Discourses of Masculinity: The New Man, The New Lad, and Maxim Magazine

Known for its exploitative handling of women and risqué photographic content, UK-import Maxim Magazine is one of the most popular men’s “lifestyle” magazines in print today. The men’s lifestyle magazine, as a genre, is deeply invested in consumptive, modern identity construction, offering readers guidance in expensive clothing, entertainment devices, video games, books, movies, alcohol, automobiles, sporting goods, and even who to find sexually attractive. Study in sociolinguistics has uncovered that language also plays a pivotal role in the construction of identity, including gender. The incorporation of written articles into Maxim to accompany its largely pictorial content, namely interview segments, suggests that Maxim’s editors do serve a particular ethos with consideration to male gender construction, and an interest in perpetuating ideology and discourse surrounding male gender performance, versus other competing arbiters of men’s lifestyle such as GQ or Esquire. The interview space affords readers an opportunity to witness identity performance and gender construction in action, making it an ideal point of analysis to uncover Maxim’s ideology. Following Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, and using linguistic methods of discourse analysis, it is the aim of this investigation to show that Maxim ratifies popular, hegemonic beliefs surrounding male sexuality, solidarity, and dominance, in contrast to antithetical ideologies for masculine performance, through its choice of interview subjects and interview content. For this analysis, twelve physical issues of Maxim dated from January 2011 to December 2011 were collected, representing one year of interview data