Abstract

The relatively novel phenomenon of ‘sexualisation’ has, over recent years, received attention as a matter of concern within scholarly and popular texts. And yet those studies have paid little attention to the ways in which ‘gender’ inflects the media's representations of ‘sexy’ men and women. As a result, claims that sexualised representational strategies now affect men just as much as they did, and still do, affect women have proliferated. The objective of this article, however, is to demonstrate that and how a particular form of discourse analysis allows for a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which gender cuts across, and inflects, processes of sexualisation. This argument is developed through a case study of representations of two differently gendered scientists across a corpus of national UK newspaper articles. A discussion of the naming, focalisation and transitivity choices on display therein leads not to the conclusion that sexualisation is a singular phenomenon, but rather, to the suggestion that it is indexical, with sense and reference afforded by occasioned use, and occasioned use inflected by definite gender asymmetries.