This book examines the professional discourses produced in women’s media in Malaysia and the subject positions that they make available for career women. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis, critical stylistics and feminist conversation analysis, it identifies a range of gendered discourses around employment and motherhood that are underpinned by postfeminism and neoliberal feminism. Through close linguistic analysis of magazine and newspaper articles and radio talk, the study reveals that these discourses substitute balance, individual success, self-transformation and positive feelings for structural change, and entrench the very issues hindering gender workplace equality. Chapters discuss topics such as sexism, work-family balance, extensive and intensive mothering, breadwinning, gender stereotypes, beauty work, ‘synthetic sisterhood’, media practices and gender equality policies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of language and gender, discourse analysis, and media, communication and cultural studies as well as policy-makers, media practitioners and feminist activists.

Gendered Media addresses the broad topic of gender and media, where "gender" is not simply a shorthand for "woman" but also embraces masculinitiy/ies, queer, lesbian and gay identities. Karen Ross provides the necessary historical context against which to read recent sex- and gender-based media phenomena such as Big Brother, Terminator, girls' use of mobile phones, women news editors, the Wonderbra generation, the Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin phenomena, and so on. The book is an overview of the various aspects of gender and media in one volume. The book provides introductory overviews to the various themes around women, men, sexuality and the ways in which these attributes are cross-cut by other demographics such as age, ethnicity and disability. In this way, the book genuinely tries to provide a broad introduction to the ways in which gender, in all its facets, engages with media, in one accessible volume.

Gender, Media, and Organization: Challenging Mis(s)Representations of Women Leaders and Managers is the fourth volume in the Women and Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice series. This cross?disciplinary series from the International Leadership Association draws from current research findings, development practices, pedagogy, and lived experience to deliver provocative thinking that enhances leadership knowledge and improves leadership development of women around the world. This volume addresses the lack of critical attention in leadership research to how women leaders and professionals are represented in the media. The volume acts as a companion piece to a Seminar Series, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC), to address this gap in the research. The lack of research interrogation of gendered media representations of women leaders and professionals is a surprising omission given the wealth of evidence from stakeholders outside academia revealing that women, and women leaders, continue to be underrepresented across all forms of media outlet. This volume contributes to social change, equality, and economic performance by raising consciousness about women’s lack of representation in the media and challenges gendered mis(s)representations of women professionals and leaders in the media through the presentation of a range of empirical investigations and methodological approaches. The volume contributors use various theories and conceptualizations to problematize and analyze women’s limited representation in the media, and the gendered representations of women professionals and leaders. Together, the volume’s 14 chapters reflect the beginning of a rich, diverse, emergent strand of academic research that interrogates relationships between the media in its multiple forms and women’s leadership. Illuminating the positioning of women leaders and professionals as both complex and problematic, these chapters offer an important agenda for management and organization scholars. They attest to the need to describe and make visible women’s mis(s)representations in the media while drawing attention to the importance of situating these mis(s) representations in the broader social, economic, historical, cultural, and political context as a means to gain insight into their development and evolution. As a rich and diverse site of research, examination of the media calls for a broad methodological repertoire. The chapters in this book draw from multiple sources and include, among others, the development of thematic analysis to illuminate stereotypes, the use of critical discourse analysis to understand professional women’s experience, a rhetorical analysis of the covers of Time magazine, and an interrogation of the power dynamics manifested in the media’s practice of nicknaming women leaders. Gender, Media, and Organization is a first step in stimulating further research that poses critical questions concerning gendered and sexualized representations of women leaders in textual and visual forms, and considers the media’s influence on gender equality and social justice. The chapters offer fruitful avenues for future research to continue the momentum of challenging gendered media representations of women leaders and professionals.

Despite the inroads made by women in the professions, the glass ceiling remains a persistent barrier to their career progression. Using a range of interactional sociolinguistic data this publication investigates the crucial role that gendered discourses play in perpetuating workplace gender inequalities.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book presents an analysis of masculinity construction in a large corpus of women’s magazines, adopting a feminist Critical Stylistic approach to reveal how men are talked about and ‘sold’ to women as part of a successful performance of hegemonic femininity. This novel approach identifies women’s magazines as sites of ‘lad culture’ that perpetuate ideologies more commonly associated with the ‘laddism’ of male-targeted media. It examines how stereotypical images of men as naturally aggressive and obsessed with sex are promoted, as well as considering some of the ways in which women’s magazines contribute to the social construction of normative understandings of gender and sexuality more broadly. This engaging work will offer fresh insights to students and scholars of (Critical) Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Stylistics, and Gender and Communication Studies.

"Questions of gender are scarce in the mass communication literature and feminist media studies remain marginalized. Here is a strong effort to remedy the situation, an overview that initiates the newcomer and offers topics and methods for the previously initiated. . . . All levels." --Choice Feminists have long recognized the significance of the media as a forum for the expression of--or challenges to--the existing constructions of gender. In this broad-ranging analysis, Liesbet van Zoonen explores how feminist theory and research contribute to a fuller understanding of the media's multiple roles in the construction of gender in contemporary societies.