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Author: Tracy Lynn Rundstrom Williams Publisher: ProQuest ISBN: 9780549319757 Category : Communication Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Women in the first decade of the 21st century encounter competing ideologies of traditional femininity and empowered femininity. Language, in particular Discourse Analysis, provides a means for investigating what these ideologies, or discourses, are and how they are perpetuated. One source of language which encodes and perpetuates ideologies of femininity is women's magazines. As pervasive, monthly texts directed specifically at women, women's magazines provide a rich source of contemporary ideologies of femininity. Given the rise of health and fitness magazines over the past 20 years, it appears that one primary focus of contemporary femininity is the body. Previous research has found that the idealized female body today--an extremely thin body--encodes traditional femininity in that it represents social values of beauty, smallness, and others-orientation, but it also encodes empowered femininity in that it represents will-power, dedication, and strength. Using one fitness instructional text from eight different women's fitness magazines, an analysis of the rhetorical structure, clauses, and lexicon demonstrates how these texts perpetuate a hybrid discourse which actually integrates traditional and empowered femininity. This hybrid discourse appears as a seamless combination of the two "parent" discourses by placing itself in the middle of a continuum between traditional femininity and empowered femininity: emphasizing achievement but to a limited degree, and celebrating beautification and objectification. The hybrid discourse also supports a sociological trend of many women wanting to balance competing demands of portraying highly valued but traditionally male traits while still being seen as traditionally feminine.
Author: Tracy Lynn Rundstrom Williams Publisher: ProQuest ISBN: 9780549319757 Category : Communication Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Women in the first decade of the 21st century encounter competing ideologies of traditional femininity and empowered femininity. Language, in particular Discourse Analysis, provides a means for investigating what these ideologies, or discourses, are and how they are perpetuated. One source of language which encodes and perpetuates ideologies of femininity is women's magazines. As pervasive, monthly texts directed specifically at women, women's magazines provide a rich source of contemporary ideologies of femininity. Given the rise of health and fitness magazines over the past 20 years, it appears that one primary focus of contemporary femininity is the body. Previous research has found that the idealized female body today--an extremely thin body--encodes traditional femininity in that it represents social values of beauty, smallness, and others-orientation, but it also encodes empowered femininity in that it represents will-power, dedication, and strength. Using one fitness instructional text from eight different women's fitness magazines, an analysis of the rhetorical structure, clauses, and lexicon demonstrates how these texts perpetuate a hybrid discourse which actually integrates traditional and empowered femininity. This hybrid discourse appears as a seamless combination of the two "parent" discourses by placing itself in the middle of a continuum between traditional femininity and empowered femininity: emphasizing achievement but to a limited degree, and celebrating beautification and objectification. The hybrid discourse also supports a sociological trend of many women wanting to balance competing demands of portraying highly valued but traditionally male traits while still being seen as traditionally feminine.
Author: Tracy Rundstrom Williams Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443845469 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 105
Book Description
Women in the first decades of the 21st century encounter competing ideologies of femininity. This book traces the existence of two such ideologies – traditional femininity and resistant femininity – in language, in women’s magazines, and in relation to the body. The book then uses a Discourse Analysis of women’s fitness magazines to investigate how these ideologies, or discourses, are encoded and ultimately merged into a single discourse of femininity. The extremely thin female body encodes traditional femininity in that it represents social values of beauty, smallness, and others-orientation, but it also encodes resistant femininity in that it represents determination, dedication, and strength. Similarly, fitness instructional texts from women’s fitness magazines demonstrate a hybrid discourse which integrates the language of traditional femininity and the language of resistant femininity. This hybrid discourse, which the author calls empowered femininity, appears as a seamless combination of the two “parent” discourses by placing itself in the middle of a continuum between traditional femininity and resistant femininity through two themes: limited achievement and celebrating objectification. The empowered femininity discourse also supports a sociological trend of many women wanting to balance competing demands of portraying highly valued but traditionally male traits while still being seen as traditionally feminine.
Author: Saumya Sharma Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 0429960379 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
This book explores multiple facets of femininity for marriage in India. Using language as an entry point, it looks at how and why media representations of gender identities are constructed the way they are. It works with a unique synthesis of second-wave feminist discourse and empirical linguistic research to look at how the social institution of marriage becomes the site of interaction between language, ideology, psyche and culture. This volume also brings together the personal histories and views of women who discuss how media, modernity and social norms shape their ideas about marriage and selfhood. Deconstructing perceptions of femininity in contemporary India, the book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, gender studies, linguistics, media and cultural studies and psychoanalysis.
Author: Natalie Jovanovski Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319589253 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 213
Book Description
This volume addresses how the rhetoric of feminist empowerment has been combined with mainstream representations of food, thus creating a cultural consciousness around food and eating that is unmistakably pathological. Throughout, Natalie Jovanovski discusses key texts written by women, for women: best-selling diet books, popular cookbooks produced by female food celebrities, and iconic feminist self-help texts. This is the first book to engage in a feminist analysis of body-policing food trends that focus specifically on the use of feminist rhetoric as a harmful aspect of food culture. There is a smorgasbord of seemingly diverse gender roles for women to choose from, but many encourage breaking gender norms and embracing a love of food while perpetuating old narratives of guilt and restraint. Digesting Femininities problematizes the gendering of food and eating and challenges the reader to imagine what a genderless and emancipatory food culture would look like.
Author: R. K. Devlin Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: Category : Health & Fitness Languages : en Pages : 694
Book Description
This encyclopedia explores exercise and physical activity from a variety of angles, including anatomy and exercise science, health benefits and risks, the wide array of sports and recreational activities available, and the sociocultural context of physical fitness. Exercise and Physical Activity: From Health Benefits to Fitness Crazes is a one-volume encyclopedia featuring more than 200 entries that cover a multitude of exercise-related topics. Content is divided across five broad themes: anatomy, exercise science, sports and activities, health benefits and risks, and exercise and society. The anatomy theme includes entries on all the major skeletal muscle groups and associated connective tissues. Within the exercise science theme, entries focus on topics within the fields of physiology, kinesiology, and sports psychology. Profiles of more than 70 sports and recreational activities are included. Entries under the theme of health benefits and risks explore the effects of exercise on many of the body's physiological processes and related systems, as well as specific sports-related injuries. Exercise and society entries profile influential individuals and organizations, as well as fitness trends. Together, these themes support a holistic understanding of exercise, encompassing both the theoretical and the practical.
Author: Eileen Kennedy Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136883681 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
Exercise for women is a heavily-laden social and embodied experience. While exercise promotion has become an increasingly visible part of health campaigns, obesity among women is rising, and studies indicate that women are generally less physically active than men. Women’s (lack of) exercise, therefore, has become a public concern, and physiological and psychological research has attempted to develop more effective exercise programs aimed at women. Yet women have a complex relationship with embodiment and physical activity that is difficult for quantitative scientific approaches to explore. This book addresses this neglect by providing a much-needed feminist, qualitative social analysis of women and exercise. The contributors, drawn from across Europe and North America, investigate the ways women experience exercise within the context of the global fitness industry. All the authors take a specifically feminist perspective in their analysis of the fit, feminine body, exploring media images and the global branding of fitness products, the relationship between exercise and fat, the construction of physical activity within health discourse, and the lived experience of the exercising body. The collection explores the diversity of women’s experiences of exercise in relation to age, ethnicity and body size. The book is essential for anyone interested in health promotion, sport and exercise or the social and cultural study of gender and embodiment.
Author: Shari L. Dworkin Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814719678 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
Dworkin and Wachs analyze 10 years of health and fitness magazines to uncover how bodies are made in popular culture Are you ripped? Do you need to work on your abs? Do you know your ideal body weight? Your body fat index? Increasingly, Americans are being sold on a fitness ideal—not just thin but toned, not just muscular but cut—that is harder and harder to reach. In Body Panic, Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs ask why. How did these particular body types come to be “fit”? And how is it that having an unfit, or “bad,” body gets conflated with being an unfit, or “bad,” citizen? Dworkin and Wachs head to the newsstand for this study, examining ten years worth of men’s and women’s health and fitness magazines to determine the ways in which bodies are “made” in today’s culture. They dissect the images, the workouts, and the ideology being sold, as well as the contemporary links among health, morality, citizenship, and identity that can be read on these pages. While women and body image are often studied together, Body Panic considers both women’s and men’s bodies side-by-side and over time in order to offer a more in-depth understanding of this pervasive cultural trend.
Author: Katherine Dashper Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing ISBN: 1839829389 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
This volume unpicks mega-events as gendered entities and showcases how they both position athletes in relation to one of two binary sex positions and also push the boundaries of what we see and accept as a recognisably gendered male or female body.
Author: Precilla Y. L. Choi Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 113470822X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 132
Book Description
Why do fewer women than men exercise? What is the ‘sporty’ type? The fitness boom of the last two decades has led to many people incorporating exercise into their lifestyles through activities such as jogging and aerobics. However, whilst many physical and psychological health benefits have been documented, far too few people actually take part in enough exercise to glean significant improvements, and this is much more a problem for women and men. Femininity and the Physically Active Woman explores one reason many women offer for their lack of involvement in sport and exercise – that they are not the ‘sporty’ type. Precilla Y.L. Choi argues that the ‘sporty’ type is masculine, and to determine how this notion might affect women’s self-perceptions, she critically examines the experiences of women athletes, bodybuilders, recreational exercisers and girls’ physical education. What emerges is the importance of visible differences between women and men, in terms of muscularity, strength and agility in order to maintain the gender order. Thus if a girl or woman wishes to play the masculine game of sport she most do so in conformity with a number of patriarchal rules which ensure she is first and foremost recognised as heterosexual feminine being. Contributing to a psychology of the physically active woman by examining women’s experiences from critical feminist and gendered perspectives, Femininity and the Physically Active Woman will be of great interest to students, researchers, practitioners and teachers from a range of disciplines.
Author: Tracy Lynn Rundstrom Williams
Author: Tracy Lynn Rundstrom Williams
Author: Tracy Rundstrom Williams
Author: Saumya Sharma
Author: Natalie Jovanovski
Author: R. K. Devlin
Author: Eileen Kennedy
Author: Shari L. Dworkin
Author: Katherine Dashper
Author: 
Author: Precilla Y. L. Choi