Speaking the gendered body: The performative construction of commercial femininities and masculinities via body-part vocabulary

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study illustrates how body-part vocabulary can contribute to linguistic gender construction. As a starting point, gendering mechanisms pertinent to body-part terms are delineated. On a theoretical plane, the study is indebted to poststructuralism and the notion of performativity in identity construction. Gender performativity via body-part vocabulary is explored by quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing material from a corpus of 2,000 advertisements from the two magazines,CosmopolitanandMen’s Health, yielding evidence on how two specific commercial versions of femininity and masculinity are discursively constructed. The findings are highly stereotypical and therefore bear witness to body-part lexemes as traces of dominant gender discourses whose gender indexicality can be strategically exploited. The concluding discussion advances a theorization of linguistic identity construction in line with performativity, which departs from more traditional variationist approaches that see identity as a pre-discursive fact. (Language and gender, body, advertising discourse, body-part vocabulary, poststructuralism, performativity)