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2. DISCOURSE Rosalind Gill

Overview

Discourse analysis is the name given to a variety of approaches that take language and social con- structions as their object of study. Discourse means all forms of talk and text—it includes media texts of all kinds, as well as interview data and naturally occurring conversation. Strictly speaking, there is no single “discourse analysis,” but many different styles of analysis which all lay claim to the name. What these perspectives share is a rejection of the realist notion that language is simply a neutral means of reflecting or describing the world, and a belief in the central importance of language and representations in constructing social life. Discourse analysis became a popular approach in media and communications studies from the 1990s onwards, reflecting a wider “turn to language” across the humanities and social sciences, along with the influence of poststructural- ist ideas. Types of discourse analysis used in studying media include Foucauldian discursive analysis, critical discourse analysis (CDA) and conversation analysis. Discourse analysis has close intellectual connections to ideological and narrative analysis, as well as to broad thematic analysis and qualitative approaches more generally.

This chapter is structured as follows. First, it will provide a brief intellectual history of discourse analysis, situating it in relation to other method- ologies in media studies. It will examine a range of different approaches to analyzing discourse and introduce their key terms and concepts. Next it will discuss one particular approach to discourse analy- sis that I have used in a variety of types of research, including studies of media organizations, analy- ses of media texts, and interview-based audience research. To illustrate the nature of the approach

and the kinds of findings/knowledge it generates, I will focus on one case study, analyzing sex and relationships advice in women’s magazines. I will conclude by reflecting on the challenges and dilemmas of using this approach in media and communications research.

History and Intellectual Context

The extraordinarily rapid growth of interest in dis- course analysis in recent years is both a consequence and a manifestation of the “turn to language” that has occurred across the arts, humanities, and social sciences in the wake of the influence of structural- ism, poststructuralism, and postmodernist ideas. Discourse analysis belongs to a group of approaches that are sometimes called social constructionist. Key features of these perspectives include:

1. a critical stance towards taken-for-granted knowledge, and a skepticism towards the view that our observations of the world unproblematically yield its true nature to us (a perspective known as positivism);

2. a recognition that the ways in which we com- monly understand the world are historically and culturally specific and relative;

3. a conviction that knowledge is socially constructed—that is, our current ways of understanding the world are not determined by the nature of the world itself but by social processes;

4. a commitment to exploring the ways that knowledges—the social construction of people, phenomena or problems—are linked to actions.1

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The terms “discourse” and “discourse analysis” are contested. To claim that one’s approach is a discourse analytical one, therefore, does not neces- sarily tell anybody much. Instead, it may be helpful to identify some different approaches to discourse analysis and to connect them with distinct intellectual traditions. Here, I discuss three contrasting traditions of discourse analysis that have been used in media research.

First, there is the variety of positions known as critical linguistics, social semiotics, or critical discourse analysis.2 Compared with many types of discourse analysis, this tradition has a close associ- ation with the discipline of linguistics, but its clearest debt is to semiotics and structuralist analysis. The central semiotic idea is that a word’s sense derives not from any inherent feature of the relationship between that word and the thing it represents—the signifier and signified—but from the system of oppo- sitions in which it is embedded. This idea posed a fundamental challenge to “word-object” accounts, which viewed language as a process of naming. This insight has been developed in recent critical linguistic work, which has an explicit concern with the relationship between language and power. The critical linguistic tradition is also well-represented in media studies, particularly in research on news, and has highlighted—amongst other things—the ways in which particular linguistic forms can have dra- matic effects upon how an event or phenomenon is understood—not simply the choice of individual terms (such as “terrorist” versus “freedom fighter”) but also distinctions between active and passive voice, or agent deletion, e.g., the difference between “Police shoot dead demonstrators” versus “Demonstrators shot dead”. The critical linguistic approach has a strong interest in ideology3—understood as the ways in which power and meaning intersect4— and has been popular amongst feminist media researchers,5 as well as anti-racist scholars and those who are interested in critical race theory. Most recently it has been developed within the field of com- munication studies into a broader approach known as multimodal analysis that allows the researcher to look not just at language but at sound and image, too, attempting to offer a systematic approach to analyzing meaning in media texts such as television programs or Facebook pages.6 Although not referred to as multimodal, this approach to discourse analy- sis has a longer tradition within film, television, and game studies, where audiovisual media are central objects of study.

A second broad tradition of discourse analysis is that influenced by speech act theory, ethnometh- odology, and conversation analysis.7 These perspectives stress the functional or action orienta- tion of discourse and are interested in looking in detail at the organization of social interaction. The approach emerged out of micro-sociology and has made a significant contribution to understanding how sense and meaning are produced out of the everyday messiness of talk—punctuated as it is by hesitations, false starts, deviations, “ums,” and “ers.” Conversation analysis offers insights into how we “do” things with words, e.g., make excuses, apologize, offer an invita- tion, practice sarcasm. It has been taken up in media and communications studies to research mediated interactions such as radio phone-ins or talk shows.8

The third body of work that sometimes identi- fies itself as discourse analysis is that associated with poststructuralism. Poststructuralists have broken with realist views of language and rejected the notion of the unified coherent subject, which has long been at the heart of Western philosophy. Among poststructur- alists, Michel Foucault is notable for characterizing his genealogies of discipline and sexuality as discourse analyses. In contrast to most discourse analysis, this work is not interested in the details of spoken or writ- ten texts, but in looking historically at discourses. Foucault’s methodology has had a significant influ- ence on some media analysts. His work rejected mono-causal explanations, and he attempted to write “histories of the present” that disrupt the obviousness of the way things are. As he put it, “the genealogist tries to rediscover the multiplicity of factors and pro- cesses which constitute an event in order to disrupt the self-evident quality ascribed to events through the deployment of historical concepts and the description of anthropological traits.”9 A good example of this approach in media studies is Sean Nixon’s genealogy of the development of new sexualized ways of repre- senting the male body, which showed how emergent representational practices for signifying masculinity had multiple points of origin (e.g., in fashion, adver- tising, magazines) and were not the outcome of one single change.10 To do a discursive analysis in this Foucauldian sense, then, is to be interested in reading how new masculinities materialized across multiple mediated sites, in other words, how fashion photog- raphy or the music industry literally brought new constructions of manhood into being.

Foucault was critical of the notion of “ideology,” often understood as “falsehood,” versus science or truth. Unlike Marxists, he did not think it was possible

Discourse 25

to divide up representations between the true and the false but was more interested in what he called “truth effects” and their relationship to power—that is, what discourses do by dint of constructing the world in a particular way. Moreover, rather than seeing science as “truthful” and “innocent” he was precisely interested in the ways in which the sciences—and particularly the emerging human and social sciences—were themselves enmeshed in power relations through the production of new subjects and categories of expe- rience, for example, the hysteric, the schizophrenic, or the homosexual. He called this idea the “power- knowledge” nexus, and it has been central to much media and communications research because of the way it directs our attention to what representations and stories do rather than comparing them with an assumed “reality.” We come back to this point in the case study.

Having looked briefly at a number of different discourse analytic traditions, in the next section, I will turn to elaborating the approach I have used in my own media research.

Elaborating Discourse Analysis

The approach to be elaborated here draws on ideas from each of the three traditions outlined above, as well as from the growing field of rhetorical analysis.11 Developed initially in work in the sociology of sci- entific knowledge and social psychology, it has now produced analyses in fields as diverse as gender stud- ies, social policy, technology studies, and is a valuable addition to approaches in media and communica- tions studies.12 It constitutes a theoretically coherent approach to the analysis of talk and texts.

It is useful to think of discourse analysis as hav- ing five main themes. First, it takes discourse itself as its topic. As noted already, the term discourse is used to refer to all forms of talk and texts, including naturally occurring conversations, interview material, and writ- ten or spoken texts of any kind—from blogs to TV programs to SMS messages. Discourse analysts are interested in texts in their own right, rather than see- ing them as a means of “getting at” some reality that is deemed to lie behind the discourse—whether social or psychological or material. Instead of seeing dis- course as a pathway to some other reality, discourse analysts are interested in the content and organization of texts. Thus if a discourse analyst were looking at a news broadcast, she would not be interested in com- paring the news representation with “reality” (indeed she would not believe that there exists some ultimate,

unmediated, non-discursive reality), but might rather be concerned with exploring how the broadcast was organized to produce a sense of truth and coherence, to make its version of events persuasive, to generate a sense of “liveness” and authenticity, to accord author- ity to the host, and so on.

The second theme of discourse analysis is that language is constructive. Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell argue that the metaphor of con- struction highlights three facets of the approach: It draws attention to the fact that discourse is built or manufactured out of pre-existing linguistic resources; it illuminates the fact that the “assembly” of an account involves choice or selection from a number of differ- ent possibilities; and it emphasizes the fact that we deal with the world in terms of constructions, not in a somehow “direct” or unmediated way; in a very real sense texts of various kinds construct our world.13 The constructive use of language is a taken-for-granted aspect of social life. The notion of construction, then, clearly marks a break with traditional “realist” models of language, in which it is taken to be a transparent medium, a relatively straightforward path to “real” beliefs or events, or a reflection of the way things really are. All media show this constructed quality— for example, social media like Instagram or Facebook are often centered on presenting people in a positive light, adverts are designed to offer persuasive com- munications, and news broadcasts aim to construct an authoritative version of events.

The third feature of discourse analysis that I want to stress here is its concern with the “action orienta- tion” or “function orientation” of discourse. That is, discourse analysts see all discourse as social practice. People use discourse to do things—for example, to offer blame, to pay compliments, or to present themselves in a positive light. To highlight this is to underline the fact that discourse does not occur in a social vacuum. As social actors, we are continu- ously orienting to the interpretative context in which we find ourselves and constructing our discourse to fit that context. This is very obvious in relatively formal contexts such as hospitals or courtrooms, but it is equally true of all other contexts too. To take a crude example, you might give a different account of what you did last night depending upon whether the person inquiring was your mother, your boss, or your best friend. It is not that you would deliberately be being duplicitous in any one of these cases (or at least not necessarily) but simply that you would be saying what seems “right” or what “comes naturally” for that particular interpretative context. Discourse analysts

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argue that all discourse is, in this sense, “occasioned” or produced for a particular audience or context.

Even the most apparently straightforward, neu- tral sounding description can be involved in a whole range of different activities, depending upon the inter- pretative context. Take the following sentence: “My cell phone is not working.” This sounds like a straight- forwardly descriptive sentence about an object. However, its meaning can change dramatically in dif- ferent interpretative contexts:

• When said to a friend who has been waiting for you in a restaurant for an hour, it may be the beginning of an excuse or mitigation.

• When said to the person or store who sold you the phone only a few days earlier, it may be part of an accusation, a blaming.

• When said to a stranger, approached in the street, it may be an implicit request to borrow his or her phone in order to make a call.

One way of checking your analysis of the dis- course is to look at how the participants involved responded, as this can offer valuable analytical and contextual clues. For example, if the phone sales person responded by saying, “Well, it was working fine when I sold it to you,” this indicates that the sentence was heard as an accusation—even though no explicit accusation was made. It is important to note that the person to whom one is speaking does not have to change in order to alter the interpreta- tive context. Think about how a question like “Are you going out tonight?” can have multiple meanings when said by someone to their partner, depending on mood, history, and so on. The key point here is that there is nothing “mere” or insubstantial about language: Talk and texts are social practices, and even the most seemingly trivial statements are involved in various kinds of activities. Aims of dis- course analysis include identifying the functions or activities of talk and texts and exploring how they are performed.

This brings me to the fourth point: Discourse analysis treats talk and texts as organized rhe- torically.14 Unlike conversation analysis, discourse analysis sees social life as being characterized by conflicts of various kinds. As such, much discourse is involved in establishing one version of the world in the face of competing versions. This is obvious in some cases—politicians, for example, are clearly attempting to win people around to their view of

the world, and advertisers are attempting to sell us lifestyles, dreams, and products, but it is also true of other discourse. The emphasis on the rhetorical nature of texts directs our attention to the ways in which discourse is organized to make itself persua- sive. Discourse analysis teaches us to approach all discourse critically—from the Big Brother contest- ant to the talk show confession, the tweet to the DJ’s patter—to see it as attempting to construct particular versions of the world.

As well as examining the way that language is used, discourse analysts must also be sensitive to what is not said, to silences. This, in turn, requires a significant awareness of the social, political and cul- tural trends and contexts to which our texts refer. As I have argued elsewhere, without this broader contex- tual understanding:

[W]e would be unable to see the alternative ver- sion of events or phenomena that the discourse we were analysing had been designed to counter; we would fail to notice the (sometimes system- atic) absence of particular kinds of account in the texts that we were studying; and we would not be able to recognize the significance of silences.15

Finally, discourse analysis involves identifying pat- terns in discourse, being able to highlight recurrent themes or ideas or tropes—particularly when looking across a corpus of data—whether this is in news- papers or interviews. Discourse analysts call these patterned features of discourse interpretative rep- ertoires. Their common features may be content or they may be marked by particular metaphors or figures of speech. Sometimes they encode particu- lar ideological positions. For example, terms such as “community” or “responsible citizens” or “hard- working families” seem to come ready-evaluated in contemporary discourse, always already presented as a good thing. Recently, British political discourse has been marked by a shift from the phrase “this country” to “our country,” with potent ideological effects.

To offer an example: In my research on women and radio16, I was interested in the reasons radio sta- tion managers and program controllers put forward for the very small number of female broadcasters compared to males, particularly in music program- ming. Using a discourse analytic approach to analyze my interviews, I identified six interpretative reper- toires used in interviews to account for the lack of women in presenting roles. These were

Discourse 27

• women just do not apply (for the role of presenter);

• the audience prefer male presenters; • women don’t have the right skills for radio

presentation; • women who want to become broadcasters all

go into journalism; • women’s voices are wrong; • daytime radio is targeted at housewives so it is

better to have a male presenter.

The broadcasters all drew on and combined these different repertoires, moving between accounts when it felt right to do so. Thus, one moment, they might assert that the reason for the lack of women at the station was that no women applied; the next, they would regretfully explain that actually the issue was audience objections or the fact that women’s voices did not sound appealing on radio. Rather than taking any of the accounts at face value, the analysis looked at the patterning, organization, and action orientation of the discourse. That is, the force of the analysis as a critique of sexist ideology or practice lay not in com- paring the accounts with a taken-for-granted reality (e.g., the assertion that women do apply), but in look- ing at how the accounts worked together to justify the lack of women at the radio stations in question.

One of the things that attention to the fine detail of discourse was able to show was how carefully these accounts were constructed, despite being part of the fast cut and thrust of an interview conversation. They were, for example, full of disclaimers about sexism (such as “I’m not being sexist but …”) and other rhe- torical devices designed to head off potential criticisms of their own sexual politics or the equal opportunities practices of the radio station. The interviews were also characterized by multiple strategies to make the radio bosses’ accounts persuasive, for example, the use of scientific terms to lend credibility and objectivity or the deployment of “extreme case formulations.”

What the analysis showed, in sum, was the sub- tlety and the detail of the way that discrimination was practiced: At no point did any one of the interviewees say that they did not think women should be employed as radio presenters. On the contrary, they were keen to stress their positive attitude to female presenters and to suggest that they were (to quote one) “look- ing hard” to appoint women. However, what they produced were patterned accounts that justified the exclusion of women, whilst simultaneously protecting themselves against potential accusations of sexism.

Method and Major Terminology

In order to more fully flesh out the principles of discourse analysis discussed above and its use as an approach within media and communications research, I am going to discuss my development of this approach to examine sex and relationship advice in a top-selling women’s magazine. This is reported fully in my article, “Mediated Intimacy and Postfeminism: A Discourse Analytic Examination of Sex and Relationships Advice in a Women’s Magazine.”17 Glamour is the United Kingdom’s best- selling monthly magazine, targeted at upwardly mobile women in their 20s and 30s and gaining (at the time of the analysis) 8 million hits on its website each month. Articles about sex and relationships are a key part of its success, along with fashion, beauty and celebrity news. Each month sees this fare promi- nently displayed on the cover with headlines such as “How good are you in bed? Men tell you what your partner won’t,” and “We’re coming to your sexual rescue: never be bored in bed again.” The aim of the analysis was to understand the kinds of messages about sex and relationships that were presented in the magazines, asking questions about sex, gender, and sexuality. Other research looking at similar mag- azines (e.g., Cosmopolitan) had highlighted themes of “naughtiness” and transgression, alongside the notion that the “fun, fearless female” must ultimately be focused on pleasing the man, rather than herself.18 Pantea Farvid and Virginia Braun argued that such sex advice draws on the “male sex drive” discourse, which depicts the man as “needing” lots of great sex and the woman as having to develop sexual skills in order to satisfy him and prevent him from stray- ing.19 In their research, carried out in New Zealand, men were presented as easily aroused and satisfied, whilst women’s orgasms were depicted as difficult to achieve, building into a his ’n’ hers, Mars and Venus notion of gender complementarity and heteronorma- tivity.20 My research set out to extend these studies, looking in detail at sex and relationship advice in Glamour magazine.

The study could be seen as a type of ideologi- cal analysis or critique in that it examines a cultural artifact—sex and relationship advice in a magazine— as a means of understanding and illuminating the ideological notions that run through it. In this sense, as Ron Becker puts it in Chapter 1 of this volume, it connects “close textual analysis” with “wider sys- tems of domination.”

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The analysis also bears resemblance to some Weberian approaches, which are interested in the rationalization of modern life, or what George Ritzer has called its “McDonaldization”21—its standardized, homogenized and commodified nature. Eva Illouz’s work on “emotional capitalism” is pertinent, particu- larly her incisive critique of Internet dating sites.22 She documents how these push people towards very par- ticular ways of relating in which oneself and all potential partners must be advertised and apprehended as com- peting products in a marketplace of intimacy.

My case study is also informed by a Foucauldian interest in “technologies of the self” and an attentive- ness to the way the magazines incite us to become entrepreneurs, even in this most intimate of domains.

In reality, then, it is striking to note the varied and hybrid intellectual influences on this project; it is not a “pure” discourse analysis (whatever such a thing might be) but benefits from a range of scholarly traditions.

Sampling

The first challenge for most researchers is in build- ing a sample of material that will offer reliable—and in some cases generalizable—findings whilst working with a volume of data that is manageable. I started my research with a corpus of three years’ worth of editions of Glamour—that is 36 issues, each one aver- aging around 380 pages—around 150,000 pages in total. This is a huge volume of data for a single researcher to work with—though might be suitable for a small team or two or three people working together. In order to manage it, I selected two issues at random from each year. However, I had to be careful that they were spread across the year, as Christmas issues, summer issues, and (in the Northern hemisphere) the famous September issue, which launches new fashion collections, all have a distinct flavor and tone.

Having selected a more manageable number of magazines to examine in detail, the next dilemma was to think about how to develop rigor in my sampling within the magazines. Given the focus of Glamour upon beauty, fashion, and celebrity, it was quite dif- ficult to draw the boundaries in a principled way around those articles that could be considered sex and relationship advice articles and the mass of the rest of the magazine. Inevitably, articles about hair- styles, skin care regimes, or new makeup techniques often touched upon sex or sexiness, whilst those about celebrities frequently discussed relationships. How was I to narrow down my sample?

In order to do this, I read and re-read the maga- zines in detail and identified a recurring set of article types or genres that took as their main focus inti- mate relationships or sex. These included the survey report articles which described the results of new research (often commissioned by the magazine) (e.g., Glamour’s sex survey and a survey about sexual fan- tasies); the “men’s voice” article which discusses what men do/want/think/fantasize about when “you” (the assumed heterosexual female reader) are not there; the “how to” article, which explicitly sets out to edu- cate you on how to be a better lover or how to get a man to commit; the quiz in which you can find out what sort of lover you are, how shy or forward you are in bed; and the feature article, which focuses on a group with a particular relationship to sex or inti- macy (e.g., women who learned sex tips from porn stars, women who are determined to marry within six months of a first date, men who are sex addicts). Focusing on these types of articles, all of which explic- itly take intimate relationships as their primary focus, yielded more than 20 full-length articles to examine and this became my data corpus.

Identifying Patterns and Themes in the Data

As discussed above, one of the aims of discourse analy- sis is to identify patterns in a corpus of data in order to be able to say something meaningful about it. The key concept here is the interpretative repertoire, which is a unit of analysis that allows researchers to go beyond individual or discrete expressions to begin to identify themes, consistencies, and patterns across and between texts and to connect these to wider contexts and social formations. In some discursive traditions, these are known as “discourses,” and researchers may speak of “consumer discourse” or “environmental discourse” or “legal discourse” and so on. However, rather than assuming that each domain—law, medicine, environment—has its own associated discourse that can be readily identifiable and which maps directly onto it, the notion of inter- pretative repertoire allows for more flexibility and dynamism, recognizing that any one phenomenon or text may be constituted by multiple intersecting discourses, some of which may be contradictory. Magazines are the example par excellence and have always been discussed as sites of intense contradic- tion yet somehow able to hold together competing discourses in a pleasurable whole, e.g., injunctions to love your body alongside articles about dieting;

Discourse 29

stories about cheating husbands alongside articles about wedding planning.23

In beginning to identify interpretative reper- toires, different researchers take different approaches. Wetherell and Potter, in their important work on the dynamics of new forms of racism, discuss the need to look out for common or recurrent themes or fig- ures of speech and to be attentive to the repeated use of particular metaphors, similes or tropes.24 In my own analysis, the focus is more on particular ideas or arguments. Whichever approach is taken, central to all discourse analytic approaches is what Potter has called “the spirit of skeptical reading.”25 This involves the suspension of belief in the taken for granted. It is analogous to the injunction by anthro- pologists to “render the familiar strange.” It involves changing the way that language is seen in order to focus upon the construction, organization, and func- tions of discourse rather than looking for something behind or underlying it. As Potter and Wetherell have pointed out, academic training teaches people to read texts for gist, but this is precisely the wrong spirit in which to approach analysis:

If you read an article or book the usual goal is to produce a simple, unitary summary, and to ignore the nuance, contradictions and areas of vagueness. However, the discourse analyst is concerned with the detail of passages of dis- course, however fragmented and contradictory, and with what is actually said or written, not some general idea that seems to be intended.26

By contrast to our normal practices of reading, doing discourse analysis involves interrogating our own assumptions and the ways in which we habitually make sense of things. It involves a spirit of skepti- cism and the development of an “analytic mentality,” which does not readily fall away when you are not sitting in front of a transcript.27 You need to ask of any given piece: Why am I reading this in this way? What features of the text produce this reading? How is it organized to make itself persuasive? In my opin- ion, discourse analysis should carry a health warning, because doing it fundamentally changes the ways we experience language and social relations—much as studying media and communications more broadly can radically shift our perspective and experience of everyday experiences and media.

In this phase of the analysis, I might try out mul- tiple ways of coding or parsing, trying to make sense of the data. A key point, which I will return to later,

is to be able to account for the variability in the data. It is no good coming up with a way of under- standing magazine sex advice that leaves out several types of argument or theme because they don’t fit the schema. The analysis must be able to lend coher- ence and understanding to the whole data set, not just the “juiciest” quotes or the parts we find most interesting. For me, this stage involves multiple notes and different ways of trying to code the data. The magazine research involved a very untidy work envi- ronment that was a hive of activity: magazines spread out everywhere, marked with sticky notes; piles of paper; detailed notes made on the computer. It is, as Beverley Skeggs has noted, inevitably a “messy” process that often gets cleaned up, smoothed over and sanitized in the process of writing up in a way that obfuscates the difficulties and the hard work, the frustration and dead-ends, the false starts and aban- donments of notions.28

The Analysis

This complicated, at times frustrating, process is dif- ficult to write up honestly and authentically. It is much easier to explain the key themes of discourse analysis than it is to explain how actually to go about analyz- ing texts. Pleasing as it would be to be able to offer a cookbook style recipe for readers to follow methodi- cally, this is just not possible. Somewhere between selecting the data and writing up, the essence of doing discourse analysis seems to slip away; ever elusive, it is never quite captured by descriptions of coding schemes and analytical schemas. However, just because the skills of discourse analysis do not lend themselves to procedural description, there is no need for them to be deliberately mystified and placed beyond the reach of all but the cognoscenti. Discourse analysis is similar to many other tasks: Journalists, for example, are not given formal training in identifying what makes an event news, and yet after a short time in the profession their sense of “news values” is hard to shake. There really is no substitute for learning by doing. This is how I learned to analyze discourse.

In the magazine study, after going through the process described above, I finally identified three interpretative repertoires that helped to make sense of the sex and relationship advice being offered, whilst also offering a new—and hopefully productive— way of thinking about how articles about inti- mate life were connected to a broader postfeminist sensibility operating across popular culture. The rep- ertoires I identified were what I called the intimate

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entrepreneurship repertoire, which was based on a language of goals, plans, and strategies, a “profes- sionalization” of intimate life; men-ology organized around the idea that women need to study and learn about men’s needs and desires; and transforming the self which exhorted women to “makeover” not simply their bodies and sexual practices, but their emotional lives too—in order to become confident and adven- turous sexual subjects. I will say a little about each repertoire in order to highlight their key themes.

Intimate Entrepreneurship

In this repertoire, relationships are cast as work, using analogies and metaphors from the worlds of finance, management, science, and military cam- paigns. Finding a satisfying intimate relationship is portrayed as having little to do with fate and more to do with careful planning and strategy. Women are advised to build a detailed checklist of what they want in a partner and to “go out and find him” and market themselves to suitable partners. Even sex is treated as an entrepreneurial activity, best approached in a rational, quasi-scientific manner. As one article put it: “Forget spontaneity—if it’s passion you’re after, you need to plan for it. Here we tell you what to eat, the exercises to boost your libido, and the tricks that will guarantee sex worth waiting for.”29

Men-ology

The name I gave this repertoire is designed to draw attention to two things: the emphasis it places upon learning and studying and its focus on men as the subjects of this intense pedagogic activity. Whereas women were depicted as smart and go-getting in the intimate entrepreneurship repertoire, in this repertoire they appear naïve and unworldly, requiring guidance about every aspect of intimate relationships and par- ticularly how to please men. Women are exhorted to study men closely, to learn about how they like to be seen and to offer compliments that fit with this perceived self-image, to familiarize themselves with men’s interests, to mirror their speech patterns, and to ensure that they reassure and affirm what is presented as an extremely fragile male ego at all times—but especially during difficult sexual encoun- ters. The asymmetry of the emotional labor required in relationships is striking, albeit obfuscated through a discourse of “good communication” (which turns out to mean women’s communication).

Transforming the Self

This third repertoire also focuses on the work women are required to do in relationships, but differs from the two others in that it involves a profound “work on the self.” This repertoire helped to make sense of articles that were neither about planning and goal setting to get a man or a good sex life, nor about learning to please men, but—perhaps more fundamentally— necessitated a transformation of subjectivity. In this repertoire, women were advised to “love your body,” “banish neediness,” work on their attitudes so that they are confident and adventurous, having rid them- selves of any body “hang-ups” or sexual repression.

What this brief summary has shown, I hope, is that sex and relationships were constructed in three very different and quite contrasting ways across the body of data found in Glamour. Considering them now, these interpretative repertoires may have taken on the status of a certain kind of obviousness. This is partly because they capture and express well the main thematics of contemporary sex and relation- ship advice targeted at young, middle-class women. In practice, however, these repertoires did not come “ready identified” but were entangled within the magazine articles—sometimes all three repertoires might be mixed up together in the space of two or three sentences. The quotation below demonstrates this vividly:

You just have to give sex the same priority you do to everything else in your life which you cher- ish. Educate yourself, try out new things, and, above all, have the right attitude. Try anything (within reason) once, put some effort into plan- ning, but also don’t worry if nothing goes to plan. Great sex stems from sexual confidence and if you feel sexy and believe in yourself, your body and your own ability, you really will be better at everything in bed.30

Here, then, we see a mash-up of all three repertoires: the focus on planning and prioritizing sex, the empha- sis upon education, and the injunctions to “have the right attitude” and “believe in yourself”. The repertoires give us a way to understand and unpack the differ- ent discourses at work in extracts like this and in the magazines in general. This constitutes the main work of analysis, offering a fresh yet rigorous take. However, for me, what is interesting is not to stop at the iden- tification of the different repertoires but to explore how these patterned ways of talking about intimate

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relationships connect back to larger social contexts and cultural shifts and sensibilities. In the analysis fore- grounded here, I did this by situating them within the neoliberalization and postfeminization of culture.31

A Critical Evaluation of Discourse Analysis

One of the questions asked of research findings gen- erally is: Are they representative? Can they, in other words, tell us something beyond the specifics of the particular analysis? This is a good question and an important one for scholars, pushing us to be careful about the status of the claims we want to make. In the case of discourse analysis, much of the time research- ers are less interested in representativeness—let alone in the generalizability of their findings—than in the richness of their research, the ways it may offer insights into the structure and organization of every- thing from a TV talk show to advice pages. Looking back on my own research on Glamour magazine, however, I would make a bolder claim: By careful sampling I attempted to generate a representative set of articles to analyze. I think it is fair to claim that my analysis is representative of the kinds of discourses about sex and relationships circulating in a particular kind of magazine, in a particular historical and geo- graphical context. Clearly my analysis is not true of all magazines at all times. Indeed, it is striking how different sex and relationship advice is in otherwise similar men’s magazines such as GQ or Men’s Health. My research does, I think, offer something that goes beyond an analysis of the particular editions of Glamour that came under my forensic gaze.

Another important set of questions concerns the reliability and validity of research. How can we judge this? How do we know, in other words, which research to take seriously and to trust? Discourse analysts have been extremely critical of many exist- ing methods for ensuring reliability and validity. In psychology, for example, much experimental and qualitative research depends upon the suppression of variability, or the marginalization of instances that do not fit the story being told by the researcher.32 Potter argues that discourse analysts can make use of four considerations to assess the reliability and validity of analyses:33

1. Deviant case analysis—that is, detailed examination of cases that seem to go against the pattern identified. This may serve to

disconfirm the pattern but it may help to add greater sophistication to the analysis.34 This step was part of the process of coding in my research—trying out new ways of organizing the material until I could make sense of all the data, not just some of it.

2. Participants’ understanding. As I noted earlier in the chapter, one way of checking whether a piece of discourse analysis holds water is to examine how participants responded. This is most relevant, of course, in records of interaction, but in media research like mine, magazine letters pages and online comments can provide useful ways of checking how (other) readers responded.

3. Coherence. Discourse analytic research is building increasingly upon the insights of ear- lier work. For example, we know from many types of discursive analysis that certain forms of speech and writing are especially effec- tive and persuasive rhetorically. This includes three-part lists, contrast structures, extreme case formulations, and disclaimers. As Potter argues, there is a sense in which each new study provides a check upon the adequacy of earlier studies.35

4. Readers’ evaluations. Perhaps the most important way for the validity of the analysis to be checked is by presentation of the materi- als being analyzed, in order to allow readers of the research to make their own evaluation and, if they choose, to put forward alternative interpretations. Where academic publishers permit it, discourse analysts present full tran- scripts of their materials to readers, but this is more common in Ph.D. research, where raw data may be presented in appendices. When this is not possible, extended passages will be presented. In this way, discourse analysis is more open than almost all other research practices, which often present data “pre- theorized” or, as in ethnographic or psycho- analytic research, ask us to take observation and interpretations on trust.

Limitations and Drawbacks

In all these ways, discourse analysis offers a princi- pled, rigorous approach to researching media and communications. Three limitations or drawbacks are perhaps worth mentioning. Firstly, discourse

Rosalind Gill32

analysis is not an ideal approach for analyzing large data sets. It is much better at telling us “a lot about a little” than producing broad and sweeping findings. Secondly, the labor-intensiveness of the approach is another key point to note. Compared with a simple thematic analysis, a proper discourse analysis will require significantly greater investment of time, concerned as it is with the organization, action orientation, and rhetorical functions of texts as well as their thematic content. Finally, a third limitation of discourse analysis, including the case study presented here, is its inattention to the visual and audiovisual dimensions of the text. In this sense, discourse analysis requires further elaboration for use in moving image research in communication studies—as some scholars are now attempting with “multimodal (discourse) analysis.”36

If I were doing this study again today, I would make some changes to the design of the research. My focus would probably be on online sex and relation- ship forums or blogs, or even smartphone apps, since these are displacing the former prominence of the printed word. Laura Favaro has produced a fascinat- ing study of English- and Spanish-language forums concerned with both editorial and peer-to-peer advice using a broadly discourse analytic method.37 If I were to do a similar study, it would also be impor- tant to analyze how audiences take up, negotiate, and resist the ideas offered in sex and relationship advice; clearly, people are active in their engagement with these texts.

In a further development of the work, Meg-John Barker, Laura Harvey, and I have examined construc- tions of intimacy across many different media, looking at how consent, desire, and pleasure are presented, and interrogating how media depict gender and sex- ual normality.38 This work extends and develops the analysis of a single magazine discussed here, and is also notable for its focus upon diverse texts from sex apps to You Tube videos, to self-help books and tel- evision documentaries.

Conclusion

Ultimately, discourse analysis, like much other media and communications research, involves an individual or research team making a reading or interpretation. Discourse analysts put forward their take on a par- ticular phenomenon, “showing their working” and presenting as much information as possible to allow others to make alternative interpretations. In the case

of media texts such as Glamour magazine, their ubiq- uitous nature makes it easy for others to contest or challenge the findings. At the end of the day, analy- ses stand or fall by the extent to which they illuminate a contemporary phenomenon, such as the changing nature of sex and relationship advice, and become part of an ongoing conversation about how to under- stand a world that is increasingly mediated. In this chapter, I hope to have shown how I have used the approach to aid in our understanding of the changing ways in which intimate life is mediated in a popular cultural text.

Discourse analysis is an enduringly popular method for media studies. It is “low budget” (i.e. relatively economical to carry out) and produces rich qualitative findings. Challenges for future research in communication studies of discourse involve integrating visual and moving image data and using discourse analytic approaches to analyze bigger data sets.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Yvonne Ehrstein and Danielle Bikhazi for their careful assistance in editing and formatting this chapter.

Notes

1. Vivien Burr, An Introduction to Social Constructionism (London: Routledge, 1995).

2. Roger Fowler, Robert Hodge, Gunther Kress, and Tony Trew, Language and Control (London: Routledge, 1979); Gunther Kress and Robert Hodge, Language as Ideology (London: Routledge, 1979); Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress, Social Semiotics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (Harlow: Longman, 1989).

3. See Chapter 1 in this volume. 4. John B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 5. For example, Michelle M. Lazar, ed., Feminist Critical

Discourse Analysis: Gender, Power and Ideology in Discourse (London: Palgrave, 2005); Lia Litosseliti, Gender and Language: Theory and Practice (London: Hodder Arnold, 2006).

6. David Machin, “Multimodality and Theories of the Visual,” in The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, ed. Carey Jewitt (London: Routledge, 2009), 181–90; Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication (London: Arnold, 2001).

Discourse 33

7. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967); Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson Sacks, “A Simplest Systematics for the Organisation of Turn-Taking in Conversation,” Language 50, (1974): 697–735; Malcolm Coulthard Coulthard and Martin Montgomery, eds., Studies in Discourse Analysis (London: Longman, 1981); John Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984); J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

8. See, for example, Andrew Tolson’s collection, Television Talk Shows: Discourse, Performance, Spectacle (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001).

9. Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 15; see also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley (London: Pelican, 1981); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

10. Sean Nixon, Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption (London: UCL Press, 1996); see also Rosalind Gill, “Power and the Production of Subjects: A Genealogy of the New Man and the New Lad,” in Masculinities and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines, Sociological Review Monographs, ed. Bethan Benwell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 34–56.

11. Michael Billig, Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Michael Billig, “Methodology and Scholarship in Understanding Ideological Explanation,” in Analysing Everyday Explanation: A Casebook of Methods, ed. Charles Antaki (London: Sage, 1988), 199–215; Michael Billig, Ideology and Opinions: Studies in Rhetorical Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

12. Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour (London: Sage, 1987).

13. Ibid. 14. Billig, Arguing and Thinking; Billig, Ideology and Opinions. 15. Rosalind Gill, “Discourse Analysis: Practical Imple-

mentation,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods for Psychology and the Social Sciences, ed. John Richardson (Leicester: British Psychological Society, 1996), 147.

16. Rosalind Gill, “Justifying Injustice: Broadcasters’ Accounts of Inequality in Radio,” in Discourse Analytic Research, eds. Erica Burman and Ian Parker (London: Routledge, 2000), 79–93.

17. Rosalind Gill, “Mediated Intimacy and Postfeminism: A Discourse Analytic Examination of Sex and Relationships Advice in a Women’s Magazine,” Discourse & Communication 3, no. 4 (2009): 345–69.

18. David Machin and Joanna Thornborrow, “Branding and Discourse: The Case of Cosmopolitan,” Discourse and Society 14 (2003): 453–71.

19. Pantea Farvid and Virginia Braun, “‘Most of Us Guys Are Raring to Go Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere’: Male and Female Sexuality in Cleo and Cosmo,” Sex Roles 55 (2006): 295–310. See also Wendy Hollway, Subjectivity and Method in Psychology: Gender, Meaning and Science (London: Sage, 1989).

20. Farvid and Braun, “‘Most of Us Guys.’” See also Annie Potts, “The Science/Fiction of Sex: John Gray’s Mars and Venus in the Bedroom,” Sexualities 1 (1998): 153–73.

21. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society 6 (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2011).

22. Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Oxford: Polity Press, 2007).

23. Janice Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines (London: Pandora, 1987); Rosemary Ballaster, Margaret Beeton, Elizabeth Fraser, and Sandra Hebron, Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Women’s Magazine (London: Macmillan Education, 1991); David Machin and Joanna Thornborrow, “Branding and Discourse: The Case of Cosmopolitan,” Discourse and Society 14 (2003): 453–71.

24. Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter, Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1992).

25. Jonathan Potter, Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction (London: Sage, 1996).

26. Potter and Wetherell, Discourse and Social Psychology, 168.

27. Jim Schenkein, “Sketch of the Analytic Mentality for the Study of Conversational Interaction,” in Studies in the Organisation of Conversational Interaction, ed. Jim Schenkein (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 1–6.

28. Beverley Skeggs, ed., Feminist Cultural Theory: Process and Production (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 2–3.

29. “All day foreplay for your sexiest night ever,” Glamour, March 2006, cited in Gill, “Mediated Intimacy and Postfeminism.”

30. Tracy Cox, “Six ways to be better at everything in bed,” Glamour, Nov. 2005, cited in Gill, “Mediated Intimacy and Postfeminism.”

31. See Gill, “Mediated Intimacy and Postfeminism.” 32. See Potter and Wetherell, Discourse and Social

Psychology. 33. Potter, Representing Reality. 34. See J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, eds.,

Structures of Social Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Jonathan Potter, “Discourse Analysis and Constructionist Approaches: Theoretical

Rosalind Gill34

Background,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods for Psychology and the Social Sciences, ed. John Richardson (Leicester: British Psychological Society, 1996), 125–40.

35. Potter, “Discourse Analysis and Constructionist Approaches.”

36. Ibid. 37. Laura Favaro, “Porn Trouble,” Australian Feminist Studies

30, no. 86 (2016): 373–85. 38. Meg-John Barker, Rosalind Gill, and Laura Harvey.

Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017).