Celebrities at Work: The Symbolic Production of Masculinities in American & British GQ Magazines in 2012

This thesis explores the relationship between masculinities and national identities as represented in the editorial content of the 2012 editions of American and British GQ magazines. Men’s lifestyle magazines, such as GQ, are influential in helping readers make sense of themselves through representations of celebrity, fashion and style. Although the magazine began as a men’s fashion publication, contemporary editions provide readers a variety of content: business, cars, food and drink, grooming, politics, popular culture, relationships, sport, technology, travel and wellness. This mix of editorial content coheres to produce an aspirational middle-class man, but what distinguishes the American from the British representations in these two cultural texts is a contribution of textual scholarship to the fields of cultural studies, masculinity/gender studies and media studies that this research fulfils.

Academic scholarship on the theme of men’s lifestyle magazines remains a niche area of interest. Whilst authors have explored the relationship between American masculinities and men’s lifestyle magazines and British masculinities and men’s lifestyle magazines, mostly in the noughties, scant attention has been paid to men’s lifestyle magazines since, and research on this theme has yet to engage in comparative analyses across national editions of a magazine. Drawing on the work of Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu this research highlights the importance of magazines (and media generally) as cultural products for the on-going reiteration, reinterpretation and representation of cultural constructs, and therefore, as significant sources for the continuance of textual scholarship on gender.

A mixed methods approach utilising comparative and textual analysis is employed for this Anglo-American comparison. As part of the textual analysis, content analysis of the editorial sections was conducted to explore how the editorial content of each magazine was valued. The results of the content analysis were used to direct a combined comparative and discourse analyses supported by tools from compositional interpretation and semiology that followed by using the significant editorial sections as points of entry into the texts, rather than relying on the researcher’s own interests of self-selecting editorial sections for reading. Using content analysis in this way along with comparative and textual analyses makes a methodological contribution to textual analyses of media texts