This article introduces the concept of stylization and illustrates its usefulness for studying online discourse by examining how writers have employed it in order to parody sexist products such as BIC Cristal for Her, using genderlect in order to introduce dissonance into and reframe patriarchal discourse. A corpus analysis of 671 reviews, written from August through October 2012, confirmed a dramatically higher presence of lexical items and adjectives often stereotyped as feminine, compared to a reference corpus of other parody reviews, as well as the GloWbe corpus housed at Brigham Young University. A qualitative analysis shows the stylized use of these features, and how they contribute to the construction of personas that are intended to mock the sexism inherent in BIC’s advertising. This analysis hopes to encourage more attention to how stylization functions in emerging online genres.
AlexanderJ.RhodesJ. (2014). On multimodality: New media in composition studies. Urbana, IL: NCTE.
2.
BakhtinM. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
3.
BammanD.EisensteinJ.SchnoibelenT. (2014). Gender identity and lexical variation in social media. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18, 135-160.
4.
BarrettR. (2006). Supermodels of the world, unite! Political economy and the language of performance among African American drag queens. In CameronD.KulickD. (Eds.), The language and sexuality reader (pp. 151-163). London, UK: Routledge.
BiberD.ConradS.ReppenR. (1998). Corpus linguistics: Investigating language structure and use. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
7.
BlairK. L. (2012). A complicated geometry: Triangulating feminism, activism, and technological literacy. In LeeN.SheridanM. P. (Eds.), Writing studies research (pp. 63-72). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
8.
BucholtzM. (1999). Why be normal? Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language and Society, 28, 203-223.
9.
BucholtzM. (2009). From stance to style: Gender, interaction, and indexicality in Mexican immigrant youth slang. In JaffeA. (Ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives (pp. 146-170). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
10.
ButlerP. (2005). Style in the diaspora of composition studies. Rhetoric Review, 26, 5-24.
11.
CameronD. (2007). The myth of Mars and Venus. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
12.
CarterS.MutnickD. (2012). Writing democracy: Notes on a federal writer’s project for the 21st century. Community Literacy Journal, 7, 1-14.
13.
CejkaM. A.EaglyA. H. (1999). Gender-stereotypic images of occupations correspond to the sex segregation of employment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 413-423.
ChunE. W. (2004). Ideologies of legitimate mockery: Margaret Cho’s revoicings of mock Asian. Pragmatics: Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association, 14, 263-289.
16.
CoatesJ. (2013). Women, men, and language: A sociolinguistic account of gender differences in language. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
17.
CouplandN. (2001). Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society, 30, 345-375.
18.
CouplandN. (2007). Style: Language variation and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
DeauxK.LewisL. L. (1984). Structure of gender stereotypes: Interrelationships among components and gender labels. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 991-1004.
21.
DeGeneresE. (2012, October12). Bic pens for women. In: The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Burbank, CA: National Broadcasting Company.
22.
DiekmanA. B.EaglyA. H. (2000). Stereotypes as dynamic constructs: Women and men of the past, present, and future. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 1171-1188.
23.
EckertP. (2004). The good woman. In LakoffR.BucholtzM. (Eds.), Language and woman’s place: Text and commentaries (pp. 65-170). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
24.
EckertP.McConnell-GinetS. (2013). Language and gender. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
25.
EggersD. (2000). A heartbreaking work of staggering genius. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
26.
GagneI. (2008). Urban princesses: Performance and “women’s language” in Japan’s Gothic/Lolita Subculture. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 18, 130-150.
27.
GlennC. (2004). Unspoken: A rhetoric of silence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
28.
HallK. (1995). Lip service on the fantasy lines. In HallK.BucholtzM. (Eds.), Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self (pp. 183-216). London, UK: Routledge.
29.
HallK. (2005). Intertextual sexuality. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15, 125-144.
30.
HawisherG. E.SelfeC. L. (2012). Women and the global ecology of digital literacies. In BethD.MortensenP. (Eds.), Women and literacy: Local and global inquiries for a new century (pp. 207-228). New York, NY: Routledge.
31.
HelmbrechtB. M.LoveM. A. (2009). The BUSTin’ and bitchin’ ethe of third-wave zines. College Composition and Communication, 61, 150-169.
32.
HerringS.PaolilloJ. (2006). Gender and genre variation in weblogs. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10, 439-459.
33.
HesseD. (2004). Identity and the Internet: The telling case of Amazon.com’s top fifty reviewers. In CoutureB.KentT. (Eds.), The private, the public, and the published: Reconciling private lives and public rhetoric (pp. 139-152). Logan: Utah State University Press.
34.
HolcombC. (2007). “Anyone can be president”: Figures of speech, cultural forms, and performance. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37, 71-96.
35.
HolmesJ.SchnurrS. (2006). “Doing femininity” at work: More than just relational practice. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10, 31-51.
36.
HuddyL.TerkildsenN. (1993). Gender stereotypes and the perception of male and female candidates. American Journal of Political Science, 37, 119-147.
LakoffR. T. (1975). Language and woman’s place. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
42.
LawlessJ. L. (2004). Women, war, and winning elections: Gender stereotyping in the post-September 11th era. Political Research Quarterly, 57, 479-490.
43.
MathieuP.GeorgeD. (2009). Not going it alone: Public writing, independent media, and the circulation of homeless advocacy. College Composition and Communication, 61, 130-149.
44.
McEneryT.HardieA. (2012). Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
45.
McLemoreC. (1991). The pragmatic interpretation of English intonation: Sorority speech (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Texas, Austin.
46.
NakamuraM. (2006). Creating indexicality: School speech in Meiji Japan. In CameronD.KulickD. (Eds.), The language and sexuality reader (pp. 270-84). London, UK: Routledge.
OchsE. (1992). Indexing gender. In AlessandroD.GoodwinC. (Eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon (pp. 335-358). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
49.
OwensK. H. (2009). Confronting rhetorical disability: A critical analysis of women’s birth plans. Written Communication, 26, 247-272.
50.
PowellK. M. (2007). Virginia mountain women writing to government officials: Letters of request as social participation. In DanielB.MortensenP. (Eds.), Women and literacy: Local and global inquiries for a new century (pp. 71-90). New York, NY: Routledge.
RaoD.YarowskyD.ShreevatsA.GuptaM. (2010). Classifying latent user attributes in Twitter. In Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on search and mining user-generated contents (pp. 37-44). New York, NY: ACM.
53.
RaysonP.GarsideR. (2000). Comparing corpora using frequency profiling. In WCC ‘00 Proceedings of the workshop on Comparing corpora, 9, 1-6.
RosenwasserS. M.DeanN. G. (1989). Gender role and political office: Effects of perceived masculinity/femininity of candidate and political office. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 13, 77-85.
59.
RoysterJ. J.KirschG. (2012). Feminist rhetorical practices: New horizons for rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
60.
SagollaD. (2009). 140 characters: A style guide for the short form. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.
61.
SchlitzS. A. (2010). Introduction to the special issue: Exploring corpus-informed approaches to writing research. Journal of Writing Research, 2, 91-98.
62.
SchneiderM.BoxA. (2014). Measuring stereotypes of female politicians. Political Psychology, 32, 246-266.
SheridanD.RidolfoJ.MichelA. J. (2012). The available means of persuasion: mapping a theory and pedagogy of multimodal public rhetoric. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press.
SinclairJ. (2005). How to build a corpus. In WynneM. (Ed.), Developing linguistic corpora: A guide to good practice (pp. 79-83). Oxford, UK: Obow Books.
69.
SinorJ. (2002). The extraordinary work of ordinary writing: Annie Ray’s diary. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
70.
SpenceJ. T.HelmreichR. L.HolahanC. K. (1979). Negative and positive components of psychological masculinity and femininity and their relationships to self-reports of neurotic and acting out behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1673-1682.
71.
TannenD. (1994). Gender and discourse. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
72.
VasquezC. (2014). The discourse of online consumer reviews. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
