ABSTRACT
One of the first spreads in Diva was entitled ‘Naughty but nice’ (Figure 2). Here the ‘naughty’ overtly refers to the devilish horns worn by the models. But it also suggests that the revealing clothes may themselves be naughty. Yet, when we turn the page to discover the ‘nice’ we find a far less demure picture: maintaining sexualized body contact at all times the two models are now in a rougher, dykier, street-style, posing with an in-your-face knowingness for the camera. On one level this suggests a carnivalesque reversal, in which the grotesque of the lesbian body is inverted as ‘nice’, whilst something approximating ‘proper’ femininity is demonized as ‘naughty’. This might be called the magazine’s preferred reading, in which an audience assumed to have lesbian subcultural competencies would decode the visual pun of the title. But the spread offers another reading that, rather than problematizing the very idea of a binary divide by ridiculing its constituent terms, re-naturalizes the dichotomy by presenting a lesbian binarism in which the more masculine, dyke-referential style of the ‘nice’ is normatized, whilst the femmier, mainstream fashion of the ‘naughty’ is presented as subculturally transgressive. Although all the clothes are from a London designer shop, the styling of the ‘nice’ is quite easily recognizable as a lesbianized version of what was a current club look. The jeans, the leather trousers and big leather belts cut against the cutesy T-shirts and the baby blue satin of the jacket, securing a lesbian-coding for those in the know. But both images are presented as potentially desirable for the reader.
