ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to representations of men in language use, looking at corpus studies which have considered adjective and verb collocates of the words man and men. The authors look at the ways that vrais hommes (real men) are talked about in a French corpus, as well as representations of fathers in parenting magazines. The authors then use an artificial intelligence tool in order to compare what makes a good father and a good mother, finding differences which key into powerful gendered discourses. The chapter then moves on to look at the representation of men in advertising, focussing on a Spanish case study of a chocolate bar as well as birthday cards aimed at men. Finally, the chapter examines newspaper texts that represent masculinity and also the ways that men and boys are represented in children’s books and toys, such as the Harry Potter series and Lego. The authors conclude that representations are never ‘neutral’ but, rather, are imbued with ideologies that reflect, among other things, the values of the culture and society in which they take place.
