Bethan Benwell

Ironic Discourse Evasive Masculinity in Men’s Lifestyle Magazines

This article takes as its textual focus the U.K. men’s lifestyle magazine and explores the notion that irony is strategically employed in the partial constitution (and evasion) of a specific masculine identity. It is frequently claimed that irony is a prominent feature of the postmodern condition, with its slippery ability to disclaim allegiances to particularpolitical or critical positions; within the men’s lifestyle magazine, we can see how irony functions both to give voice to reactionary and antifeminist sentiments and to continually destabilize the notion of a coherent and visible masculinity. The article focuses on both irony as a trope and irony as a mode of existence in the pursuit of describing the ambiguity inherent in magazine masculinity, and it engages with close textual and linguistic analysis of a magazine feature and an interview.

‘Lucky this is anonymous.’ Ethnographies of reception in men’s magazines: a ‘textual culture’ approach

In this article I address the contribution that a study of reader reception might make to our understanding of the cultural meanings of the discourses to be found in and around men’s magazines. Reception is a cultural site often neglected in linguistic analyses of popular cultural texts, which are commonly treated as discrete, autonomous and ahistorical within these approaches. Conversation Analysis of unstructured interviews with magazine readers is one means of accessing contexts of reception, which, unlike many ethnographic approaches, is properly reflexive about the ontological status of its data. The drawback of a strict ethnomethodological approach, however, is its limited ability in recreating the original context of reading: the interview is arguably a situated account rather than a transparent report of reception. In order to expand the terms of ‘context’ for these interviews, therefore, the article proposes a triangulated method whereby the discourses and categories identified in talk can be intertextually linked (and indeed are sometimes intertextually indexed within the talk itself) to other communicative contexts in the circuit of culture, such as the magazine text, media debates, editorial identities and everyday talk. This ‘textual culture’1 approach to the analysis of popular culture effectively aims to analyse with ethnographic breadth and in discursive depth, the various, intersecting sites of culture within which the material text is formed - of which reception serves as the focal point for this article - and mirrors recent developments in Critical Discourse Analysis.

NEW SEXISM?: Readers’ responses to the use of irony in men's magazines

A common motif of “new” forms of masculinity in recent years has been the adoption of what have been termed “new sexism” discourses. This involves the legitimation of male power in new and creative ways, often by the strategic accommodation or negotiation of liberal, progressive or feminist discourses. This paper examines one particular “new sexism” device—irony. Irony is a versatile device in mens magazines which allows a speaker to articulate both anti-feminist sentiments as well as engage in discourses of femininity, whilst disclaiming responsibility for or ownership of both. This strategic use of irony in relation to the expression of sexist or homophobic views is a common device in the “new lad” magazines examined in this paper. Compounding the slipperiness of the ironic utterance is the acknowledgement that it may be read variously by different audiences. For this reason, my analysis attempts to move beyond the rather narrow textual focus normally favoured in language analysis, to consider the multiple, often contradictory responses produced by audiences. The paper examines firstly, the reading habits and dispositions of two groups of dedicated readers of mens magazines. Then the paper considers detailed responses to the texts under discussion and specifically the meaning of the ironic utterance. The lack of consensus elicited by such an exercise arguably problematises our initial reading of irony as a device of “new sexism”.

University Students Resisting Academic Identity

A commonly documented phenomenon in educational settings in the UK has been students’ resistance to academic tasks and identity (e.g. Felder and Brent 1996; Francis, 1999, 2000; Willis 1977). This resistance tends to take the form of challenging the teacher, joking and doing the minimum amount of work necessary. It has chiefly been researched within the compulsory sector and tends to assert an association between resistance and masculinity, although recent studies suggest a similar pattern among girls (Pichler 2002). In an interview-based study of London schoolboys, Phoenix and Frosh (2001) suggested that antagonism to school-based learning was influential in determining pupil popularity. In a similar study carried out with Australian pupils, Martino (2000: 102) suggested that pupils resisted the teacher’s task and the institutional agenda by preferring to ‘muck around’ in class, ‘give crap’ and ‘act cool’.

'A pathetic and racist and awful character': ethnomethodological approaches to the reception of diasporic fiction

In this article I report on findings from an ongoing research project into the activities of a transnational range of book groups reading the same series of ‘diasporic’ novels. Rather than relying upon speculations as to how readers respond to text-immanent cues, this project conceives reading as a socially situated, localized activity, contingent upon the context in which it is produced. Empirical approaches to literary reception (whether historical, experimental, or ethnographic) have rarely taken full account of the conditions in which reception data is produced. An ethnomethodological analysis of transcribed book group sessions illuminates the ‘social order’ of particular book groups, their implicit values and systems of accountability, and their careful management and negotiation of subjective experience. This contributes to a complex understanding of the processes of literary interpretation, allowing linguistic studies of reading to complement sociological reception studies.

Common-sense anti-racism in book group talk: The role of reported speech

This article explores the rhetorical accomplishment by British book group members of anti-racist identities through their discussions of fictional texts in exploring themes of race and immigration. ‘Common-sense anti-racism’ is a social action or stance that is presented as self-evidently taken by speakers, yet explicitly flagged at the same time. Speakers in book group discussions routinely display enlightened, anti-racist views, principally by invoking the figure of the ‘racist other’ and their reported speech. Many of the examples of reported speech do not involve explicit markers of quotation or shifts in footing, meaning that the attribution of certain utterances to a racist ‘other’ relies on an assumption of shared values. The article questions why anti-racism tends to be packaged as an accountable matter in need of some impression management in the way that racism often is, and concludes that this is linked to the way in which it operates in contexts where anxieties around issues of race and racism continue to exist.

Keeping “Small Talk” Small in Health-Care Encounters: Negotiating the Boundaries Between On- and Off-Task Talk

ABSTRACT Health-care interactions often involve social, relational, small-talk, or “off-task” sequences that are largely topically distinct from the institutional business of the setting. In this article we examine data from preoperative assessment sessions in a Scottish hospital in order to explore the transitions between on- and off-task talk. In the majority of instances, the movement between social and medical talk is routine and unproblematic, and both nurse and patient orient to the boundaried nature of off-topic talk. However, occasionally patients’ social talk evolves into personal disclosure and troubles telling that may disrupt the institutional agenda and that can lead to difficulties in the negotiation of sequence closure. Data are in British English.

Traumatic journeys; understanding the rhetoric of patients’ complaints

BackgroundResearch on patients’ complaints about healthcare has tended to focus on the typology of complaints and complainants to homogenise complaints and better understand safety implications. Nonetheless, complaints speak to a broader spectrum of harm and suffering that go beyond formal adverse events. Complaints about care episodes can take considerable time and effort, generate negative energy and may leave a dogged ‘minority’ embittered.MethodsThis study provides an overview of the process and rhetoric of how patients formulate written complaints. We collated a data corpus comprising 60 letters of complaints and their responses over a period of one month. This paper focuses on the complaint letters only. National Health Service (NHS) Complaint Department staff in a healthcare area in the United Kingdom (UK) anonymized the letters. We took a broad qualitative approach to analysing the data drawing upon Discourse Analysis focusing on the rhetorical and persuasive strategies employed by the complainants.ResultsWhat patients complained about related to how they complained, with complainants expending considerable effort in persuasive rhetoric that sought to legitimise the complaint drawing upon different sources of epistemic authority. The complainants struggle to be an ‘objective’ witness as the complaint evolves from an implicit neglect narrative to increasing ‘noise’ with other features such as Direct Reported Speech used to animate and authenticate the narrative.Many of the complex complaints appeared to evidence some psychological distress. This was associated with the complainants’ reports of experiencing cumulative poor health care and their repeated failure to resolve the complaint. The subsequent delicate and potentially stigmatized formal act of complaining was a source of additional distress.ConclusionsComplaints are involved narratives often predicated on the expectation they will not be given due credence. Health care staff may benefit from understanding how complaints are formulated to be able to more appropriately address the focus and extent of patients’ grievances from the outset and therefore, reduce the considerable associated harm.

Reading in the Literary Marketplace

White Teeth, Brick Lane and Small Island come to our readers humming with meanings derived from the marketplace. Zadie Smith has been dentified as ‘the perfect package for a literary marketing exercise’ (Squires, 2007: 179), with ‘demographics at her fingertips’. Two years later Monica Ali was dubbed ‘a new Zadie Smith’ (Lane, 2003: np), while in 2005 the conspicuous success of Andrea Levy’s novel made it ‘tempting’ for a Guardian newspaper reviewer ‘to see Small Island as this year’s White Teeth’ (Allardice, 2005: np). The same reviewer goes on to explain that ‘[l]ike Monica Ali or Zadie Smith, Levy, the daughter of first-generation immigrants, “a bastard child of the empire”? draws on growing up with a dual cultural heritage’. The reviewer’s quotation (‘a bastard child of the empire’) comes from Salman Rushdie, the celebrity author who famously endorsed Smith’s debut on the front cover as a novel with ‘bite’. Bite, a term that suggests both a certain narrative astringency and that the text is somehow al dente, or perfectly cooked for consumption, later became a buzzword to describe a whole host of contemporary novels, including Small Island: ‘Levy’s simple, measured prose is capable of delivering quite a bite’ (Tripney, 2005: np).

Reading and Realism

We begin this chapter with a series of discrepant responses to the end of Monica Ali’s novel. To briefly locate these readings within what Alastair Cormack (above) calls the ‘developmental narrative of realism’: in the preceding pages, the protagonist Nazneen has been led blindfold through the streets of London on a surprise all-female outing to the skating rink. At this point Nazneen has left her husband and her lover, along with the domestic drudgery of a high rise flat in London’s Tower Hamlets. As the narrative progresses Nazneen has steadily taken control of her own destiny (fate), exploring the London beyond her claustrophobic flat, starting work in the garment industry, having an affair with a local activist (Karim), and by the end of the novel freeing herself from the marital home and setting up her own business in Brick Lane.