Language and Mediated Masculinities: Cultures, Contexts, Constraints

by Robert Lawson

From television shows to the manosphere, and from alt-right communities to fatherhood forums, debates about masculinity have come to dominate the media landscape. What does it mean to be a man in contemporary society? How is masculinity constituted in different media spaces? This growing cultural tension around masculinities has been discussed and analyzed both for general audiences and in burgeoning academic scholarship. What has been typically overlooked, however, is the role that language plays in these mediated performances of masculinity.

In Language and Mediated Masculinities, Robert Lawson draws on data from newspapers, social media sites, television programs, and online forums to explore language and masculinities across a range of media contexts. The book offers a critical evaluation of the intersection between language, masculinities, and identities in contemporary society and addresses three key questions: How are masculinities constructed, in both public and private spheres, through linguistic and discursive strategies? How does language about masculinity and men affect (and recreate) gender ideologies in different social, political, and historical contexts? What might the language of men tell us about the state of contemporary gender relations in the twenty-first century? Lawson furthers our understanding of how language is implicated in (re)creating gender ideologies and how it shapes contemporary gender relations. Against a cultural backdrop of rising neoliberalism, ethnic nationalism, online radicalization,
networked misogyny, and fractious gender relations, this book is an important contribution to charting how language is used to monitor, evaluate, and police masculinities in online and offline spaces.

Genres: Linguistics

328 pages, Paperback

Published January 24, 2023

Reviews

[Yang · Rating 5 out of 5]

The up-to-date data in this book allow us to have a fuller landscape of masculinity in today’s society. Lawson carefully considers the ethical issues while collecting data, taking into account GDPR regulations, and shows his concerns about researchers’ well-being and mental health when working with sexist, racist, misogynistic, and hateful language. Additionally, he demonstrates the innovation of using conversations from TV series as a source of data for linguists, expanding the scope beyond mere scripts examined by scholars in cultural studies. Chapter 7 illustrates that this type of data can be approached using a combination of Corpus Linguistics, Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Multimodality Analysis, allowing for both quantitative and qualitative interpretations.

Overall, Lawson’s work has demonstrated the significance of exploring masculinity through the lens of linguistics, in this changing socio backdrop.

[Seath Tankard-Crook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific and quite frightening research based exploration of the way masculinity is expressed through different media. Although the trawls through the manosphere are quite depressing, there's a great chapter on Brooklyn Nine-Nine to cheer everyone up.