Language and the Manipulation of Teen Women’s Identity: Creating Deficiency, Subverting Agency and Devaluing Teen Women’s Personhood on the Multiple Levels of Discourse in Teen Women’s Magazines

Abstract: In this dissertation I analyze the linguistic construction of the imagined teen reader on the multiple levels of discourse in three teen magazines, Teen, Seventeen, and YM. More specifically, I explore how teen women readers are constructed morphologically, syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically throughout all text within magazine editorial control. I ultimately argue that teen magazine discourse in this project presents teen women as fundamentally lacking and undermines their agency; the magazine then uses discourse features to sell teen women solutions to the discursively-constructed problems they created.

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