SAGE Journal Articles

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Louise Mullany. ‘Become the Man that Women Desire’: Gender Identities and Dominant Discourses in Email Advertising Language. Language and Literature, November 2004; vol. 13, 4: pp. 291–305.

Haraway (1985, 1991) presented a futuristic, utopian vision of a gender-free space as the distinction between human and machine becomes indistinct in the age of global technologization. This article explores how such an idealized perspective corresponds with the current reality of gender identity in cyberspace. The fluidity of gender identities is examined by conducting a linguistic analysis of the strategies advertisers use to address their targeted subjects via electronic mail (email). The option of gender neutrality is available within email as a user’s gender identity can be concealed by a non-gender specific user name, and data are analyzed from a series of messages sent to a non-gender specific email account hosted by one of the world’s largest email service providers. While the fluidity of gender identity can be clearly observed, a quantitative analysis reveals that the targeted gender identity is one of heterosexual masculinity. Despite recent statistics that women now use the Internet just as frequently as men, disembodied advertisers can be viewed constructing fictional personae to entice male recipients to pay for heterosexual pornography or products to enhance male heterosexual performance. When female gender identity is invoked within these messages, women are viewed as passive and consumable. Therefore, instead of producing an environment where distinctions between genders are diminished as Haraway hoped, binary oppositions are intensified as the dominant gender discourses of femininity and masculinity are produced and reproduced through these messages.

Christopher A. Chávez. Linguistic Capital and the Currency of Spanish in Hispanic Advertising Production. Journal of Communication Inquiry, January 2014; vol. 38, 1: pp. 25–43.

This study examines how advertising intended for U.S. Latinos is indelibly shaped by the interaction between Hispanic agencies and their English monolingual clients. Although previous research on Hispanic advertising has typically focused on the psychological state of the speaker, less attention has been paid to the social consequences of speech. Using Bourdieu’s theory of practice as an analytical framework, qualitative interviews were conducted with 34 advertising practitioners. The testimonies reveal that in limited contexts within the production of Hispanic advertising, practitioners’ knowledge of Spanish serves as a form of linguistic capital, which they have been able to successfully convert into economic capital. However, the value associated with speaking Spanish is relatively constrained due to language ideologies at play in the larger social space. In this class-stratified, multilingual professional community, more powerful English monolinguals maintain strict control over Spanish language messages. This is made possible by formal and informal practices built into the production process.