Dire le genre dans la presse magazine féminine et masculine

In this paper, I aim at exploring how gender is built through media discourse. I have thus analysed the discourse used in editorial pieces published in French women’s and men’s lifestyle magazines in 2013. I show that gender, in this kind of media discourse, is not only performed through thematic choices, but is also built within discourse through enunciation itself. Therefore, even if editorialists provide similar perspectives on the evolution of gendered roles, they also offer different definitions of femininity (as the result of a fight) and masculinity (as the result of an heritage). But the most fundamental difference lies in the use of irony by editorial writers – toward themselves, or toward their own discourses. My conclusion is that irony contributes, in a most essential way, to the building of a gendered discourse in the media.