Mellan Bröst och Rumpor : En Kvalitativ Studie av The Playboy Interview

• Main Authors: Dewrang, Nicklas, Sjöström, Axel
• Format: Others
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för samhällsvetenskaper, SV 2012
• Subjects: Playboy; bröst; rumpor; Hugh Hefner
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-17083

Playboy is a magazine that, for more than a half century, has been mostly known to the wider audience for its stylized pictures of naked women. What a lot of people do not know is that the magazine, with its editor in chief Hugh Hefner in the lead, has been frontrunners in human rights. Playboy has been fighting protecting the right of freedom of speech, fighting for equal rights for all people during the civil rights movement and supported the feminist movement by funding precedent cases on abortion rights.   According to a series of text analyses by Beggan & Allison (2000, 2002b) Playboy’s editorial direction contradicted conventional definitions of masculinity. Also, the magazine portrayed its Playmates with complex identities that, in many cases, contained a number of traditionally masculine abilities. In this thesis we have done a critical discourse analysis of the Playboy interview and how the gender of its subject is portrayed by the magazine. Also, we have studied how seriously Playboy takes the journalistic mission in educating its audience, criticizing the power, and let a diversity of opinions be heard in the interview.   We found that, even though it’s easy to repudiate Playboy as a magazine for unsophisticated men that prefer objectified naked women, the Playboy interview presented a number of different people in different ages and of different gender that in many ways contradicted the traditional ways you tend to see the gender portrayed in interviews. The female subjects tends to be portrayed in ways that you normally se male subjects are portrayed, and the male ones tended to be given a complex identity that included both traditionally male and female abilities. We also found that Playboy takes the journalistic mission seriously, letting a diversity of opinions be heard even though they contradict what the magazine stands for.