Performance of a Korean masculinity in Taiwanese men’s fashionmanifests traits of traditional masculinity, while on the other hand, he meticulously grooms
himself in ways that were once thought feminine. Examples such as David Beckham, involving
the obviously hyper-masculine and assumedly heterosexual status enjoyed by most sportsmen,
have been critical to the men’s fashion scene in changing attitudes about exposing, eroticizing,
and grooming the male body (Coad 2008; Shiau 2012). Without some of the most celebrated
heterosexual athletes in the world endorsing and embodying different facets of metrosexuality,
it is uncertain if masculine norms would have changed so rapidly in so many different cultures.
a multimodal discourse analysis
Magazine covers, as noted by scholars (e.g. Held 2005), behave like actual advertisements, a pro-
motional genre par excellence, that seek to capture the public’s attention and generate interest
in buying the magazine. In this chapter, I analyze men’s fashion magazine covers and corre-
spondent cover stories as multimodal texts designed to convince readers to buy magazines by
advancing particular standpoints towards their subjects. This study sees magazine covers as a
multimodal media genre that, as suggested by Held (2005), announces, indicates, and appraises
specific content (Held 2005, 173). Men’s UNO’s front covers featuring Korean men along with
the accompanying cover stories are examined to explicate how the multimodal discourse of
Korean masculinity fits the magazine’s own editorial stance, and also seek to accommodate
the expectations of readers that can provoke ongoing and sustainable discussion. Men’s fashion
magazines, both as a genre and as a communicative venue, deploy three codes: pictures, typo-
graphy and language, which interact to yield a unique meaning (Held 2015). A number of media
scholars have studied a corpus of covers of news magazines, focusing on their structural, textual,
stylistic, and rhetorical characteristics (Kjeldsen 2007; Roque 2012; Van den Hoven and Yang
2013). In so doing, this examination shifts attention from news magazines to a different genre—
men’s fashion magazines—by seeking to illuminate some of the macro- and micro-structural
characteristics of men’s fashion magazine covers, focusing largely on their textual features and,
to a lesser degree, their visual features. I also draw some insights from authors adopting a mul-
timodal perspective to the analysis of discourse (Bateman and Wildfeuer 2014; Kress and van
Leeuwen 2006; Lim 2004; Machin and Thornborrow 2003; Machin and van Leeuwen 2007).
While multiple “masculinities” are likely produced in relation to “femininities,” Connell
(1987, 2000, 2005) asserts that the mechanics of power create hegemonic versions of masculin-
ity and femininity. Paradigms of gender performance are disseminated in manifold modes from
everyday discourse to literary and screen narratives, but in this chapter, the focus is the visual and
textual codes in men’s fashion magazines and how they work together to renovate, reproduce
and/or sustain the hegemonic masculinities in the East Asian context. The sampling scheme
used in this study is exhaustive; it examines all the Korean males featured on the covers of Men’s
UNO as well as the associated cover stories that outline their life narratives. This approach results
in the inclusion of ten Korean male celebrities for analysis (Table 14.1).
The subjects are chronologically listed according to the date of their first appearance.
Ji Jin-hee (as seen in Figure 14.1) seems to possess a personae especially favored by Men’s UNO
given that he has appeared on the cover three times, first in 2005, and most recently in 2014.
Meanwhile, Lee Min-Ho, Song Seung-heon and Lee Byung-hun have each been featured on
the cover twice. In other words, this study analyzed 15 cover stories involving 10 different male
celebrities. All the models were below 40 years old when they were featured on the cover, and
four were in their twenties; this reflects the demographics of the readership of Men’s UNO,
namely Taiwanese men aged 18 to 40 years old. Notably, nearly all the featured celebrities are
taller than 6 feet (181 cm), with the sole exception of Ji Jin-hee at 5’8” (178cm). The Korean