Communication Studies

In this paper I analyze how an ad for Microsoft Composer Collection represents physical and technical masculinities through constructed speech in contrastive linguistic styles. These linguistic varieties link to our consensual knowledge about gender stereotypes. The ad pictures a menacing white biker guy who is also stylized through tough, working-class talk. As the narrative voice of the ad, he extols Microsoft's classical music software. He styleshifts between working-class talk and a highly educated, even arcane, techno-geek talk. I consider Eckert & McConnell-Ginet's suggestion that technical masculinity and physical masculinity are disjunct, Kiesling's claim that different forms of masculinity compete with each other, and Smith's claim that advertising is increasingly using ironic humor aimed at young males to reinforce traditional notions of masculinity. The ad plays with our beliefs about how linguistic forms depict types of masculinities, but also manipulates linguistic variation to reify masculine stereotypes. * I am grateful to Harold Schiffman and Johan Oberg for locating the ad in Entertainment Weekly and in People magazine, respectively. Michael McLachlan provided technical assistance. I thank Bryan Gordon, Scott Kiesling, Gilbert Rodman, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a prior version of this paper.

In everyday behavior speakers make connections between language use and social identities. assert that we "often notice, rationalize, and justify" these connections between linguistic form and social identities in a process that creates "linguistic ideologies that purport to explain the source and meaning of the linguistic differences" (p. 973). Judgments of the social groups are solidified in this process. shows how narratives about encounters with linguistic difference influence the formation of vernacular norms and simultaneously serve in the process of linguistic ideological differentiation. Building on Johnstone's analysis of narratives about dialect difference, we suggest that similarly structured narratives about encounters with semantic/pragmatic linguistic difference also serve in the circulation of ideological differentiation. Specifically, we use Johnstone's framework to show how the kinds of linguistic ideologies that Gal & Irvine identified are shaped in relation to social and linguistic indexes of gender and sexual orientation.