Textual Construction of the Female Body

by Lesley Jeffries

"Do women's magazines present us with the perfect female form as an ideal? Are they squeamish in the face of the more intimate of body parts? Do they treat 'real' women's bodies differently from celebrities' bodies? These questions, among others, are addressed in this book, which claims that women's magazines help to put readers under enormous pressure to conform to the ideology of the perfect body. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, Lesley Jeffries considers the different ways in which ideologies of the body are played out in the language of the magazine. This approach utilizes concepts such as naming, describing, contrasting and equating to access the hinterland between structure and meaning, and to map out the subtle ways in which texts can naturalize the ideology of the perfect female form."--Jacket.