back
Naming and Describing 89
a flat stomach after pregnancy, and talks about good posture, ideal posture
and keeping the spine strong and supple as contrasted with:
When the abdominals are weakened and stretched (as after pregnancy)
the pelvis sags backwards, the spine curves excessively and the back
becomes vulnerable to damage and low-back pain.
There is an emphasis in this text on bodies and body parts that are
healthy, strong and natural. The implicature, rather oddly, is that what
happens to the body after childbirth is unnatural, unhealthy and weak,
and in other texts that what we are granted by nature in the way of body
shape or size is also somehow the opposite of natural. This may indeed
seem true to evenly-proportioned and healthy women who have grown
up expecting their bodies to continue to function in the same manner
throughout their lives, but it is an ideology, rather than being in any
sense absolutely true. Thus another ideology, of the unchanging body,
is reinforced repeatedly through these texts. The body is portrayed as
serving the individual, as able to let us down, and to some extent able
to be ‘fixed’.
Beauty advice in pregnancy also manages to stress the negatives as we
see in these extracts from Pregnancy and Birth:
Where more positive adjectives are used, they are often connected with
products that are being advertised, albeit obliquely:
This wonderful new skin saver from will leave your skin glowing and
your mind feeling invigorated is available exclusively from
this current change in her own life has left her ‘excited, but slightly
bemused’ she and her management consultant husband, John, are
thrilled and delighted she hopes for a natural birth.
The worst that seems to befall Katie in this account is that the surprise
of her pregnancy leaves her slightly bemused. This is very much less
negative an emotion than those found in the more general articles, or
those dealing with readers’ stories, for whom the problems they have
is their only claim to being included at all. This is even true of those
stories where there are no significant problems being discussed.
As we might expect, most of the articles and texts dealing with sex are
full of positive adjectives relating to sexual activity. One text in Shine,
which reports on different aspects of foreplay, is full of such descriptions
as applied to different techniques:
Naming and Describing 91
It seems a bit unfair that I put in all the work and got nothing out
of it.
Crap, says Amanda.
How extremely humiliating.
Mate, it’s brilliant.
‘My God, I had no idea we sounded so unsexy.’
Not only does sex help keep your body toned and shaped, but women
who have regular sex (meaning at least twice a week) have been shown
to live longer, to have lower blood pressure and to look younger than
those who don’t. (Body Beautiful )
Doggy Style With the added bonus that all men love this position,
it makes even the largest of bottoms look pretty attractive.
Missionary and elongating your limbs makes saggy bits look less
saggy and chunky bits less chunky. (Body Beautiful )
Give up smoking
Cut down on alcohol
Eat a healthy balanced diet and take exercise.
Try to relax and get enough rest.
If both partners are well nourished and healthy then these odds are
significantly reduced.
The writer doesn’t, of course, cite any evidence for this view, and he
doesn’t deal with the many reasons why these early spontaneous abor-
tions might be a ‘natural’ way of avoiding birth defects. In each article of
this kind, there is an over-simplistic reliance on the notion that whatever
advice is being given, it is the panacea for the problem that is being
addressed.
Perhaps the most clearly positive–negative structure of descriptive
vocabulary comes in the slimming texts where there is a clear paradigm
of positive and negative adjectives building up through the data
including the following from a problem page on slimming in Slimmer
Magazine:
Positive: fit and healthy; balanced; content and happy; healthy active
interest; healthy lifestyle
Negative: overweight; ugly; poor body image
deal, as they often do, with people complaining about both ends of
the spectrum. The following extracts are taken from readers’ stories in
Bliss:
both denote young females, but seem to connote immaturity in the case
of girlies and street-wise brashness in the case of gals.
Whilst these phrases, even accepting the analysis above, might be
dismissed as the product of a single writer, and therefore of little wider
ideological significance, nevertheless, the inter-textual context indicates
that these views are embedded more generally. Thus, the texts dealing
with surgery on the whole are more interested in breast enhancement
than reduction, though the latter may have physical and medical reasons,
and the former cannot be anything other than cosmetic. Similarly, the
linking of sexual maturity (but not old age) to size of breasts is confirmed
by readers who claim to feel more womanly as a result of a breast implant:
One letter in Bliss which deals with having small breasts, receives an
answer which seems much more interested in big breasts:
At 13 you are just starting to develop, and your breasts may grow
larger over the next few years. You will find that those girls with very
big breasts aren’t that happy either. In summer it is much harder to
look good in a T-shirt and other tops when your boobs are uncomfortably
big. If you are doing sport of any sort it is harder if you have very
heavy breasts. In General Practice we often see women that come
in complaining of back and shoulder pains because their breasts are
too large and want to have them made smaller. You often hear boys
saying they like big boobs. They often ‘talk’ about it. The truth is that
when you start having a boyfriend who really likes you, then you
will see that the size of your breasts is not a problem. It is the person
he will want to be with and he won’t mind the size of your breasts.
the text is applying the term to the readership in some way. One solu-
tion, which avoids insulting, whilst still enabling the reader to relate to
the points being made, is to use comparative forms of adjectives, but
without a basis of comparison, thus leading to their possible interpret-
ation as categorical adjectives:
This usage allows the reader to interpret the text in a number of ways,
including:
bump there; Now it’s wonderful to be able to wear what I like; Now
I’m so much more confident: at least I’ve got a wonderfully flat tummy.
Again, this pattern seems to show the extremes of bad and good in
talking about the problem and its solution theoretically, whilst mitig-
ating these extremes when discussing the practical aspects of a solution.
Much of the discussion of body parts, and the clothes they can be
covered by is concerned with what is wrong with them. There is thus
a great deal of intensification of adjectives with negative evaluation, as
we see from the following:
but avoid anything that’s too tight; You might want to avoid anything
too big and baggy; avoid anything too long and loose; You might
want to avoid anything too fussy! (Shout)
don’t mix and match too many patterns; frills and bows around a
neckline might make you appear too busty. (Sugar)
Less enticing is his decree that dieters should take plenty of cod liver
oil, which apparently helps to keep the insulin levels down.
Her vast double chin protruded beneath her big, moon-shaped face, the
tops of her arms spread massively beneath short sleeves 30-year-old
Diane, now a fantastic-looking blonde in size 10 fashionable clothes,
(Diet and Fitness)
Note that these two sentences, which follow each other in the text and
seem to represent the two extremes of Diane’s weight, are contrasted
by the use of vast, massively and big on the one hand, and blonde and
fashionable on the other. We will return to this issue in Chapter 4,
but it should be mentioned here that the clear implications of this
contrast are that it is impossible to be fashionable or blonde (assuming
sexy or attractive, rather than a literal meaning) if you are overweight.
Note also that some of these descriptors turn up in non-adjectival
uses, though the descriptive force remains. Thus, the use of the adverb
massively, rather than an adjective, massive, allows the upper arms to
be perceived as actively spreading, and leads to a sense of being out
of control. By contrast, the use of blonde as a head noun, rather than
an adjective, implies a closer and more permanent link between Diane
and her blondeness. If this feature (her blondeness) is also symbolic
of her new image (of attractive slimness), then its occurrence as a
permanent feature emphasizes the other extreme from her earlier,
out-of-control, self.
Another repeated pattern in slimming texts is the tendency to line up
emotional and physical features as equivalent:
Fed up and desperate, she broke the yo-yo chain by learning to slim
from within I have always been unhappy with my figure I’d end up
feeling so unhappy.
The rest of the story reiterates a number of times, the before and after
effects of watching the tapes associated with this programme:
Now, I’m very happy with my husband and I have a rewarding job as
a childminder.
There is no mention in this story about the slimmer having been unhappy
with either her husband or her job when she was overweight, but the
presuppositions in this extract are just that. In other texts the claims for
the additional effects of slimming (beyond being slim itself) are varied,
and include the discovery of a birth mother by an adopted woman and
the achievement of life goals such as the finding of new and better jobs.
This equating of slimming with happiness and success in general is
underlined by the repeated occurrence of transferred epithets, whereby
the adjective which might be used of the achievement of slimming is
oddly attached to the amount of weight loss itself:
These transferred epithets also occur in other texts, such as those for
teenagers and fitness instructions:
Tampons and towels are so discreet that there is no need for anyone else
to know you have your period unless you choose to tell them. (Fresh)
Being such a perfectionist, everything you do has to be just right. A neat
arm workout is the best exercise for you. (Bliss)
In the first case, the tampon itself is described by an adjective that would
normally collocate with a personal noun. The effect is the equating
of tampons with discreetness, rather than with an ability to behave
in a discreet manner. In the second example, the exercise is described
as neat, though this adjective could be more appropriately applied to
the desired shape of the arms. This transferring of attributes from the
personal onto other artefacts or processes is indicative of the positioning
of the woman in these texts. It is not what slimmers do that is amazing,
but the conceptual mound of bodily fat that carries this description.
It is not the proper and effective use of sanitary products that can be
discreet, but the very existence of tampons themselves. And note, in
passing, that in itself the desire to hide all signs of menstruation, whilst
universally accepted, is nevertheless an ideology in itself, and reinforces
our greatest remaining bodily taboo.
100 Textual Construction of the Female Body
The desire for beauty and sexual attractiveness underlies many of the
texts in this data, and there are two contrasting methods of convincing
readers that they can achieve these goals. On the one hand, there are a
number of compound adjectives which are used to imply that the advice
being given will make the reader irresistible:
For a sexy, come-to-bed style, first give your hair a lift Cosmo’s get-
beddable beauty guide. (Cosmopolitan)
These examples demonstrate the direct link between beauty and its
ideological aim, which is to have sex. Whilst young (and not so young)
women may claim to be doing things ‘for themselves’, this text, and
indeed many of the others in more-or-less direct ways, acknowledges
that this is simply not true.
By complete contrast with this rhetorical method (it will get you
‘laid’), there are also texts which emphasize the scientificness of the
advice they are giving, without apparently expecting much in the way
of technical understanding:
In the first three of these cases, the adjectives add very little, if anything,
to the head nouns. Thus, water loss from the body is likely to be through
the skin (trans-epidermal), barriers are by their nature occlusive, and
scanners tend to use heat. The final example is a little different, but
equally vacuous. The head noun, technology, means very little (a pencil
could be called technology). The adjective, in this case, is there to tell
us where this technology takes place (through the skin). It adds very
little, whilst appearing to ‘firm up’ the content of a rather general word
(technology). But content or information is not the point of these terms,
whose job is to make the reader feel reassured about the reliability of
the techniques being described, and their foundation in science.
As explained in Chapter 2, there is little in this data which relates
specifically to the older woman, despite some of the magazines being
aimed at this age group. The poignancy of the one advert for a product
which would minimize the effects of the menopause may be a good
place to end this discussion of the description of women in this data:
Naming and Describing 101
As we have seen, the texts aimed at younger women spend pages of print
on issues which divide up the body into sections at the same time as
seeming to indicate that the construction of the reader is in the hands of
not only a series of experts, but is flexible, alterable and ever-changing.
This advertising slogan, hints towards an earlier, non-postmodern world
in which the self had not only integrity, but also an unchanging core
identity which would not be affected by the superficial bodily changes
of life. The irony, of course, is that this advertisement undermines such
a message in trying to sell the reader a (albeit natural, herbal) remedy
to mask the ‘natural’ effects of the ageing process. The real self, then,
though existent in this text, is still a younger self, a fitter self, and one
which has no pain or emotional distress.
Summary
With a couple of exceptions and contrary to the original impetus of this
research, the actual naming of body parts was less interesting than how
they were set into their surroundings. Thus, the naming of breasts in
particular seemed to emphasize the importance of size in attracting male
attention, in itself to be desired, and this was reflected in the use of boobs
for only large breasts, whereas the more neutral term breasts tended to
be used for small breasts. The other more sexual body parts were either
mentioned using the medical terminology (vagina, and so on.) or not
mentioned at all. If anything, there was an absence of sexual body-part
vocabulary, reflecting perhaps the inadequacy of everyday language as
much as a reluctance to mention these parts.
The findings of this investigation in relation to naming and describing
focused more on the modifiers of the head noun with determiners being
of particular interest. It seems that there remains a tendency to regard
the female reproductive organs as slightly alien in the sense that they
are hidden and somewhat mysterious. This results in the use of the more
distancing definite determiners often being used with the more technical
words referring to the internal organs such as uterus and fallopian tube,
even in texts where the norm is the second person possessive (your).
The descriptive vocabulary, in the form of adjectives, highlights what
is confirmed by the construction of opposites; that the overwhelming
pressure on readers of these texts is to create the perfect, natural and
normal body by any means possible.
4
Equating, Contrasting,
Enumerating and Exemplifying
This chapter introduces some forms of analysis that are not the usual
tools of analysis in CDA, but are analogous to the regular apparatus in
that they appear to construct meaning textually, and have a particular,
repeated semantic process that operates on the basis of a range of textual
triggers. The semantic relations that are being constructed textually are
those which relate to similarity and difference of meaning (equating
and contrasting), and those which produce examples of a general case
either by enumerating all the different variants or by using one or more
examples.
One of the most important things a text can do, locally, is to create
sense relations such as synonymy and antonymy between lexical items.
This will have meaning for the purposes of that text in the first instance,
but may have repercussions beyond the scope of the text if similar sense
relations are repeated, or if the text has a particularly strong effect,
as some advertisements, for example, do. This hegemonic tendency is
particularly likely in the case of the data being analysed here, which
is read regularly by many women and girls and treats the subject of
their bodies about which they are often quite insecure. The creation
of opposites and equivalents relies largely on the syntactic frames that
set up these semantic possibilities, though the semantics of the words
may themselves also contribute to the effect. This textual creation of
what are normally seen as context-free lexical semantic meanings is
just one of the ways in which we can see the symbiotic relationship
between code and usage or between langue and parole. The recogni-
tion and understanding of opposites, for example, relies on our prior
102
Equating, Contrasting, Enumerating and Exemplifying 103
In the context of the current data, the focus is on the part of this
process which either reinforces or possibly also invents or reinvents such
similarities and contrasts in meaning. There are many syntactic and
semantic frames or structures that can cause such semantic relations
to occur in a text. Here, we will look at a few of the most obvious
ones.
As already mentioned, the clearest example of a frame which creates
equivalence is apposition. This is the juxtaposition of two or more noun
phrases in the same syntactic role, such as clausal subject, which either
clearly have the same referent, such as Mr Bun, the baker,2 or which are
deemed by their very juxtaposition to have such a referent in common.
The latter is probably the more interesting of the cases for this project,
suggesting as it does that equivalence can arise out of the placing of
noun phrases into such a relationship. We will see some examples of
this in context later in this chapter.
Other possibilities for equivalence-creation are the positioning of
noun phrases either side of an intensive verb, such as be, as in She is my
cousin’s daughter. This frame puts the relationship of equivalence under
the spotlight in a way that apposition does not, and it is thus more open
to debate by the reader or hearer. The proposition of such a structure
is precisely that the equivalence relation exists, and this means that
the reader or hearer can question and debate the assertion that there
is equivalence between the two referents of the noun phrases. This,
in terms of ideological assumptions, is therefore less hidden than the
production of equivalence by appositional means, which is harder to
query.
These are, of course, not the only structures which can create an
equivalence of meaning, but the task of this book is not to investigate the
range of form-to-meaning relationships in each section, but to explore
the data along a number of dimensions. Other frames for equivalence,
then, will be introduced in relation to the data as necessary.
As for the structural ways of producing opposition, these are many and
varied, and are investigated in Jeffries (forthcoming) and Davies (forth-
coming). Here, I will simply demonstrate some of the more common
frames, and we will see in the analysis of the data below how these may
trigger oppositional meanings.
One of the more likely places to find opposites is on either side of a
coordinating conjunction such as but or yet. These, and to a lesser extent
also and and or, often highlight the dimensions along which words or
phrases are contrasted. Thus we may find conventional opposites, as in
Equating, Contrasting, Enumerating and Exemplifying 105
The children were happy but everyone else was sad. But we may also find
slightly less usual contrasts framed in the same way:
The process that is happening here, I would suggest, is for two words
which would not be listed together in a dictionary of antonyms to be
juxtaposed in such a way that they almost appear to be conventional
opposites. Though, if asked, a native speaker would probably not say
that relaxed is the opposite of uncomfortable, the context makes such
a relationship seem natural. Still less clearly related words and phrases
may also be put into such a frame, and in some contexts this will also
result in the temporary oppositional relationship being highlighted. We
will see some examples below.
Other likely frames for such creation of opposition include the use of
parallel structures to focus onto the differences between two items. This
can be seen in pairs of sentences such as:
Whilst this is not a rhetorical strategy on the large scale that was
considered in Chapter 2, the effect, as some have claimed, may be
persuasive:
We will see later in the chapter (pp. 123f ) the different ways in which
the three-part list plays a part in normalising certain views of what is
good and bad in the female body and its functions.
Equating
With three fingers on your left hand, feel for lumps or thick tissue.
It is noticeable here that the two references to the same thing are
conjoined by or, and thus could theoretically refer to two rather different
phenomena. However, this conjunction is often used in pedagogical
contexts to offer alternative ways of describing essentially the ‘same’
referent, and this use shows an awareness of the inaccuracy of language
to describe each individual’s experiences.
Slightly less clearly pedagogical are those examples of rephrasing
which may have an explanatory effect, or could have an emphatic effect.
Equating, Contrasting, Enumerating and Exemplifying 107
The hormones in the Pill give your body artificial periods each
month these pretend periods could be masking a problem
So the best way to get in shape at your age is to get active and eat healthily.
You’re quite vain, and always like to look your best Being such a
perfectionist, everything you do has to be just right.
They are not compulsory and Mel can refuse any test she wishes.
The two clauses here can be seen as additional to each other, but they
also both refer to the same incident and to that extent seem to be
appositional too. The conclusion we can draw is that the two things
that the letter-writer fears are also linked. Thus, being a lesbian would
be implicitly connected to doing something wrong.
We will return to clearer listing and exemplifying examples below,
but first there is the question of the impact of created opposites on the
ideological messages about the body in this data.
Contrasting
Make the most of your height by standing straight and walking tall –
slouching around will make your clothes look terrible! (Shout)
the language, as the word slouching itself has negative value connotat-
ively, and it is hard to think of a neutral word with similar denotation.
If this example can be glossed as ‘right’ versus ‘wrong’, and these
are, in turn, specific examples of good versus bad, then the tendency to
categorize notions as myth or fact exemplifies a different kind of right
versus wrong. In this case, we are referring not to value judgements, but
the truth or otherwise of ideas.
We saw in Chapter 2 that there are some texts in the data which
structure themselves around the myth-versus-fact idea. This can be seen
also in Pregnancy and Birth in an article which has sections of advice
and product promotion in relation to pregnancy and body care. There is
one section which is labelled Pregnancy Myths This month: breast changes,
and is clearly one of a set which is spread over a number of issues of the
magazine. There are three individual ‘myths’, each of which is followed
by a paragraph of explanation, headed Fact. Here is one of them:
Myth: The darker colour of your nipples and the surrounding area is
only temporary, and they will return to their normal colour after the
birth.
Fact: This colour change occurs because This is in fact a permanent
change.
Painkillers like ibuprofen can help ease period pain Natural remedies
can also help (Bliss)
I had a normal birth with no pain relief except gas and air. (Our Baby)
she’s planning to give birth without medical pain relief. But a midwife
has to be prepared for all eventualities. (Pregnancy and Birth)
says she hopes for a natural birth, ‘though I’ll probably start off
with whale music and end up with an epidural!’ (Pregnancy and Birth)
I had silicone put in so they’re firmer than normal tissue but they still
feel like part of my body. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything there at
all. I think it feels very natural.
112 Textual Construction of the Female Body
The first contrast here is set up between silicone and normal tissue. Thus,
silicone would not be opposed to human tissue in other contexts, for
example in relation to its use in computer components. Here, the altern-
atives in fact are between ordinary breast tissue and silicone, and the
contrast is highlighted by the comparative form, firmer than. This oppos-
ition is undermined a little in the next sentence which uses negation
and parallelism (doesn’t feel versus feels) to set up an opposition between
what is natural and what would be (hypothetically) unnatural. The oddity
of this example, of course, is the reader’s assertion that it is the breast
implants which feel natural by not seeming to be there at all.
The slightly jokey treatment of problems of puberty that is found in
Bliss and was discussed in Chapter 2, relies on notions of normality and
abnormality, but uses a scaremongering technique to contrast some-
thing ridiculously abnormal with the supposedly normal situation that
is at the root of the problem. Thus, in the following extract the surreal
suggestion that one might find a hairy caterpillar under one’s nose
is contrasted, by negation, with the reality, designated as worse, by a
comparative form:
Close inspection reveals that it’s not a hairy caterpillar that’s decided
to take refuge under your nose. It’s worse than that – it’s a moustache!
This text, then, plays on the good versus bad superordinate by lining up
the reality, which is bad, with normality, which is usually good. This is
partly a rhetorical device which enables the text to first of all emphasize
the feelings of revulsion that the young girl may be feeling, and then to
continue in a more soothing tone to undo the very semantic relations
that are being set up here. This reinforcement of the supposedly ‘natural’
reaction to the facts of the female form, that it is ‘unstable and leaky’,
ends by trying to emphasize the fact that everyone has some body hair,
making the abnormal in some sense normal, but not in the sense that
it would be seen as normal for a male:
Smile ‘cause: Every one of your mates has a hair scare somewhere,
and if you hate it, you can deal with it.
If your life’s been turned upside down by the arrival of a new baby,
shouldn’t your stomach have the good grace to return to normal?
(Women’s Health)
After losing her son, Jac, just six days after he was born prematurely
due to severe pre-eclampsia She’d had two normal pregnancies and
healthy children
The word normal, then, has to do duty for a range of meanings, including
unproblematic in this case. It marginalizes those with other experiences,
and places only the most straightforward pregnancies in the centre of
the prototype of normality.
One final example of the normal versus abnormal range comes from
the text in Jump written by a young, male-implied author on the subject
of unduly sexualized young girls. He describes himself early on as a
seemingly normal, red-blooded, 19 year old guy, and then later, in case
there’s any doubt, tries to establish his credentials by distancing himself
from abnormality in the following way:
Nor am I the kind of guy who only goes for earthy types (you know,
girls who prefer eco-terrorism to experiencing life and refuse to, like,
shave and stuff).
114 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Good Bad
Like this one, the other opposites constructed in the data in relation
to food are often constructed by negation, with one clause being
positive and one negative. In some cases, though, the two terms of the
Equating, Contrasting, Enumerating and Exemplifying 115
You need to try and eat a healthy diet, so that your body gets all the
vitamins and minerals it needs to grow and develop properly. Please
try not to undereat.
The main thing is just to eat things that are made from fresh produce,
avoiding processed foods or frozen junk food. (Slimmer Magazine)
Though these are not complementaries, since they are not necessarily
mutually exclusive, their causal relationship seems to be called into
question in this construction using the conjunction but, which normally
favours opposites through the process which Grice (1975) would term
conventional implicature. This reflects rather well the feelings of a
woman who has been through technological processes to help her
conceive and has not done so; the link between insemination and preg-
nancy may well, in that case, seem to have been severed.
Another group of created opposites in the data relate to time, and in
particular to the permanence of certain bodily-related issues:
But it’s a good idea to get into the habit of checking your boobs now –
as it’s a habit you should keep for life. (Sugar)
Equating, Contrasting, Enumerating and Exemplifying 117
It’s important to ask yourself whether your feelings for this woman
are about her being a special person in your life right now, or about
your sexual feelings in general? (Bliss)
Myth: The darker colour of your nipples and the surrounding area is
only temporary, and they will return to their normal colour after the
birth This is in fact a permanent change. (Pregnancy and Birth)
This extract exemplifies the latter contrast, between then and now, and
the strong implicature is that now is better. In other words, this is
another opposition with a paradigmatic relationship to the good–bad
superordinates.
In addition to these, there are two sets of opposites that relate to the
female body and which seem to construct it in a binary form. The first
simply divides the body up horizontally between top and bottom. This
is normally for fashion or beauty reasons, and is best exemplified by a
text from Sugar, the whole of which is about setting up the top versus
the bottom half of the body as separately variable sites. The categories
are introduced as follows:
Triangle. You are Broad shouldered, with slim hips and a small bum.
You may have a large bust – and always look great in a bikini!
Hour glass. You are V = Curvy figured, with broad shoulders, wide
hips, a slim waist and probably big boobs.
This text, and others like it, may be aiming at encouraging the reader to
see that we are not all the same, that there is no one ideal shape, and so
on. However, the tendency is still to normalize, and to emphasize the
118 Textual Construction of the Female Body
clothes that will minimize any imbalances in the natural figure, rather
than, say, flaunting such features. The reader of this last sentence might
wish to pause and consider her (his?) reaction to it. If the reaction was
to think that it was obvious that people would wish to balance out their
bodily shape, and this is not ideological, but ‘natural’, then I would
suggest that such reactions only serve to underline the strength of the
cultural imperatives at work here.
The other major division that is evident is that between the physical
and the emotional. Many texts make explicit this distinction, whilst also
indicating that well-being in one goes hand-in-hand with well-being in
the other:
You are definitely feeling better, if not perfect. Yippee! your skin may
become spotty. Boo! (Sugar)
Time to recover, both physically and emotionally. (Our Baby)
This wonderful new skin saver with tea tree, mint and herbs is a
great way to detoxify your skin and relax your senses. (Pregnancy and
Birth)
an instant facial sauna which will leave your skin glowing and your
mind feeling invigorated. (Pregnancy and Birth)
the tensions that arise from that very relationship of mutual depend-
ence, as in the following case from Sugar:
This combination of the negative (that is, things that can appear to be
wrong with your breasts) is intended to cover the possible options, in
other words to represent all sorts of mishaps. Similarly, the following
examples, from Fresh and Woman respectively, refer to two different
points on a gradable range, both of which are nearer the negative than
the positive end of the spectrum:
This can range from mild tummy aches or back aches to painful
cramps.
It can be dangerous, even fatal to mother and baby.
This extract has the appearance of being full of information, but beyond
telling the reader when the AFP test will be done and two problems it
can show up, it fails to make clear whether having a high or a low level
of AFP is a good or a bad thing. Whilst there is an indication that both
extremes have their risks, and no measurements are given to indicate
what how or high would be in real terms, even this small amount of
information is undermined by the final sentence which tells us that the
high or low readings may anyway occur within normal distributions.
The two-part list in these cases seems to gesture towards a longer ‘real’
list, but indicates that the main cases are covered. In the final case
there is clearly an indication of a range of procedures between these two
typical cases, though the range is not ordered in any significant way, for
example from mild to serious or from one part of the body to another.
The more pedagogically-oriented the text, the more likely it is that
instead of a single example or a couple of important examples, there
will be a true list of cases that expand upon the generalization. The
following examples illustrate this direct informing process:
The symptoms usually occur between weeks four and 10 and can
include long, painful periods; dark, watery bleeding; severe, low, one-
sided abdominal pain; pain on emptying bowels; and shoulder pain.
(Our Baby)
Foods to avoid include liver, liver sausage and liver pate; raw or
lightly cooked eggs; peanuts; rare or undercooked meat or poultry;
mould-ripened soft cheese; unwashed salad or veg. (Our Baby)
There is a sense, here, that the writer is trying hard to cover all the
eventualities, to help the pregnant woman make sense of her symptoms
in the first case and decide on dietary adjustments in the second.
122 Textual Construction of the Female Body
irregularities can start showing through. I’ve seen some very poor
results – you could actually see the tracks where the tubes had passed
through the fat again. (Body Beautiful )
This extract illustrates the general case of very poor results (of liposuction)
with a specific example of the kind of result that is meant. The relatively
emotive effect of the description of tracks under the skin is presumably
intended to make potential customers think twice before they go to
a cheap or under-qualified surgeon. Cosmetic surgery is the one topic
that goes against the upbeat tone of most of this data, and is given
to this kind of scaremongering, possibly for good, responsible reasons.
However, it is also noticeable that there is barely a single article on
surgery that doesn’t have the name of a clinic or clinics in the text.
Whilst they are not strictly advertisements, these articles, nevertheless
promote particular clinics as being within the realm of the responsible,
so the scaremongering tactics could be seen as promoting commercial
advantage for them.
The converse of this motivation, the desire to protect plastic surgeons
from blame for failures or relative lack of success, is also delivered in the
form of exemplification:
Surgery is not an exact art – there are too many variables, such as
skin quality, social behaviour, different healing times and potential
complications
This extract from Body Beautiful adds detail to the assertion that surgery
is not an exact art by making it clear that the variables are too diverse
to be able to predict the precise outcome. The slightly chilling, and
throwaway, item in this list is the final one, potential complications.
Though it does, indeed, present as one of the variables in all surgery,
it is in itself a general case which covers all sorts of frightening possib-
ilities. At this point, the text retreats from full explanation and lets
the general term stand with no further exemplification which could
discourage potential customers.
Equating, Contrasting, Enumerating and Exemplifying 123
It is not unusual, of course, to find lists that have specific items at first,
and then end with a catch-all category to cover anything that might not
have been mentioned individually. The following is such a case:
The reader who is considering facial surgery may read this list and check
off the different areas of the face in relation to her own. The final item
on the list makes it more likely that each reader will relate to the text
personally, as they work out which parts of their own face might come
under this description.
The structural techniques which set up exemplification are many and
varied, but often include explicit reference to the fact that they are
examples, using verbs such as include or adverb introductions like such
as. For some cases, where the items in the list are clausal, and there is
structural repetition, there may be a strong rhetorical effect reminiscent
of Biblical or poetic parallelism:
This list of what good posture does for the body is long, and has the
effect of putting good posture into a conceptually superior role as the
centre of all well-being and health.
Three-part lists
The difference between these genuine, if sometimes patchy, examples
of lists, and the symbolic three-part list is striking. Though it cannot
easily be ‘proven’ to be a different kind of textual practice, it does seem
noticeable that when you read a three-part list, its significance is often
more rhetorical than informational:
Midwives can tell all sorts of things by looking, feeling and asking clever
questions.
There is something odd about the third part of this list, possibly because
it is not a physical activity, but probably because it seems to be added on
to make up the numbers. Other examples use the superordinate terms
that we investigated in relation to opposition, which has an additional
effect of completeness, as well as the three-part list effect:
For many girls, whatever their age, heavy periods are normal, healthy
and natural.
May simply want to look more alert, relaxed and happy (Body
Beautiful )
She is a very busy woman – actress, wife and mother (Body Beautiful)
Every session is pleasant, relaxing and invigorating (Slimmer
Magazine)
Before years of laughter, smiles and tears have left their mark (Body
Beautiful )
Equating, Contrasting, Enumerating and Exemplifying 125
This extract from Pregnancy and Birth does not appear to be from a
longer potential list, and it has no phonological sign that it is symbolic.
This is, indeed, what happens at the beginning of a first ante-natal
appointment, so it has all the qualities of a genuine list. Another
example, from the same text, appears at first sight to be a genuine list,
but on closer inspection, we see that the second and third elements of
the list are very much more general than the first:
This seems like a ‘real’ list which just happens to have three parts, though
the second and third in the list are rather general, and may encompass
a number of conditions which are as specific as Down’s syndrome. One
could conclude that the list appears reassuringly complete, and it could
also be argued that it informs less than it appears to. Pregnancy complic-
ations are two-edged for pregnancy magazines, which may want to be
positive about all aspects of pregnancy, whilst informing their readers
about the dangers. One of their techniques is the happy ending, as we
saw in Chapter 2. This may be another one, whereby the three-part list
glosses over the detailed facts and gives an impression of informing,
whilst really smoothing over the potential anxieties of the pregnant
126 Textual Construction of the Female Body
You’ve just been invited out on a hot date. Do you: a. Rush out and
buy a really tight dress? b. Treat yourself to a facial and a new lipstick?
c. Panic! Start the starvation diet NOW – there’s no time to lose?
A quickie twice in one day will work for three reasons: 1) a frenzied
bonk will boost your libido; 2) quickies break the routine and may
spur your boyfriend on to greater things; 3) the adrenaline surge will
give you a day-long, warm, fuzzy feeling.
There is no doubt at all that this writer could have come up with any
number of additional reasons if pressed, but three is the convention in
such lists and more might make clear the lack of substance in the article
as a whole.
It is hard to be sure that there is not a good physiological reason
for manufacturers of tampons making them in three different sizes, but
in the context of the ubiquitous three-part list, it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that such technical decisions might be partly influenced by
the advertising attraction of being able to use three-part lists, as in this
extract from Sugar:
In fact, their products often come in four different sizes, which makes
it all the more interesting that only three of them are mentioned here.
Note that the three-part list can operate at higher levels of struc-
ture, and sometimes occurs where parallel structures are being used.
The following example uses three question forms to hypothesize about
the reason for Pamela Anderson reducing her breast implants to a
smaller size:
Was she worried by the recent health scares about silicone implants?
Was it because moody musician hubby Tommy Lee had grown bored
of her plastic chest? Or was it simply that she herself had tired of the
old ‘glitz and tits’ image that she had fought so hard and become so
well known for? (Body Beautiful )
There can be, of course, no comprehensive list of all the possible reasons
for any course of action, so the writer falls back upon the three-part list
as the standard number of options to give.
Summary
A general conclusion that we might draw from this analysis is that
many of the texts in this data have an ostensibly pedagogical function,
which may be served by the equivalence-construction of appositional
128 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Mel’s booking-in visit seems to last forever! The midwife wants details
about her husband and family and information on asthma, diabetes,
epilepsy, heart problems, high blood pressure
5
Assuming and Implying
The two categories of assuming and implying are the labels that I am
using for what is technically known as presupposition and implicature
by linguists. This chapter, then, considers those meanings which are
often seen as less direct than lexical and sentence semantics, and as a
result of this indirectness can be seen as helping to naturalize certain
ideologies relating to the female body. What is particularly important
about the functions of assuming and implying in texts is that these
meanings may communicate themselves to the reader at a relatively
subconscious level, and if reading texts of a similar nature repeatedly
delivers the same ideological assumptions, the reader is vulnerable to
the conceptual influences that such repetition could have on world view
or perceptions.
Many of the assumptions and implications we address here will be part
of a more general process of constructing an ideal or supposed reader. This
process includes making assumptions about the general categories that the
reader is likely to belong to (such as female, white and so on.) but it also
includes, as we shall see, much more specific assumptions, for example
about the kinds of problems the reader has, or the shape of her body.
129
130 Textual Construction of the Female Body
As we will see below, some of these triggers occur more frequently than
others in the data. Those which do occur provide a basis for the natur-
alization of certain ideologies pertaining to the female body.
In addition to the presuppositions that contribute to the textual
construction of the female body in this way, these texts also depend
on conversational implicature to provide further ideological underpin-
ning. Conversational implicature, a consequence of Grice’s co-operative
principle and its maxims, is described by Simpson (1993: 129) as:
I’m extremely tired. I’ve got to look after myself, put my feet up and
eat healthily. (Our Baby)
There are many such examples in the data, on all topics, and we will
look at some of them in detail below. Here, the point is to notice that
there is probably more information than the reader needs in the second
sentence, unless it is not just a ‘note to self’ in the protagonist’s ‘diary’,
but is also a semi-coded message to all readers of the magazine that they
too should do these things in the early stages of pregnancy. This self-
consciousness of the multiple addressees of the text can be described
with reference to discourse roles (see Thomas 1986). Thus, this text
requires both the fictionalized self-addressing of the diary-style article
and also the knowledge that there are other addressees, the pregnant
readers, who will be expected to assimilate the information that these
are good things for pregnant women to do. The message of this extract,
delivered by implicature resulting from the flouting of the maxim of
quantity, is that this is what the reader, also, should do. The mechanism
is essentially circular; many such implicatures in fact do not seem to
deliver any ‘new’ information, leaving the implicature, which amounts
to ‘you already know all this, but should act upon it’ as the main message
of the text.
The overwhelming majority of the texts in our data make the under-
standable assumption that the reader is female. This is demonstrated in
a number of ways, but mostly by the use of the second person pronoun
(you) or the possessive determiner (your) in conjunction with purely
female conditions such as having breasts, periods or a vagina.
Thus in texts from Bliss and Sugar, for example, the reader is addressed
by talking about your vagina and your period which form existential
Assuming and Implying 133
Firstly, don’t be embarrassed about your breasts – we’ve all got them!
(Shout)
periods are all part of being a girl. There is nothing to be afraid of,
ashamed of or embarrassed about – because we all have them! (Fresh)
Apart from the occasional expert opinion or article, the data are mostly
neutral with respect to the writer’s gender, but these occasions when
the writer makes an appearance in the text are striking in their attempt
to cause the reader to identify with her.
Whilst it is to be expected that articles which purport to be of help to
women might address all readers as female, there are also a very large
number of presuppositions and implicatures which detail the kind of
women that they are addressing. Whilst there is no explicit statement
of expectation that the reader will have these characteristics, there is,
nevertheless, the potential for a normalising effect where the same char-
acteristics are assumed time and again.
Take, for example, the assumptions that everyone lives in a nuclear
family, and in particular that everyone has a mum. Bliss, for example,
presupposes just these things, by the mechanism of the same your +noun
structure that we have already seen:
you’re also worrying about what your mum will say when she does
your washing.
It is, of course, also noticeable that the stereotype of the mum that does
her (teenage) children’s washing is presupposed here as a result of the
iterative meaning of when in this context. These norms of family life
and gender roles may indeed still reflect many young people back to
themselves, though the potentially alienating effect on those without
134 Textual Construction of the Female Body
When did labour start? And how did it feel to finally meet your baby?
Three couples share the agony and the ecstasy. (Our Baby)
The three labour stories which follow this introduction are in the form
of an interview, with questions and first-person answers. The use of you
in this example, then, is odd, because the article itself is not in the
second person. The explanation, it seems to me, is that the three couples
are intended to ‘stand for’ the readership of the magazine, and their
different stories represent the likely range of difference to be experi-
enced during a delivery. This compounds the problem of there being no
variation in the nuclear family/heterosexual couple, patterning, since
there is an implicature that you (= the readers) are all in some sense like
the people whose stories are being told.
Those pregnancy articles which do address the reader in the second
person also assume the norm of a couple:
The use of the iterative trigger, other, causes a logical presupposition that
the addressee is also (part of) a couple.
The articles which detail how to have ‘good’ sex also regularly presup-
pose that the reader is a woman in a heterosexual relationship, since that
is their raison d’être. They normally use the possessive determiner and
noun structure to cause an existential presupposition. Thus your partner
is found frequently in such articles. Similarly, there is a presupposition
that he and his penis exist in the following extract from an article which
promises out-of-this-world orgasms:
If you can’t grip his penis with your vaginal muscles during sex, then
your internal vaginal muscles are too flabby! (More)
Assuming and Implying 135
My breasts are big and saggy. I’m worried when I have sex with a boy
he’ll be put off (Bliss)
The presupposition, that she will indeed have sex with a boy in due
course, arises from the subordinator when, which functions in the same
way as a verb of change to introduce a new situation which it is assumed
will definitely happen.
In the pregnancy literature, it is probably not surprising to find that
there are many articles which presuppose or imply not only a female
reader, but also a pregnant one. It is, of course, possible that non-
pregnant women and men may also read these magazines, not least if
they are embarking on parenthood, or wish to do so, but these ‘marginal’
readers tend not to be addressed directly:
that’s why it’s vital you have your blood pressure and urine checked
for protein levels at every antenatal visit. (Woman)
This extract uses pragmatic presupposition to imply that the reader is not
only female, but pregnant, by addressing her using the second person
pronoun, you, and connecting this with the existentially presupposed
protein levels in urine and antenatal visits. Thus, the world knowledge
of the reader comes into play here as the connector between different
presuppositions in the sentence. This kind of construction of the reader
is, of course, ubiquitous in the pregnancy data, but the assumptions do
136 Textual Construction of the Female Body
not stop there. Most of the assumptions about the reader also assume
that the pregnancy is healthy, and therefore describe the processes
which are found in successful pregnancies: your placenta transfers anti-
bodies. (Our Baby)
Again, the presupposition is achieved by the use of you with the exist-
ential presupposition of the placenta and the description of the process
by which the embryo is fed. The norm of the healthy pregnancy is also
reinforced by the expectation in all of the articles that the pregnancy is
not only wanted, but looked for:
The iterative trigger (at last) in this extract indicates a change of state
from an earlier state of non-pregnancy and demonstrates that the preg-
nancy is not only desired but also took a while to achieve. This norm of
the desirability of children is confirmed and reinforced in a number of
articles, as seen in the two extracts from different articles which follow:
Slim from Within not only helps with your weightloss, it also
brings you belief in yourself and an end to self criticism (Slimmer
Magazine)
The use of the second-person pronoun here, with the noun weightloss,
causes the existential presupposition that you (the reader) do indeed
have a weight problem. Logical presuppositions, that you lack self-belief
and that you are self-critical are triggered in the next clause by the
change of state verb brings, and the change of state noun an end to.
The text that this extract is taken from is an advert for a slimming
programme, so we may not be surprised at these presuppositions, though
we may also note that this does not alter the potential effect for a reader,
whose own perceptions may well tend to be influenced by the unerring
message that she is overweight, whether or not this is really the case.
The very many readers’ stories in the data relating to weight, as well as
being rhetorically significant by having happy endings, also use a great
many superlatives to describe weight loss:
When Ros Thatcher lost an amazing 9st it finally gave her the courage
to pursue her dream of finding the mother who gave her up for
adoption. And she did! (Diet and Fitness)
And life has been looking up ever since. Amy now works in a
community health centre as a pharmacy technician. She’s also
studying at college one day a week (WeightWatchers)
138 Textual Construction of the Female Body
In both of these cases, the weight loss is directly attributed with the
power to solve difficult problems, and though it is never stated outright,
the implicature, as in all these stories, is that it could do the same for
the reader.
As well as assuming universal weight problems, the texts have a tend-
ency to assume that readers have a desire to eat unhealthily, as exem-
plified in the following two extracts:
In the first example the noun licence causes a logical presupposition that
the reader has the desire to pig out, and the second one that the reader
wishes to eat all unhealthy food, despite it being bad for them, signalled
by the verb allow. Since what is allowed – or licensed – is normally
something that the person concerned wishes to do, the presupposition
attaches to the activity following these words.
The generalized assumptions about excess weight are not confined to
the slimming magazines or articles, but tend to crop up in all contexts,
including post-pregnancy, exercise, and sex-related texts. The following
two come from articles promoting different forms of exercise:
Follow Lynne’s example to trim your tum and shape your bum. (Slimmer
Magazine)
Stop reminding anyone who will listen that you’ve got a huge arse. One
advantage of this superficial world is that everyone is too obsessed
with themselves to really notice your lumpy thighs! (Body Beautiful )
The first includes an implicature that trimming the tum and shaping
the bum are necessary for the reader. This arises from the pragmatic
presupposition that you wouldn’t trim or shape something unless it was
needed. The second example is based on presuppositions triggered by the
factive verb remind whose subordinate clause complement (italicized) is
presupposed to be true and the existential effect of the definite noun
phrase your lumpy thighs, which the reader is presupposed to have.
One of the main reasons frequently implied in the data for the import-
ance of not being overweight is to appear sexually attractive, to men:
Assuming and Implying 139
BEST FOR: Big hips and thighs. This is obviously because the offending
parts are hidden from view in this position – and elongating your
limbs makes saggy bits look less saggy and chunky bits less chunky.
(Body Beautiful )
Your partner keeps pointing out how fabulous your stick thin best
friend looks in her animal print skirt. Do you: a Rush out and buy
exactly the same skirt, three sizes bigger, even though it won’t suit
you? b Find something similar, with a flattering silhouette which
makes YOU look sensational? c Wonder if he’s having an affair with
her? (More)
These examples demonstrate that big hips and thighs, referred to as the
offending parts, are something to disguise by using particular positions
for lovemaking and, in the case of the second example, that the reader is
likely to be relatively overweight – and therefore relatively unattractive –
to her partner, compared with a thinner friend. These are effects of
pragmatic presupposition in the first case achieved by the mechanism
of rephrasing, and by implicature in the second case where the maxim
of quantity is flouted, but there is an implicit link between three sizes
bigger and being overweight.
Want to have the most luscious lips he’s ever kissed? Slough off dry
flakes with a flannel while you’re taking a hot, steamy shower.
This extract uses the rhetorical question to imply that no reader could
fail to desire this outcome. It also hints at sexual activity by using
a word with sexual connotations, steamy, to describe the shower.
This normative message about the pursuit of sexiness begins in the
teenage magazines, and even where it is not being explicitly connected
to looks it is still seen as the driving ambition for girls and young
women:
140 Textual Construction of the Female Body
How come women’s mags are so obsessed with us driving the boys
crazy all the time? (Minx)
This comes from an article in which the writer and her friends try
out some of the more outlandish sex tips that they have read of
elsewhere. These are not all tips aimed at male pleasure, but they
do include some naturalized assumptions, such as the assumption
that ‘blow jobs’ are normal and tight stomach muscles are to be
desired:
I had wanted to be a page three model from the age of 14 but wasn’t
blessed with the figure I feel so much more womanly now. (Body
Beautiful )
The change of state adverb, now, presupposes that the narrator hadn’t
felt ‘womanly’ before, and the pragmatic presupposition that readers are
likely to draw from this is that this change of affairs came about as a
result of the breast implants. This generalised celebration of the large
breast starts in the teenage magazines. The text from Mizz is apparently
a straightforward advice article about how to make sure that the reader
is wearing the right bra for her shape and size and activity levels. The
ostensible and responsible message is that we are all different, so we
need different underwear. However, there are some messages that are
not about comfort or well-being:
Padded Are great for girlies who have got small breasts – the padding
gives you more shape than you really have. Fantastic!
There is, however, such a thing as breasts that are too large because
they unbalance the figure or are embarrassing:
The implicature in the last example is that breasts are indeed a problem,
but they might be overlooked if you’re interesting enough. Note,
however, that there are some conflicting messages about breasts, with
the padded bras being enthused about, to draw attention, and the
pendant or choker to displace it. The extremes that women are supposed
to go to in order to balance out their bodies is illustrated in an article
from Body Beautiful with advice on clothing as a way of making your
142 Textual Construction of the Female Body
figure look better. The advisor gives a lot of detailed clothing advice to
a questioner with a large bust. However, the caption on a photo of a
woman leaning forward with her arms crossed reads:
You can minimise a large bust by folding your arms across it, or you
can take Mia’s advice.
With a little help from Sweetex it’s easy getting back to your pre-
pregnancy shape (Our Baby)
Here, we are faced with the ideology of the perfect – in this case the
‘pre-pregnancy’ – body which argues counter to the biological reality
that women’s bodies are likely to change shape fundamentally as they
age, and particularly after pregnancy. It is possible, and indeed common
in some cultures, to envisage an ideology of the body that celebrates the
youthful shape for some women and the more mature shape in others,
perhaps particularly those in the middle stages of life. But these ideas
are so contrary to the pervasive ideology of our times that it seems odd
even to express them here. This example works by implicature, that the
pre-pregnancy shape is desired, because what we normally try to achieve
is normally also desired.
The notion of ideal shape is also fostered, as we have seen in
other chapters, in the teenage articles on clothing to enhance your
body shape, in which the article implies some notion of ‘ideal’
shape, from which we all deviate but which the reader is assumed to
aspire to:
the bottom so you’re curvy You’ll just add extra weight where
you don’t need to you don’t need to add extra height you don’t
need to slim any areas. (Shout)
This set of examples constantly implies the norm of a body which does
not have any features out of balance with the rest, and which is neither
too fat nor too thin, too tall or too short and so on. Rather like something
in the Golidlocks story, this elusive body shape is one that is sought
by many, but achieved by few, and this advice is there to minimise
the bad features. The text is built on one over-arching implicature; that
the reader wishes to, and can, make the best of her imperfect body.
This is probably quite comforting to some teenagers who are racked
with anxiety about their bodies, but it does nothing to challenge the
ideologies that put them under this stress in the first place. Some of
the implicatures seem to emphasise, and thus reinforce, the negatives
in each body shape they consider:
Wear white skirts and trousers to even out your proportions hide
beanpole legs in baggy trousers etc. (Sugar)
this data. Perhaps the most interesting is the one that acknowledges
that women have body hair, but also takes for granted the need to
remove it:
Rather like the conundrum of the breast implants that feel natural
because you can’t feel them, this position depends on the acceptance
that women are ‘naturally’ hairy in various ways, which by the ideolo-
gical context that we have already established ought to be a good thing.
However, these texts also insist that the removal of this hair is vital
for femininity to be established. These two examples use shock-horror
tactics and exaggeration to establish female hair (anywhere but on the
head) as unwanted. The first one uses the pragmatic presupposition
triggered by being in luck combined with hair removal techniques which
presupposes a wish to remove this offensive bodily feature. The second
one pragmatically presupposes that what is refused is normally to be
wished for, and that they are thus being unreasonable in not shaving
(their armpits presumably).
The one aspect of the ideology of the body that we haven’t discussed
a great deal so far is that of the importance of youth. This is because
the question of age crops up rather rarely in the data, though it is in a
sense ever-present too. Apart from a few specific articles aimed at older
women, these magazines tend to be aimed at the younger age groups,
and though there might be, for example, older pregnant women or
slimmers, there is an emphasis on the importance of being, and failing
that, of looking young which is implicit in all the discussions of weight,
body shape, clothing and so on.
Here, though there is also a direct proposition that girls can choose their
method of sanitary protection, there is also a possibly more powerful
implicature that what most girls do is normal, and we have already seen
that normality is a very strong normative force.
Whilst one might not be surprised – or even deeply concerned – about
the texts creating ‘normality’ around tampons, there are other issues
that create strong implicatures and presuppositions about normality
Assuming and Implying 147
which may raise greater ideological questions. One of these is the issue
of teenagers’ sexuality, which of course is of concern to many young
people. As we saw earlier, being a lesbian is only mentioned twice in
the data – both times in letters to a problem page. In both answers, the
superficial message is of acceptance, but the implicatures and presup-
positions give a rather different message, which amounts to the fact that
being a lesbian is problematic, and anyway not very likely:
This answer attributes to the letter-writer the implicature that she does
indeed have such questions, but, more significantly, states straight-
forwardly that this is perfectly healthy, using one of the co-hyponyms
of good that we discussed in Chapter 3. However, by emphasizing
the frequency of such questions, the answer also implies that most
questions are ultimately resolved in the majority direction, that of
heterosexuality:
These sort of feelings happen all the time during your teens.
This works very much like the earlier example which stated that prob-
lems getting pregnant were also very frequent (One in six couples have
fertility problems from Woman). Presumably, in a utilitarian fashion, it
will reassure the majority who turn out not to be lesbian in due course
(or manage to get pregnant for the earlier example). The assumption
that not being pregnant is a problem is one that might possibly be seen
as understandable in the context of a magazine on pregnancy where it
may be assumed that all readers share the ideology that being pregnant
is a good thing, and having babies is in some sense a vital fulfilment for a
woman. In this case, however, constructing ‘being lesbian’ as a problem
that the majority may indeed be able to avoid is not only harmful to
those who do turn out to be lesbian, but is also more ideologically signi-
ficant as a construct that confirms being lesbian as not just a minority
sexuality but a problematic one.
The other letter and answer about this subject is if anything more
negative in its construction of lesbianism. It uses a similar argument
about how common it is to question one’s sexuality (looking at other girls’
bods in the showers is completely natural), but in addition, the overriding
message in the answer, which we saw earlier, but is repeated here, is
that this is a problem that will go away, constructing lesbianism as both
unwanted and unlikely:
148 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Note that the answer here intends to reassure the letter-writer that she
has not done wrong in looking at her friend’s body, but manages instead
to provide an implicature to the opposite scenario in which both you’ve
done nothing wrong and it doesn’t mean you’re a lesbian are contradicted. As
we saw in Chapter 4, appositive structures may lead to the conventional
implicature (Grice 1975) that their content is mutually co-referential,
and the resulting implicature can also be that their negatives are also at
least coincidental, if not dependent on each other. Thus, there is a strong
implicature here that if the letter-writer was indeed a lesbian, then her
actions would also have been wrong. The impact of these implicatures
on the young readers, many of whom will have come across the use of
lesbian as a term of abuse, may well be to reinforce the negative evalu-
ation of a minority, but nevertheless quite common sexuality amongst
young women. The actual readership of a magazine may not include
many lesbians who would be directly harmed by such negative eval-
uations, but they will be affected indirectly by the ideology at large
which is inculcated by the ideologies represented here. One interesting
feature of this last extract is the use of promise as a speech act by the
advisor. This speech act includes a pragmatic presupposition that what
is promised is (normally) desired by the addressee. Thus, the perform-
ative use of this verb here results in the presupposition that being
lesbian is not a desired outcome, which adds to the ideology already
discussed.
Apart from the implicatures and presuppositions relating directly to
the body, body shape and sexuality, the data also make general assump-
tions about the lifestyle and psychology of the reader. For example, the
idea of the woman as rather silly, over-anxious and tending towards
feeling embarrassed arises repeatedly, as can be seen in the following
example:
Put silly stories about super tampons being for older women out of your
head (Shout)
implicature that the writer of the letter is silly. Similar assumptions arise
wherever the imperative occurs in relation to emotional states of mind:
Stop worrying (Cosmopolitan); So relax! (Mizz)
In these cases, the change of state verbs stop and relax respect-
ively cause presuppositions about earlier states – of worrying in the
first case and not relaxing in the second. Though it is clearly to
be expected that people with problems will worry, the emphasis on
the anxious state of mind of many of the readers who figure in the
magazines, either in problem pages or in readers’ stories, inevitably
contributes to the stereotyping of women as over-anxious, not to say
neurotic.
The final set of assumptions that we will consider here are not
directly related to the body, though being lifestyle assumptions, they
do contribute to the health and fitness of the people concerned. There
appears to be a general assumption that people reading these magazines
will have material goods and lifestyle habits that arise from a reasonably
affluent background, including the following three, which presuppose
that the addressee is employed, owns a car and can afford expensive
holidays respectively:
Your employer can insist that you start your maternity leave Is
your car suitable for the car seat you want? (Our Baby)
Now, the only thing that’s standing between you and looking
fabulous on that Caribbean vacation or cruise to the Bahamas
is (Ebony)
Mel used to drink a glass or two of wine a week, but has now given
up. Government guidelines recommend no more than one or two
units of alcohol a week
She’s enjoying showing off her new figure and keeping herself fit with
antenatal yoga, aromatherapy massage, eating healthily and getting
plenty of rest between schedules.
The presupposition here, that the reader (and the author) have black
skin, is made by the use of a definite noun phrase, using the possessive
second-person adjective, our. It is striking to those readers accustomed
to the mainstream, and mainly white, magazines, partly because it gives
such readers a sense of the ‘otherness’ that might be felt each time
a reader does not fit the stereotype assumed or implied by an article.
It also underlines the fact that white skin is not actively assumed or
implied as a norm directly in the mainstream magazines, but is so deeply
naturalized as the norm that it does not have to be textually reproduced
or reinforced.
Summary
The findings of this study in relation to presupposition and implicature
are similar to each other. They both contribute to the creation of norms
which, whilst never advocated explicitly as goals, nevertheless build up
an expectation of a prototypical woman whose body is ever-youthful,
slim, even after producing babies, functionally able to reproduce, and
Assuming and Implying 151
ideally has large breasts, even if these are created by artificial means.
What’s more, this body is expected to behave heterosexually and to
have a white skin, though these norms are so deeply embedded in the
ideology of these magazines that they only crop up in this implicit func-
tion of assuming and implying, where the assumption of male partners,
for example, is universal.
6
The Body in Time and Space
There are very many ways in which the construction of time and space
in a text can have an impact not only on the meaning of that text,
but also on the cultural and social understanding, the ideology, of the
topics that the text addresses. Thus, it seemed appropriate in the present
context to consider the way in which the time frames were constructed
by the texts, and also to see how the female body is located in space and
as space itself.
The linguistic features that were anticipated as being potentially inter-
esting for this part of the study included verbal tenses, adverbials, deixis
and lexis connected to the topics of time and space.
I was 12 when I got my first bra. I was really excited because I was
the first out of my friends to need one – they were still in crop tops.
(Sugar)
152
The Body in Time and Space 153
I started to get frequent pains one morning and called the hospital
for advice. (Our Baby)
At 29 weeks she woke up one morning with swollen hands and a
puffy face. (Woman)
in which the text projects some possibilities. These include the condi-
tional clause introduced by if, the verb want which acts modally to
suggest a desired (or in this case not desired) scenario as its clausal
complement together with the modal verb would, and in the third case
the trigger is the modal verb can.
Returning to the then-and-now structure of many of the texts in the
data, many of these have a focal point at which the life of the protagonist
changes, usually for the better:
Ros managed to lumber through the exercise session that night, and
by the time she arrived home, a mental transformation had taken
place. (Diet and Fitness)
And it was worth it: in June 1999 she reached Goal. (Weight-
Watchers)
and use this as a point of celebration and inspiration to others who have
yet to reach their Goal.
Surgery is another life-changing process that is usually narrated with
a deictic split between the then and the now:
Surgery had been at the back of my mind for years but it wasn’t
until the accident that I decided it was time to do something.
(Woman’s Own)
Apart from the very many past narrative articles and readers’ stories,
there are also many articles of advice that use the present tense to
give a general idea of what happens in the female body in relation
to such things are menstruation, pregnancy, sexual attractiveness and
eating/dieting:
If a girl wants a guy to notice her, she needs to worry about the person
underneath the façade of make up and fashion statements. (Jump)
wear fitted shirts and tops which taper in at the waist (Shout)
Every girl’s flow is different. It varies from month to month, as well
as during your period, so you should use more than one absorbency
of tampon. (Sugar)
Using a needle, a doctor removes some amniotic fluid, which contains
fetal cells. (Pregnancy and Birth)
Food is central to our lives. So there are numerous reasons why we
overdose on it: eating for comfort when we’re tired, angry, upset,
stressed or bored (Woman’s Own)
generalized present, but real time, even though the descriptions are of
hypothetical narratives, rather than real ones:
Days 8–13 You are definitely feeling better, if not perfect. Yippee!
(Sugar)
weeks 5–8 ‘I’m extremely tired. I’ve got to look after myself, put
my feet up and eat healthily. Still, Gary is taking really good care of
me.’ (Our Baby)
I’ve been getting ready; my breasts are swollen; I keep thinking I
can feel the baby (Our Baby)
Mel’s booking-in visit seems to last forever! The midwife wants details
about her husband and family information on asthma, diabetes,
epilepsy, heart problems, high blood pressure. (Pregnancy and Birth)
While boobs are developing they can feel a little lumpy, and at
different times of the month they’ll change too, especially just before
your period. But it’s a good idea to get into the habit of checking your
boobs now – as it’s a habit you should keep for life It’s important
to examine your boobs at the same time every month, just after your
period finishes (Sugar)
Every month, one of the ovaries releases an egg which travels down
the Fallopian tube to the uterus (womb) (Fresh)
For weeks; little by little; that’s when; at six months; first, second,
third trimester; during this period; during months 7 and 8; by month
9; throughout your pregnancy; as your pregnancy progresses; near
the end of your pregnancy; approaching the end of the first trimester;
at around 12 weeks; before/after 20 weeks. (Pregnancy and Birth)
Ready to reproduce, every month; will last from three to seven days;
average age to start; twelve; from any time between the ages of nine
and sixteen; your breasts will have started; often; on a regular basis;
every eight hours; you can start as soon as. (Fresh)
13, last month, 5 days, a week, how long?, common, months, average
5 days, 23 days, just started, at first, after a few months, more regu-
larly. (Mizz)
for a while; past two months; a few months ago; now; never; still;
soon; until. (Bliss)
After 12 weeks; around 28 weeks; after that; every fortnight; four
weeks early; 10 hours; four weeks before; exactly the same times.
(Our Baby)
any of the detail given here, is the most important effect; that women’s
lives are indeed often hemmed in with measurements of time in various
ways. To what extent this is either ‘natural’ or constructed we will have
to speculate, though we may imagine societies where the counting of
the days in pregnancy or menstruation will not be as obsessive as it is in
rich industrial countries with a low birth-rate. Similarly, we can hypo-
thesize that because men’s bodily experience is less time-constrained
than women’s, their texts may be less time-oriented than these. Another
study will be needed to investigate this hypothesis in detail.
Whilst the time zones in which women’s bodily lives are lived are
fairly conventional, the construction of space in these texts, particularly
bodily space, appears to develop a fairly consistent ideology of the body
across the data represented here. The first construction of space that
we should consider is of the female body as having volume, and thus
having both an outside surface and an inner space, in particular the
inner space with a reproductive purpose:
Every month, one of the ovaries releases an egg which travels down
the Fallopian tube to the uterus (womb) it is expelled from the
body along with the lining from the womb (Fresh)
Baby moves down the birth canal start to push her baby out into
the world entire head is out ease out (Our Baby)
In these two cases, the internal body features as a place from which
things (an egg, a baby) can be expelled. This echoes the outer and inner
reproductive organs division in sex education literature (see Chapter 3),
and the following, possibly metaphorical, image of the inner space
which is represented by the reproductive organs is also frequently found:
Deep in the reproductive system (Woman).
This use of the adjective deep may echo a frequent conceptual meta-
phor where the internal organs are likened to the sea (see Jeffries 2001
and Steen 2002) and it certainly emphasizes the inaccessibility and
mystery which is often associated with these specifically female organs,
even in an era of medical knowledge which has largely uncovered these
mysteries. It is not only the pregnancy texts which use this technique to
mystify the body. Exercise regimes and advice often also use the distinc-
tion between outer and inner to distinguish those muscles that we can
The Body in Time and Space 159
all feel and identify from a set of deep postural muscles (Marie Claire)
which we need expert help in locating and developing. This emphasis
on the unknowability of the internal body is continued by the beauty
texts, even when they are essentially dealing with the outer layer of the
body, the skin:
There is some evidence that the skin has a better absorption at night
so active ingredients may penetrate to deeper skin levels more easily.
(Women’s Health)
This unique non-invasive treatment works in harmony with the body
by improving circulation, eliminating toxins and breaking down
calcified fat cells beneath the surface of the skin. (Slimmer Magazine)
the cleansing capsule with the power of traditional herbs that flush
fat cells from the body. (Slimmer Magazine)
we’ve all had a rummage around our vaginas at some point (Bliss)
Turn your body into a playground (with the highly underrated art of
foreplay!) (Shine)
As we will see in the next section, there are a wealth of metaphors used
which link the body and space, these two examples being metaphorical
representations of the female body as a linked set of places or areas,
an ideology which appears to be quite deeply embedded in the social
context in which these texts are produced and read. The body is literally
treated as a set of places in many of the texts in the data:
Lie down and draw a straight line between your genitals and your
belly button. Your tanzen (a Japanese erogenous zone) is in the
middle. (Minx)
160 Textual Construction of the Female Body
build sexual tension by massaging the area about two and a half
inches below your belly button. (More)
My lower body is wide, but I want my body to look in good propor-
tion. (Body Beautiful)
eggs are collected and fertilised in the lab, then placed back in the
womb injecting a single sperm directly into an egg and transferring
the egg to the womb a blocked fallopian tube in one of the
fallopian tubes rather than the womb (Woman)
Here, the womb and fallopian tubes are treated in isolation from their
context, which would have to be (at this point in history) a complete
body. This conceptual separation of certain organs and parts is common,
particularly where we do not like them or they are unpleasant bodily
appendages:
To some it sounds like a miracle cure – just one night in hospital – and
you walk away minus 5 litres of fat!; crude way of destroying the walls
of the fat cells and then sucking out their contents; tube is inserted
through a tiny cut; pumping the area to be treated (Woman’s Own)
Upper eyelids can also benefit from a procedure capped upper bleph-
aroplasty. This treatment (which can also be done with lasers)
The Body in Time and Space 161
removes a crescent of skin and underlying fat from the upper eyelids
to correct any drooping or sagging. (Body Beautiful)
It’s like I’ve been locked away for all these years (WeightWatchers)
This identifies the narrator (the ‘I’) as being the mind, with the (fat)
body as some kind of jail or trap. Although very many of the texts in fact
link bodily problems with psychological problems, these are the only
two that use spatial dimensions to explain the relationship between the
inner (the mind or psyche) and the outer (the body).
What is interesting from the feminist point of view about these
extracts is that whilst the mind may be construed as unavoidably linked
to the body more generally, these texts represent the ‘real’ person as the
inner being or mind, and the body is not intrinsic to this identity. Such
a view is typical of first-wave, rationalist feminism which attempted to
rise above bodily concerns in the same way as men were conceptualized
as doing.
162 Textual Construction of the Female Body
And we have already seen that the body itself can be seen as a place:
We also find that sex and relationships are places that you can be on
or in:
The Body in Time and Space 163
Quite closely related to the place or space metaphor for life experi-
ences is the structural metaphor of life (and thus of parts of life) as a
journey. There are very many ways in which this underlying metaphor
is delivered in these texts, including the following, where finding a good
diet is likened to changing direction and in the same text the journey
of trying to lose weight is slowed down by emotional baggage: My life has
turned around (Slimmer Magazine).
The conceptual metaphor of DIET AS A JOURNEY is commonly used,
and could be viewed as a sub-type of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor. It
is clearly present in the following example which requires some kind of
cognitive mapping from the domain of travel to the domain of dieting in
order to understand it (see Steen 2002: 25 for more on the identification
of metaphors):
Following a low fat diet go back to the beginning one can follow
basic healthy eating guidelines as the goal weight comes into
sight the fast track to weight regain (Slimmer Magazine)
Reach my goal weight (Best Diet Now)
Notice that the journey metaphor is useful for many of the life experi-
ences discussed in the data, having the destination or end of the journey
as a focal point that can represent success, which in the case of diets is
the goal-weight and in the case of pregnancy is the safe delivery of a
healthy baby. These link to the rhetorical strategy of the happy ending,
whereby the metaphor of a journey provides a clear end-point; now I’m
nearly there (Pregnancy and Birth).
Though in many cases the traveller on these life journeys is the woman
herself, the perspective changes from time to time, and the life process
or its culmination will instead be seen as the traveller:
to women, rather than something they do. We will consider this issue
again in Chapter 7.
A similar effect is achieved in a number of texts where it is not the
woman that is moving or travelling, but the fat that attaches itself to her:
In all of these cases, the verbs and adverbials indicate some form of
movement, with the aim or life goal as the destination of this movement.
The journey for the woman in some cases has a particularly mountainous
feel to it, as in the following extract where the physical body throughout
its life is seen as being like a climbing expedition, with one main high
point, and the rest of life leading either towards or away from this: At
my physical peak (Marie Claire).
The problem with some structural metaphors of this kind is that they
are so common that they are not generally interpreted as metaphors and
this can mean that the user or the reader may become trapped by the
limitations of the metaphor, and, for example, not envisage physical
fitness as a fluctuating state, and thus see the peak as unattainable and
progress or its opposite as irreversible.
The Body in Time and Space 165
I had silicone put in I’d never ever go back and ask to have them
taken out. (Body Beautiful)
Breast implants removed having the plastic out (Body Beautiful)
Inserting your finger as he penetrates you (More)
inserted into your vagina inside me/you withdrawing etc.
(More)
they’d removed a couple of litres of fat (Woman’s Own)
This in turn sends the excess into the muscles for fuel Your body
stores it as fat Clog the heart with fats (Cosmopolitan)
Draw the fat out of storage and burn it off (Diet and Fitness)
Burn fat. (Slimmer Magazine)
Here, we see the fuel storage and the breakdown of parts (the heart) due
to inefficient use of fuel. These metaphors may indeed be useful ways for
us to comprehend our bodies, though one of the questions that arises
when a metaphor is so pervasive is to what extent it may be limiting our
thinking. Thus, the extent to which people rely on the body-as-machine
metaphor or even the body-as-parts metaphor to reassure themselves
that if one part goes wrong, it can be fixed by a technician arises from
this data.
Summary
The dimensions of time and space through deixis structure our under-
standing of the corporeal experience of girls and women, and the
analysis has shown that the basic division into inner and outer body
is fundamental to this perception. It is less clear from this data that
these magazines reflect the full range of the female life in temporal
terms, and the ‘final’ bodily development (menopause) is hardly
mentioned, though certain bodily processes (for example menstruation
and pregnancy) are excessively, if not obsessively, time-constrained and
measured.
166 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Introduction
Transitivity analysis
These goings-on are sorted out in the semantic system of the language
and expressed through the grammar of the clause.
167
168 Textual Construction of the Female Body
‘expressed’ through the grammar of the clause, in fact not all of the
different transitivity categories, are reflected straightforwardly in syntax
and they are also only partly captured in the semantics of some English
verbs. Thus, although the subject and object syntactic functions can
each carry a range of possible participant roles, precisely which role is
indicated may require analysis of both the syntax and the semantics of
that particular example. The picture is further complicated by passive
and ergative structures, which combine syntactic and participant roles
in still different ways. Also, the creativity of language is such that the
likely participant frames of verbs cannot be fixed by dictionary makers,
since they can be – and often are – used in many frames which are
not their ‘usual’ one – giving rise to metaphorical usage in some cases.
Thus, for example, the verbs vomit or throw up might normally be seen
as unintentional actions, called ‘supervention’ in this model. However,
the increase in levels of bulimia in recent years means that these verbs
have begun to appear more frequently as intentional actions.
A further problem with the model is that its use in critical-discourse
analysis suggests that the writer may choose a verb with one kind of
transitivity precisely to avoid making an ideology explicit, because s/he
wishes to naturalize that ideology, or because the ideology is already
naturalized to the extent of being seen as common sense. However,
the presentation of processes in metaphorical or other ways may be so
common that the reader is likely to ‘read’ the meaning as literal (that
is, translate it) anyway, thus undermining any sense that there is an
ideological purpose at work in the particular choice of lexical verb. The
use of euphemistic ways of talking about death, for example, such as pass
away or lose (I lost my mother last year) do not resonate with their non-
metaphorical transitivity (material action intention and supervention,
with the speaker as Actor, respectively). Rather, they both seem to carry
the ‘new’ metaphorical force of supervention, with the mother as Actor,
despite the surface form. Nevertheless, in certain cases, we may wish
to argue that the most natural metaphors are those that are indeed
most naturalized – and thus most ideologically manipulative. In relation
to dying, then, we might wish to argue that the avoidance of matters
relating to death and dying is a deeply embedded ideology in our culture
(see Holt 1993).
I am not attempting to develop or challenge any particular model
of transitivity here, but to use one version to look at the transitivity
choices, and potential ideological effects, of the data. I will therefore use
the model as described in Simpson (1993), though as it turns out, not
all of the categories of transitivity are equally relevant to this data:
Processes and Opinions 169
Perception
John saw Mary.
She heard the concert.
Mental process Reaction
She likes Bach.
He hates wine.
Cognition
She considered the question.
I thought hard.
Intensive
Mary is wise.
Tom seems foolish.
Relational process Possessive
Gill has a guitar
John owns a piano.
Circumstantial
Bill is at home.
The queen was in the parlour.
Material actions
The first question to consider is what kind of material actions are in
evidence in these texts, and what they tell us about the ideologies that
inform these publications. Although it had become clear early on that
the context was crucial in considering transitivity choices, and therefore
the quantification of each kind of process would not be useful, it is
nevertheless clear that there is a relative lack of material action verbs in
many of the texts, and as we shall see, there is certainly a lack of such
verbs with the reader (you), the reader as character (she) or the implied
reader in the Actor role.
However, the sheer number of instances of any particular process type
is not necessarily the most significant question here, where the context
can make all the difference to the effect. For example, there may be
a significant number of material action intentional verbs in the data
as a whole, but if very many of these are in the imperative form, and
thus effectively instructing the reader how to behave or move, then any
interpretation of the results as showing a readership that is actively in
control of their own actions would be misleading.
The texts where there is indeed a great deal of imperative use of
intentional material action verbs is in the instructions for exercises,
as in sit upright; lift one arm from Bliss, and shed extra pounds; follow
these; start with from Our Baby. The imperative form also crops up in
other texts, as we can see below, where the pregnancy advice text from
Processes and Opinions 171
Our Baby burdens the reader with advice in the form of imperative
structures:
This sets the scene for many of the pregnancy texts, as we shall see,
with minimal apparently volitional action on the part of the pregnant
woman. Other imperative material actions on the part of the reader
are found throughout the data, the ones in articles about sex often
being more about what the female may do to the male body than about
her own:
Position your lubricated hand above the head of his penis like an open
umbrella. (Minx)
Squat over your partner’s torso, you on top. Raise yourself up and
down, balancing above him. (Body Beautiful)
are often readers’ stories and therefore have the before-and-after format
of the damascene conversion story. Whilst there is some concession to
lack of control in the more general texts on dieting, there is also lots of
exhortation to do things as in this extract from Slimmer Magazine:
At home, Diane would snack her way through afternoons with a packet
of biscuits, crisps and chocolate bars.
With her confidence boosted, Diane joined a gym and started weight
training. She also started going swimming once a week.
you’ve given up junk food, taken up exercise and STILL you can’t
manage to shift that lingering roll of fat.
The rest of the article details the process of liposuction, and includes
discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of this procedure. There
is little further addressing of the reader, who nevertheless is implicitly
asked to consider whether this might be a solution to the problem set
out at the beginning of the article. There are two interpretations of this
opening sentence: that people cannot succeed in slimming on their own
Processes and Opinions 173
and that it’s impossible anyway. Both interpretations lead to the need
for a third party to intervene, and the article suggests one possible kind
of intervention.
The only other occasions when there is material action on the part
of the reader is in subordinate or heavily modal clauses such as the
following from Sugar:
It’s a good idea to get into the habit of checking your boobs now – as
it’s a habit you should keep for life
It’s important to examine your boobs at the same time every month,
just after your period finishes
Marlene gently manipulates Claudia’s tummy (right). She can tell how
effective the contractions are by feeling how the baby moves down the
birth canal during each one Claudia has now reached the second
stage of labour, when she can start to push her baby out into the world.
Mike had to rub quite hard, but I was surprised how good it felt
When I started sucking Rachel’s toe, she stopped relaxing. (Shine)
The other main type of Actor in material action processes is the expert,
often a surgeon, who intervenes in the woman’s body:
Here, the surgeon is not specific (some surgeons) and the action (removing)
is very deeply embedded in the structure, as a subordinate clause,
attached to a higher-level action (improve), which is also subordinate to
a catenative verb (try). To what extent this embedded representation of
surgical intervention undermines confidence in its efficacy, it is hard to
tell without psychological testing of readers. However, we can certainly
say that the action of removing fat has not been foregrounded here,
and this could either have the effect of limiting the reader’s focus on
the (unpleasant?) reality of liposuction, or of focusing the reader on the
hoped-for outcome (improvement), or both.
Those texts which concern celebrities also seem to link these protag-
onists with material actions more often, and more positively than where
the articles concern the ‘ordinary’ reader. For example, an article about
Katie Derham’s pregnancy has her as the Actor (grammatical subject) in
many material action verbs:
chasing news stories; selected her maternity wear with care; keeping herself
fit; eating healthily. (Women’s Health)
Most of this article is concerned with external issues, and not the bodily
detail of labour or delivery, which is one reason for the levels of active
verbs. However, there can be a contrast between celebrity and ordinary
‘coping’, even when the process itself is represented as a material
action:
For most of us mere mortals, having our bums dragging on the floor
or our boobs resting on our stomachs as we get older doesn’t mean
we won’t work again. We can pretty much scoop them up and go about
our day If you were in their shoes, wouldn’t you want to try to
turn the clock back to recapture your youth so you could keep on
doing what you did in your early 20s? (Body Beautiful)
the celebrity fitness article where they are portrayed as self-made women
who are not only successful but slim:
The pelvis sags backwards, the spine curves excessively and the back
becomes vulnerable to damage and low-back pain (Women’s Health)
Your waist is thickening gradually;
Your uterus pushes out above your pelvic bone;
you may find that your navel has flattened and popped inside;
your placenta transfers antibodies from your body to the baby.
(Our Baby)
Some weight did creep on; it went straight onto my stomach; that
bump wouldn’t shift (Woman’s Own)
Our muscles tend to slacken; the skin of the breasts loses its tone.
(Body Beautiful)
Waistlines tend to expand. (Diet and Fitness)
the weight came off. (Diet and Fitness)
While boobs are developing they can feel a little lumpy. (Sugar)
These examples all demonstrate body parts (muscles, boobs and so on)
apparently acting in isolation, though they are not presented as having
free will or being animate. The loss of control, then, for the ‘owner’
of these body parts is implicit, though over time and repetition, the
ideological effect may be fairly strong.
Intensive relations
Despite the findings of the previous section, these magazines tread a
fine line between convincing readers that they are not in control, and
convincing them that they can be in control, with the right help. One
of the ways that the magazines attempt to appeal to their readers is by
Processes and Opinions 177
showing that they recognize that not all women are the same. This is
mainly achieved, as we have seen, through the use of articles divided
by category of women, usually by body shape, with different advice in
each section. These sections rely on intensive verbs (usually the verb be)
which mostly make assumptions about the readers’ category, normally
to introduce the different sections:
you’re spiritual;
you’re a strong character;
being such a perfectionist. (Bliss)
The same kind of effect occurs where women (or young girls) are categor-
ized according to breast size, as in Mizz:
where the use of the intensive verb in are we bulimic? identifies the
letter-writer and her friend more closely with the condition than if she
had asked do we have bulimia? The result is that the condition and the
girls concerned seem to be more inherently connected, meaning that
it is harder to envisage one without the other, though less so than if
a noun were used (am I a bulimic?). Note that this letter also uses a
normally superventive verb, throw up, as a material action intentional
verb, emphasizing the abnormal nature of this condition where young
people choose to do something normally seen as involuntary.
The use of intensive processes is prevalent in some of the texts
here, often coinciding with quite conventional ideas or stereotypes of
women’s sexuality or identity. Take, for example, the ‘myth-busting’
section, entitled ‘Bloody lies’ in a text about periods from Bliss. Whilst
attempting to put the teenage readership straight on questions of
tampon use and when you can get pregnant, it nevertheless uses the
term virgin, with an intensive verb, confirming ideas about virginity
being an identifying and in some sense intrinsic characteristic:
Here, we have not only the notion that girls either are, or are not,
virgins, but that this is a condition defined physically by the presence
of the hymen. There would have been a choice, of course, of using a
possessive verb instead, such as if you haven’t yet had sex, and this would
reduce the distance between those on one side of this over-emphasized
dividing line and the other.
Another potential effect of intensive verbs is as part of the wider effect
of establishing norms in relation to the female form. In a section of text
from Slimmer Magazine, entitled ‘Feminine Foods’, there are a great
many examples of such normative tendencies using intensive verbs:
Women reported that salads, vegetarian dishes and soups were their
favourite dishes; drinking [lots of] beer is seen as macho, whereas
sipping modest amounts of wine is more acceptable for a woman.
Note that although this is reporting on a survey, the slippage from is seen
as where perception is being reported, to is, which sounds more categor-
ical, subtly changes the potential impact of the text which as a result
fluctuates between reporting opinions and apparently stating facts.
Processes and Opinions 179
This is vaginal discharge Beneath are the inner lips, labia minora.
They’re hairless and thinner and can be any shape, size and even
colour Normal discharge is wet, clear-to-milky in colour and not
itchy. (Bliss)
The first example, here, has a pedagogical aim in making sure that
readers know the significance of periods. The second and third extracts,
however, use intensive verbs (is) to give value judgements (good,
important) about certain kinds of behaviour (exercise, keep clean). This
is similar to the distinction between epistemic and deontic modality,
which often make use of the same set of modal verbs, thus blurring
the distinction between what is factual and what is personally approved
of or culturally agreed. This is not to say that the advice given here is
wrong or misleading, but just that it is presented by the same means
as facts, and yet is in a sense a constructed view of what is good for a
menstruating woman.
The final common use of intensive verbs in this material, particu-
larly where it concerns sexual problems or taboo areas of the body,
is in describing the emotions of the women concerned. The following
examples are from a problem page on sexual issues, though they are
typical of many, including readers’ stories where problems are discussed:
180 Textual Construction of the Female Body
We’re both really worried ; I’m really afraid ; I’m too embar-
rassed (Body Beautiful)
I’ve seen some very poor results – you could actually see the tracks
where the tubes had passed through the fat (Woman’s Own)
The reason for the absence of the actor here is difficult to establish,
though it may be that the writer is responding to the horror that she
imagines young girls experiencing if they were told directly that it
was they themselves who would be inserting the tampon. Whether or
not this squeamishness is indeed the reason for such an odd sentence,
the result of the agentless passive form is, contrarily, the implication
that there may be some unspecified agent who is separate from the
addressee.
The same mechanism operates in the following extract, but with a
different potential effect:
182 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Modality
Notice that the authority and power relations on the basis of which
the producers of this text withhold permission from, or impose oblig-
ations upon, the people it is sent to, are not made explicit. It is
precisely implicit authority claims and implicit power relations of
the sort illustrated here that make relational modality a matter of
ideological interest.
It doesn’t mean you’ll; you might feel freaky; it may turn; you may
have an infection; discharge may seem yucky; it may seem weird.
(Bliss)
It can take months; it varies loads; if you’re still worried; most girls
usually remember; may not be as effective. (Mizz)
It will last from three to seven days; the average age to start having
your periods is about twelve; it can be from any time; you can’t tell
when you are going to start; although your breasts will usually have
started to develop. (Fresh)
Note that in the last example there is a combination of the future use of
will with other more obviously epistemic modals such as about, can and
usually. In English, references to future time being necessarily modal,
the simple use of will is almost categorical, since there is no alternative
way of discussing the future. Fairclough (1995: 147) notes that in some
texts ‘the authority of the institution is marked through high-affinity
epistemic modalities’ of this kind. However, the certainty of this usage
is undermined, in this case by the vagueness of from five to seven and
any time. The young reader whose first periods last for over seven days
and who has read this article may be justified in feeling herself to be
abnormal. The vagueness somehow implies that the whole extent of
possibilities has been covered, and that experiences outside of this range
are abnormal.
In the pregnancy texts, the use of epistemic modality to ensure that
this doesn’t happen is ubiquitous, and at times the hedging is so highly
emphasised that the writer sounds very unsure of herself indeed:
It’s possible that you could ; if you’re expecting twins; you could
go into labour early; you can’t have; you won’t have to share; yoga
etc will help; it can be hard if. (Our Baby)
Note that one of the common structures in this data, particularly where
the text is trying to cover different eventualities, is the combination of
a conditional subordinate clause (If it’s fertilised ) and an epistemic
modal (will) referring to the future in the main clause:
Processes and Opinions 185
There is something odd about the intensifiers in the last example here
and it almost seems as if the speaker doesn’t really believe what she is
saying. Note that there is almost no modality in the verbs, as one might
expect perhaps in a narrative in past tense. However, the emphatic use
of intensifiers seems to cast a little doubt on this version of history.
The other uses of modality in this data to reflect different points of
view include the uncertainties of the first person narrators:
186 Textual Construction of the Female Body
Perhaps even more than the articles written in the voice of a journalist
or expert, this sounds like protesting too much. A categorical version,
It makes you happy, may, ironically, sound more convincing since, as
Simpson (1993: 49) points out:
Simpson bases this comment on Lyons (1977: 763), who maintains that
‘categorical assertions express the strongest possible degree of speaker
commitment’. Thus, the more that a text insists, the more it undermines
its case.
However, the writers of the texts in this study, and the people that
they quote, often make the understandable and very human assumption
that strongly certain epistemic modality as well as hedging with weaker
epistemic modality, can give an impression of authority. Such effects can
be seen in quotations from the ‘experts’, such as plastic surgeons, who
wish to emphasize their sense of responsibility by distancing themselves
from what they might see as bad practice as in these extracts from
Woman’s Own:
The emphatic use of never in the first example shows the surgeon
protesting his sense of responsibility and the doubt introduced by may
about some techniques seems calculated to impress upon the reader his
own credentials as a reliable and knowledgeable practitioner who won’t
cut corners. Similar effects are achieved by the use of epistemic modality
in the two final examples, using can and actually, where the reliability
of someone so honest can hardly be doubted by the reader.
Modality does, however, supply other means of the writer or other
‘voice’ asserting her (or occasionally his) authority. The deontic system,
using some of the same modal verbs, but a different set of adverbs and
adjectives, sets out the writer’s view of what should happen or what the
addressee ought to do:
Processes and Opinions 187
In Sugar, the letter-writer asks for advice and gets the precise advice she
doesn’t want; to see the doctor:
I’m too embarrassed to see a doctor or talk to anyone about it. What
should I do?
I know you might find it embarrassing, but you should still get it
checked out.
Mel should tell the midwife; she should see her GP; Mel needs to avoid
contact. (Pregnancy and Birth)
you should not smoke; your diet should consist of; milk should be
avoided. (Slimmer Magazine)
You must take care; no diet sheet should be. (Slimmer Magazine)
By contrast with the authority of the writers, the anxiety and lack
of confidence of the readers as represented in the letters to problem
pages, readers’ stories and so on may also be delivered by modality. This
insecurity of the readers manifests itself as a combination of lack of
certainty (epistemic modality) and expressions of desire or hope (boulo-
maic modality):
188 Textual Construction of the Female Body
I don’t want to have sex in case there’s something wrong with me.
(Bliss)
The final aspect of the data that will be investigated here is that
concerning the speech and thought presentation in those articles where
this representation of others’ words is of relevance to the ideology of the
body. The terms used here will be those introduced in Leech and Short
(1981). Whereas they might have simply been interested in how a partic-
ular novel constructed the ideas of its characters, and to what extent
they differ from the author’s and/or narrator’s ideas, this approach sees
the interweaving of different people’s ideas and words as part of the
overall ideology-construction of texts. The tracing of free indirect style,
in particular, is crucial to understanding the range of opinions and
outlooks which are being set out in a text, and the possible hidden
viewpoints which arise from this merging of voices.
The presentation of speech and thought has a particular role in this
data which may differ in some ways from its role in other texts, such
as news reporting or fictional writing. Here, it allows different voices to
enter what is often presented as a straightforward narrative or factual
report, and this can have a range of effects as shall see from the examples
in this section. For example, an apparently neutral article will suddenly
include a statement that is clearly in the writer’s ‘voice’:
You may have a rush of energy at this stage and start cleaning and
preparing your baby’s room and clothes – this is called ‘nesting’ ,
and is normal, but try not to overdo it as it’s really important to conserve
energy now. (Our Baby)
Processes and Opinions 189
You’ll experience your greatest weight gain during this time – around
1 kg (2lb) a week. Remember that you don’t need to eat vast amounts
of food on top of your normal daily diet –
Just pop a few drops into a bowl of boiling water to create an instant
facial sauna which will leave your skin glowing and your mind feeling
invigorated. Honestly! (Pregnancy and Birth)
This cross-over article, which is framed as advice but actually also advert-
ises products, is introduced as Jo Hansford answers your haircare questions.
However, although we know who is writing the text, and although the
style is fairly informal (pop a few drops), the use of a direct appeal to the
reader such as Honestly! stands out as a reminder of the voice behind
the remainder of the ‘facts’ on offer.
The other way in which the voice of an expert may come through is in
the choice of vocabulary used. In some problem pages, the vocabulary
of the letter-writer is reflected back by the advisor, but in other cases,
there is a distinct difference in the choice of words:
This change of word is relatively unusual in the data here, where quite
often the voice of the advisor takes on the ‘jokey’ or informal word of
the question (such as boobs) rather than choosing to distance herself
190 Textual Construction of the Female Body
from the letter-writer and using a more neutral word. Here, the effect
of what might be seen as ‘correcting’ the language of the letter-writer
may be the one that such advisors possibly fear – of seeming distant
from their concerns, but there is also the possibility that the answer to
this question will be seen as treating this part of the body with respect,
rather than joining in with the ridicule that the letter-writer suffers. In
both cases, the authority of the advisor is asserted by this vocabulary
change.
In the standard terminology of speech and thought presentation,
‘direct speech’ refers to quoted language which is normally contextu-
alized within a report or narrative, though this is relatively rare in the
current data. In a text, for example, which deals with problems like body
hair and vaginal discharge, there are quotations from ‘typical’ girls:
Carrie was 14 when she had her first moustache scare: ‘I pretended to
be ill for a week. I didn’t want to see anyone or go anywhere. Then I
noticed just how many beauty products there were in the shops for
facial hair bleaching and removal. I realised it wasn’t just me. Now I
bleach my upper lip and nobody’s any the wiser.’ (Bliss)
It’s an exciting thought, but surgery is not a substitute for weight loss,
warns Mr Dai Davies, consultant plastic surgeon and Medical Director
of the Stamford Hospital in west London. ‘The only real treatment is
to eat less and exercise more’, he stresses. (Woman’s Own)
The merging of free direct and direct speech here echoes the develop-
ment in the speech and thought presentation model made recently by
Processes and Opinions 191
Semino and Short (2004) where these are no longer treated as separate
categories because there is no difference in the claim to faithfulness
between them. In other words, the attribution of direct speech to a third
party is perceived as being as faithful to the original utterance whether it
is signalled as direct speech or whether it is presented in a freer way. The
example here shows both free direct speech (but surgery is not a substitute
for weight loss) and direct speech (‘The only real treatment is to eat less and
exercise more,’ he stresses) as having similar functions, in persuading the
reader of the sense of these words. The free direct speech is attributed
to the doctor, but faithfulness does not seem to be important and one
might easily suspect that these are not his exact words. Equally, with the
direct speech the question of how accurate they are is almost irrelevant,
as their task is to make the reader take in a particular message, and the
attribution – to either writer or expert – is simply that of giving the
words more authority.
The texts in the data which are in a sense more like faithful direct
speech are those which are wholly ‘in’ the voice of a reader or advisor.
These include problem page letters and readers’ stories, though here
again the issue of faithfulness is less significant than the advisory
function:
normally not the woman or women at the centre of the text’s concerns.
This is not surprising in a first-person narrative, where other people’s
ideas are being reported, but the content of the indirect speech at times
clearly reflects some of the ideologies that we have been examining in
this book. The following, from Bliss, illustrate this reporting of male
speech:
I’ve told him to leave them alone, and to be less rough, but he says
all girls enjoy this and there must be something wrong with me.
A (boy)friend told me last night that he and his friends like ‘big, big, big’
breasts.
I’m worried when I have sex with a boy he’ll be put off, tell his mates
and I’ll be a laughing stock.
These extracts come from three different problem-page letters, but each
exhibits the problem as being with the viewpoint of a boy or boys, and
in particular what they are reported as saying – or what the writer is
afraid that they will say. It may be that here the faithfulness of what is
reported is more significant, even though the presentation is indirect.
Notice that the second example uses a small amount of direct speech
(‘big, big, big’) which seems to confirm the fact that the actual words
used are important, and can be very hurtful.
Summary
The analysis of transitivity processes in these texts indicates a tendency
for women not to have agency in relation to their bodies, except when
they overeat or, conversely, when they have been inducted into the
regime that will save them from themselves. Though the female protag-
onists appear as actors in material action processes relatively rarely, their
body parts have a life of their own and are frequently to be found ‘doing
things’. The nightmare quality of bodies that do things like sag or curve
of their own volition feeds the impetus to ‘get back into shape’, particu-
larly after a pregnancy, with the emphasis on returning to a shape that
preceded this life-changing event. Supervention and event processes, as
well as agentless passives also contribute to this sense of the woman
being out of control, with the main material action intention processes
occurring in the instructions for exercises to give her back this control.
The other aspect of transitivity that relates to the bodily experi-
ence of women is the important difference between being and having
Processes and Opinions 193
This study provides evidence from the early twenty-first century that
what magazines published for the mass market are presenting to us
and our daughters is an ideology of the body which emphasizes the
stable, youthful and clean (unleaky) body over the real lived experience
of women. The division of their bodies into parts that can be fixed
by medical technologies and the normative pressures towards being
heterosexual, maternal and slim face the women and girl readers of
these magazines. Perhaps, ironically, it is easier for those who read these
magazines who know they are not reflecting their own bodies – lesbians,
black women and the old (certainly anyone over 50) will not feel the
pressure in quite the same way as young, pale skinned and heterosexual
readers.
This concluding chapter aims to draw together some of the main
insights arising from this study of women’s magazines’ construction
of the female body at the turn of the twenty-first century. Though
I suspected at the outset that the enlightened view of the body that
I thought prevailed in the wake of the second-wave feminism of my
own generation might not be fully represented here, I was nevertheless
surprised at the extent to which the naturalization of certain attitudes
towards perfection and constructed naturalness – often, but not only
through surgery – had taken hold.
Teaching feminist linguistics to young female students in recent years
has been a wearying activity, where repeatedly confronting attitudes to
the body that appear to me part of a frightening backlash are presented
by the confident young women I see before me as a step forward, as
‘girl power’; the power to take control. This (as I see it) skewing of
the feminist ideology of equality by re-constructing femininity as an
attainable ideal body is one that is hard to counter, since women are
194
Conclusion 195
Fairclough’s laudable aim, then, was to educate the masses about one
of the causes of their own oppression. The direction that CDA took
following his and others’ early forays into a more socially engaged
linguistic practice was an inevitably more and more contexualized and
thus more sociological direction. Perhaps because of the political focus of
those concerned, the details of analytical techniques, particularly those
196 Textual Construction of the Female Body
concerned with the texts themselves, have not been thoroughly debated.
The discussion initiated by Widdowson (1996, 1998) and reviewed in
Chapter 1 did focus on the methodological circularity of CDA and to
that extent was more textually-focused. What has not happened is the
same kind of focus on methodology that, say, sociolinguistics itself, or
stylstics, have had, with the result that there is still not even a provi-
sionally agreed set of tools or procedures for practising CDA.
I hope that this study will in a small way contribute to the evolution of
CDA as a text-based practice, particularly in the kinds of situation where
there is a relatively stable assumed audience for the text concerned, as
in the current case. The questions about hegemony and reader response
remain, of course, and there is no doubt that some readers can and
sometimes will resist the ideological force of these magazines. These
issues remain to be investigated.
This view is upheld by the findings of this study to the extent that even
when I tried to concentrate on the naming of parts in the data, I found
that the more interesting features of language were in the modification
of names, not the choice of names themselves on the whole.
Summarizing the findings of this study, then, is more than a list
of names. It involves commenting on the rhetorical strategies used
to persuade readers that they ought to be like the exemplary women
in the data. It requires a reminder of the almost religious flavour to
some of the advice on slimming. It needs a reprise of the comparative
lack of material actions performed by women in the data, unless they
have passed through their damascene turning point or are giving sexual
pleasure to their (male) partner.
These summaries, however, belie the complexity of the data. Much
of it is surely intended to – and probably does – help women deal with
Conclusion 197
(Grogan et al. 1996) where she looked at ‘the effects on both men and
women of viewing same-gender, slim, conventionally attractive models’
and the results suggested that ‘these men and women felt signific-
antly less satisfied with their bodies after viewing attractive same-gender
models’ (Grogan 1999: 104). This study could be usefully replicated but
using controlled texts with different linguistic indicators of bodily ideo-
logy as demonstrated in the current study.
A less-empirical direction to turn would be to start to apply all of the
cognitive stylistic developments of the last few years to the question of
how readers respond to texts like these. Stockwell (2002) introduces the
range of approaches that have grown up in recent years from the basic
premise that it is legitimate to consider the likely cognitive effects of
reading text. Obvious applications, which have not yet been taken up
in by many researchers, are to investigate the possibilities for building
of text worlds (Werth 1999), adopting a text’s point of view (Simpson
1993), being affected by deictic shifting in texts (McIntyre 2006) and the
potential of blending as a process of assimilation (Dancygier 2005). In
other words, the same processes that are at work when we laugh or cry
with the characters of a novel are also in play when we read a problem
page or a reader’s slimming narrative. What is different is the context
and our assumption that there is a difference between reading fiction
and reading non-fiction.
At the other extreme from reader response studies, we can see a flour-
ishing of corpus-based studies in the wake of the development of ever
more powerful computers. Baker (2006) is just the latest in a number
of recent corpus-focused works in which questions of discourse context
as well as the minutiae of searchable textual features is considered.
A number of the findings of this study could usefully be followed
up by a corpus study using magazine data. These include the use of
definite articles versus possessive determiners in the premodification
of nouns referring to internal/external body parts; tracing the use of
superordinate opposites such as natural/unnatural, normal/abnormal and
healthy/unhealthy in women’s magazines; investigating opposition trig-
gers, such as but, to establish patterns of opposite use and creation in
these texts. A tagged corpus could also investigate structures like appos-
ition and listing to see where there are equivalences being created and
where the ambiguity between these structures may be ideologically inter-
esting. Naming conventions for body parts would also be easy to trace
by computer, and confirmation of the apparent link between large size
and terms like boobs2 would be relatively accessible.
Conclusion 199
200
Notes 201
8 Conclusion
1 It is no comfort to realize that men are travelling down a similar road, albeit
at a slower pace, and not in such numbers. A casual glance at the many male
magazines on display in W.H.Smith would confirm that male looks are also
beginning to be a major drain on their finances, and male anorexia and plastic
surgery are on the increase.
2 One interesting observation is the complete lack of the use of the word tits
in this data. It would, presumably, occur frequently in ‘lads’ magazines’ and
the differences could easily be studied in a corpus project. It is also interest-
ingly different in its sound symbolism, having a close front vowel and sharp
(unvoiced) plosive consonants, in contrast to the open back vowel and voiced
consonants of boobs. Thanks to Dan McIntyre for this latter point.
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actions 169, 170–6 Body Beautiful 33–4, 43, 53, 70, 77–8,
adjectives 64 83, 83–4, 84–5, 87, 91, 111–12,
choice of adjective vs noun 71–2 122–3, 127, 138, 139, 141–2,
choice and positioning 84–101 143–4, 145–6, 160–1, 165, 174,
advertising 44–5 179–80
blurring with other text types 46–8 body language 14
advice body parts 160–1
readers’ letters 31–4, 68–9 advice in sections 43–4
in sections 43–4 naming 64–5, 72–8
step-by-step 40–2 people as 70–1
agentless passives 180–2 transitivity and 175–6
agony aunts 31 body shape 42–3, 117–18
alpha-foetoprotein (AFP) test 116, perfection and attraction 142–4
120 Bordo, S. 21
analytical categories 16–17 boulomaic modality 187–8
analytical tools 11, 12–15 bras, measuring for 40–1, 126
Anderson, P. 53, 127 breasts 76–7, 177
anorexia 22–3, 72 enlargement 87, 111–12
antonymy 102–3, 104–5 sexual attractiveness and 140–2
see also contrasting size 93–6
anxiety 148–9 bulimia 22–3, 72, 177–8
apposition 103, 104, 107, 109, 148 Butler, J. 3, 21–2
assuming see presupposition
attraction 139–50 Cameron, D. 18, 196
see also sexual attractiveness categories
authority 183–8, 189–90 analytical 16–17
naming and describing people 70
bad/good distinction 84–5, 87–8, of women 42–3, 177
109–16 see also genre and text types
Bakare-Yusuf, B. 22 celebrities 53
Baker, P. 198 stories 34–9, 174–5
Barky, S. 21 Celin, Dr J.F. 33–4
Battersby, C. 22–3 cellulite 76
beauty 100 childbirth 111, 154
Berlin, B. 6 see also pregnancy
Best Diet Now 38 circular time 156–7
black women 24, 150 circumstantial relations 169
Bliss 31, 35, 44, 50, 55, 58, 67, 94, clarity 16
95, 107, 117, 132–3, 146, 147, clothing 83–4, 141–2
157, 159, 177, 178, 179, 181–2, code 4–7
184, 185, 188, 190, 192 cognition 169
bodily functions 18–19, 50 research into cognitive effects
naming 72–8 197–8
bodily hair 112, 145 cognitive semantics 22–3
bodily lived experience 22–3 Coleman, M. 34
206
Index 207