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‘Become the man that women desire’: gender identities and dominant discourses in email advertising language
Ist Teil von
Language and literature (Harlow, England), 2004-11, Vol.13 (4), p.291-305
Ort / Verlag
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: SAGE Publications
Erscheinungsjahr
2004
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Haraway (1985, 1991) presents 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 analysed 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 (Mills,
1995). 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.