SPEAKING THE GENDERED BODY: THE PERFORMATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF COMMERCIAL

FEMINITIES AND MASCULINITIES VIA BODY-PART VOCABULARY

Author: HEIKO MOTSCHENBACHER
Gender and Discourse Interactive Theory
Gender is accomplished in discourse. Womanly and manly behavior is not dictated by
biology but rather is socially constructed. And a fundamental domain in which gender is constructed is
language use. Discourse is always embedded in a particular social context. For some scholars, with
regard to gender, this means addressing the relationship between gender inequality and the language
practices of a society.
INTRODUCTION
• The body speaks for itself or has its own kind of language (body language) which is different
from spoken and written language.
• This article will discuss how the body is also discursively gendered when it is not yet
personalized, and therefore is more an aggregation of individual body parts.
• The deconstructed gendered body can no longer serve as the foundation on which to build an
identity category.
• The main part of the present study will primarily refer to the body from the outside perspective,
but links with the inside perspective are anything but absent.
• The approaches used are deconstructionalists and post-structuralism/post-structuralist

 In accordance with the view of gender as performative, it makes more sense to compare
linguistic gendering with varieties defined according to use (such as registers and styles).
 Gender identities can be linguistically evoked can work only because individual
performances are embedded in an infinite history of continuing citation and re-citation, in
 which they have achieved the status of hegemonic discourses that defy the notion of a
specific, personal origin.
 The performative indexicality of linguistic signs is a property that might be inflected by
context.
 The article highlighted that most studies in language and gender research have
concentrated on individual gender performances, while very few have tried to tackle
performativity as it relates to language practices.
 The field of language and sexuality, however, has recently witnessed academic attempts to
overcome this deficit.

MAIN PROBLEM
How does the body-part vocabulary contribute to linguistic gender construction?
SUB PROBLEMS
1. Does body representation in advertising language contribute to a gendered discourse in the
two magazines analyzed?
2. Which parts of the body seem to be more and which less involved in gender performance?
3. How does the lexical, social, and referential gender of body-part terms play a role in this
process?

DISCUSSION
A great deal of physical gender representation in advertising takes place visually
through the picturing of bodies and body parts. However, the focus of the following work will be
specifically on the linguistic construction of the body to represent the gender symbolization also works
on a linguistic plane in advertising. Magazine genres are stereotypically gendered
Material was gathered from Cosmpolitan and Men’s Health, since both belong among
the most succesful titles of their kind and are published in many international editions, creating a
worldwide virtual community of readers. The advantage of choosing Men’s Health for a comparison
with Cosmpolitan lies primarly in the fact that the former focuses on the male-self image as opposed
to other men’s magazines, which in turns brings it closer to the format of women’s magazine.
For the purposes of the linguistic analysis, the makeup of these magazines ensures that body-parts
terms Cosmpolitan almost describe the female body and those in Men’s Health the male body.
Gendered Body Ideals in Advertising
What might be universal about gendered representational practices in advertising is the
fact that all of them are extremely normative and require recipients to engage in gendering work
(through consumption of of the products advertised) in order to pass as a “real” woman or man. Thus,
it is not makeup or car that is offered, but femininity and masculinity via these products. Talking more
specifically about body terminology, advertising in its own interests- set body standards to live up and
tries to manipulate recipients into thinking that their bodies are less than perfect.
When looking at the lexemes denoting “body shape” in advertising corpus, it becomes
immediately clear that gendered body symbolization in this context resembles a binary rather than a
continual representation, example is the word physique exclusively used in mens health, whereas
figures is used seven times in cosmopolitan. Quantitavely, the word body is a common lexeme in both
sub-corpora. The difference between Cosmo and Mens Health is not significant and shows that
nowadays not only women are normatively required to take care of their bodies.
A closer look at the kinds of compounds that occur, however points to an essential
qualitative difference, the semantic domain “personal hygiene” (body wash, body lotion, or body spray)
occurs mostly in Cosmopolitan, whereas those belonging to “sports” occurs mostly in Men’s Health.
This suggest that the supposed path of the ideal body differs men and women. According to the
advertising, women are supposed to adorn and beautify their bodies, while men are supposed to
exercise them.
Linguistic Gendering Via Body Part Vocabulary
Six lexical fields that are most interesting with respect to gender performance
Limbs Face
Hair Muscles
Skin Trunk
Highest overall frequencies, and most of their field numbers represent body parts that are
neither primary nor secondary physical gender characteristics. There are two types of semantic
relation used in the paper, first is Hyponymy, a kind of relationship in the taxonomical heirarchy, and
the other one is Meronymy, a part to whole relationship.

limbs hair skin face muscles trunk

Arms, leg Stubble, Pores, folds, Face Abs, biceps, Hips, waist, groin,
strands, follicle, skin flaws (cheeks, quads, six pack, back, umblical,
hair roots (blemishes, forehead, triceps. lunar, bikini line,
calluses, nose, nasal). genitals
lines, facial (lips,
pimples, scar, eyes, chin,
spots, temporal)
wrinkles)

Drastic binary One has to Skin, is Face is an Muscles, in This field is

gender distinguish extremeley are of accordance to particularly
construction, between important in considerable gender relevant in gender
considering that all different types the importance stereotypes- is construction
healthy human of hair, construction for the clearly more because here lie
beings possess because they of the female female body important for what are widely
cuticles, fingertips are related body in ideal in the construction known as primary
and fingernails, no differently to Cosmo. cosmo. of the ideal male physical gender
matter what the ideal body in Men’s characteristics.
gender. female and Health, than in
male body. It is obvious any other fields.
from looking
Finger parts and at this field,
 legs seem to play Dominant especially the Specific kind of
an important role gender female body muscles are
for the discourses set is symbolized differentiated
symbolization of long hair head by negative exclusively in
the ideal female hair as a body images MH.
body in Cosmo, but feminine and lexemes.
not of a male body, beauty ideal,
on the other hand, whereas men
leg part, knee, and typically are
foot occur supposed to
significantly in MH, wear short
together with the hair.
footparts. These
are important for
the construction of There is a high
the Male body, frequency of
because they are hair in Cosmo
functionally due to the
essential for doing positive
sports symbolization
of long female
scalp hair,
along with the
hair root and
hair tip, which
also points to
long hair.
Beard occurs
exclusively in
MH.

CONCLUSION
 Gendered advertising language in linguistic performativity of identities illustrates how identities
can be strategically constructed even by purely verbal means and independently of the
biological characteristics of a speaker or writer.
 Linguistic gendering through the use of body-part vocabulary is effective because of the
gendered performativity associated with many body-part terms.
 This performative mechanism is neither a matter of free choice nor of production only
o Normativity might have a damaging influence on people’s subjective image of their own
bodies, which they may see as inadequate if they do not conform to commercially
constructed bodies.
 CRITIQUE
 Language is applied differently to describe men and women. It then constructs gender as the
embodiment of either an individual or a society’s perspective.
 Gender construction in terms of lexemes is realized if and only if the particular person involved
recognizes it as intelligibly intelligent construction.
 Hypothetically speaking, gender, then, is performative and relates to wider cultural processes.

Presented by GROUP 4 ABEL 2B

Arriza Salazar
Jayvee Aguilar
Camie Jane Laote
Mary Faty Logronio
Andrea Bariso