(Re)constructing body shaming: popoular media representations of female identities as discursive identity construction

The study takes an analytical approach to discourse in its focus on the discursive realisation and (re)production of ideology in terms of the (re)construction of a singular female identity as portrayed by the media – specifically content generated by the online news and entertainment website, BuzzFeed. Data was collected electronically over a period of fifteen months (January 2014 to May 2015) and subjected to a keyword search, which then determined the most relevant articles. These articles were entered into two separate corpora for analysis in order to identify the most significant ideologies related to body shaming, and broken down linguistically through the use of Wordsmith Tools. The analysis of the data mainly drew upon the theories of Bakhtin’s conceptualisation of dialogic (2004), Gee’s building tasks of language (2014), van Dijk’s analytical toolkit (1984), (1990) and Kress’ notion of the formation of ideology (1989). The aim of this thesis was to investigate the (re)production of ideology surrounding traditional beauty ideals as being a singular concept in order to reveal the more complex identities of women as unique individuals. The study’s findings indicate that there is a significant correlation between female empowerment in terms of associating with feminist ideals and female misogyny as one of the main sources of body shaming, with female misogyny outranking feminism with only 4,94%. Furthermore, the study revealed that overall appearance was the most commonly discussed topic throughout the corpus, being mentioned in a total of 93,83% of articles, with the face and hair of women being most frequently discussed in 23,46% of articles. Overall appearance was also the topic most commonly shamed in the corpus, closely followed by fashion, body shape and fitness.National Research Foundatio