摘 要

近年来，在父权余晖中女性力量觉醒的这一悖论之下，“有害男性气质”开始受到性别研究领域的广泛关注。本文以广告话语为例，通过分析传统男性气质在社会实践中构建的过程实现父权去自然化，阐明落后的性别意识形态所带来的问题。分析主要采用批评话语分析方法，揭示广告话语中语言要素和视觉要素相互配合，增强“有害男性气质”这一概念的作用。对于性别的传统定义作为广告话语的一个“元意义体系”在其发展历史中被不断增强，而几乎所有“有害男性气质”话语的特征也在广告之中公然呈现。无独有偶，新媒体环境下其他的传播媒介也在展现和宣扬大男子主义这一方面发挥作用，危害男性心理健康、煽动性别歧视，鼓励暴力文化。

关键词：批评话语分析；有害男性气质；广告话语

Abstract

"Toxic masculinity" is a term universally discussed in gender study in recent years concerning the asymmetry between women's rising power and the male hegemonic status quo. The paper is expected to be part of the efforts in denaturalizing patriarchy by analyzing how hegemonic masculinity is socially constructed, particularly in the case of advertising discourse, thus free women, men as well, from woes that are caused by unenlightened gender ideology. Critical Discourse Analysis is applied in exploring how verbal and visual items in advertising work together to contribute to the conception of male hegemony. The conventional views of "gender", as a "meta-meaning system" in advertising discourse, have been fixed throughout its history, and all features of the discourse of "toxic masculinity" are displayed broadly in commercial campaigns. "Toxic masculinity" presented and promoted in advertising, together with its distribution in other media content, is found exacerbating men's mental issues, sexism, and violence. In conclusion, "toxic masculinity" is pervasive and fundamental, but its study still lacks a comprehensive framework, especially outside the West.

Key Words: Critical Discourse Analysis; Toxic Masculinity; Advertising Discourse

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Background and Purpose 1

1.2 Research Significance 1

2 Methodology 2

3 Literature Review 3

3.1 Critical Discourse Analysis 3

3.2 Men's Study 4

4 A Discussion of Semiotic Features of Toxic Masculinity Discourse 6

4.1 Masculinity and Toxic Masculinity 6

4.2 Possibility of Detoxication by Discourse 8

5 An Analysis of Conceptual Distributions in the Advertising Masculine Discourse 9

5.1 A Brief History of Advertising Masculine Discourse 9

5.2 Ads and Gender Ideology 10

5.3 Ads' Contribution Model to Masculine Discourse 10

5.4 Recent Advertising Masculine Discourse 12

5.5 Constructed Toxic Masculinity in Social Reality 13

6 Conclusion 16

Appendix 18

A Discourse Analysis of Advertising Toxic Masculinity in the New Media

1 Introduction

1.1 Background and Purpose

The world today, with all its complexity and advancement, is seeing a broader shift of attitudes towards conventional masculinity. Amid the surge of white-collar occupation, for instance, men are losing their dominance in the family, workplace, and other fields, which urges the half population to review their identity and redefine their values. Domestic academia's failure to ride the tide of modern male research against the backdrop, however, partly exacerbates violent hatred and social inequality more than mental issues and prejudiced education for men. However, a large corpus of masculinity in advertising, which creates space for the collision between the old and new interpretation of gender, enables a critical discourse analysis of the set of norms. In the paper, the term "toxic masculinity" is defined, and discourse as a reflection of social practices is analyzed to reveal its significant features; as an element in the reality construction to explore how the ideology of hegemonic manhood is constructed and maintained in advertising and how such discursive poses a risk to men, women and the society as a whole.

1.2 Research Significance

First, with an awareness of the toxicity of conventional social norms, males can finally break the curse of "boys will be boys." The vision allows individual man to define manhood and choose a lifestyle for himself without being panicked by the failure to prove his masculinity. Freedom from ill-timed social norms is a secret sauce for dealing with men's mental health and "macho" anxiety. Second, it is blindingly obvious that "machismo" harms women and their relations with men. Detoxification of masculine norms is not an abdication of power to feminism but men's self-evolution aimed to adapt to the need of their loved ones, their mother, wife, and daughter. The rise of new male images, like caring and family-oriented, might as well help pull up the dropping marriage curve. Thirdly, "May world peace" is no longer a pipe dream. Male violence is not an automatic biological response but rooted in psychosocial and cultural assumptions. The construction of a strong but not brutal male identity helps quell anger and maintain peace.

2 Methodology

The present paper observes "toxic masculinity", particularly its presence in advertising discourse, from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). "Discourse" here refers to an abstract category of semiotic elements of society (Norman Fairclough 2001).

The first step is to define masculinity and toxic masculinity and distill the characteristics of discourse containing the conception; the second level of discursive practice reveals the conceptual distribution of toxic masculinity in advertising discourse by analyzing linguistic features in the text level, including lexical selection and sentence constituents, as well as color, shot angle, position, and other elements in illustrations and posters. All these features and production processes unveil ideologies that attribute to the social norm of hegemony, which is discussed in the final part.

Male hegemony, as the most ingrained convention constructed through linguistic, ideological, and institutional shackles, can be denaturalized by CDA by unveiling relationships between discourse, power, and ideology. Alarmingly, CDA is neither a research method nor a linguistic theory but offers a perspective to address the issue (Xin and Gao 2013). Therefore, interdisciplinary methods must be implemented as complements.

3 Literature Review

3.1 Critical Discourse Analysis

3.1.1 Discourse

The word 'discourse' originally means conversation and speech, and then was proposed by Firth in 1951 for the first time as a concept, which designates a language activity against a specific social and cultural backdrop. CDA defines "discourse" as a social practice that is shaped by social structure and reversely intervenes and constructs social reality (Xin and Gao 2013). Fairclough (2001) offers two interpretations of the term: First, ‘discourse’ in an abstract sense as a category which designates the broadly semiotic elements (as opposed to and in relation to other, non-semiotic, elements) of social life (language, but also visual semiosis, ‘body language’ etc).; 2. ‘discourse’ as a count noun, as a category for designating particular ways of representing particular aspects of social life, which is defined through its relation to and difference from two other categories, ‘genre’ and ‘style’. The first definition, universally applied in CDA, especially in Fairclough's three-dimensional model, is favored by the author since verbal and visual elements work together in advertising discourse to attract consumers by ideological influence.

3.1.2 A Brief History of CDA

Fowler initiates the idea of Critical Linguistics (CL) in his book, Language and Control. He views language practice as subjective and sentimental, which was previously denied by structuralism.

Fairclough first proposed CDA in 1989. Compared with CL, it focuses more on the function of languages in specific social issues and thus provides theories and methods for the research on relations between discourse and sociocultural development. Fairclough designed the three-dimensional model in analyzing the interrelationship among language, discourse, and social context in his book, Language and Power (1989).

Wodak is another esteemed scholar in CDA. She proposes the discourse-historical method on the principle that background information is involved in the discourse analysis (Wodak and Ludwig 1999, p. 12). Van Dijik devises a cognitive model that embodies CDA with psychological to unveil ideologies hidden in the discourse.

In the 21st century, CDA evolves into cognitive discourse analysis (Xin Bin and Gao 2013). Another major shift is the use of corpora linguistics, whereby typical 'linguistic pattern' can be extracted from a vast pool of discourse to analyze better the way reality is constructed through language and ideologies hidden behind it (Xin Bin and Gao 2013).

CDA jumped off in China since the 1990s. Xin Bin has conducted a series of critical analyses of news discourse since he publicized Language, Power and Ideology: Critical Linguistics (1996). Tian Hailong (2002) digs deep in critical analysis of political