Introduction

Introduction

Hypothesis: How is gender represented differently in men’s health magazines and women’s health magazines in order to market to the specific audience?

For my language investigation I will be exploring men’s health magazines and women’s health magazines in order to see how gender is represented differently to market the magazine to the specific gender audience. Within this investigation I will be analysing the language used and how it is different in each magazine to meet the gender audience and it has been used to convey the stereotypical men and women. To support my investigation I will be using some of the gender theorists such as Tannen, and Lakoff. I will also focus on the English Language frameworks: lexis, graphology, grammar, pragmatics and the discourse structure.

My interest in looking into gender became clear when studying gender in the AS course and therefore by continuing this and doing further research into this topic would give me a wider understanding of gender representation. Furthermore my investigation would be focusing on the content of the magazines, and having a passion for magazines I believe that this would be enjoying to look at. Throughout my investigation I will be using examples from the magazines in order to compare the language of men and women. By doing this investigation the aim will be to gain a wider understanding for gender representation as well as learning more about how magazines target to a specific audience through the different language frameworks.

I will be using a 2 very similar health magazines however one will be aiming at men and the other females, and both will market to the same age category.  By using the same aged audiences this will make it more comparable and fair when showing the representation.

From doing this investigation I would expect that men are portrayed to be very strong characters and focus on them being very sporty and strong, whilst the female magazines focus on how women want to look. I believe that this is what I will find when looking into gender as women today are very conscious of the way they look and often want to be portrayed as slim and pretty, however men always want to look very strong and masculine. In addition the language between the two genders will also be very different whilst the feminine language will be a lot less aggressive, the male language will seem very competitive as males are portrayed as competitive and want to be the best.

Methodology: For the investigation I will be using a men’s health magazine and female’s health magazine. This is because they will be focusing on the specific audience of the same age whilst having similar content. For my investigation I will be focusing on specific parts of the magazines which will mean I can compare both magazines easily. I will firstly compare the front covers of each magazine, and then the contents page and then finally similar content inside.