ABSTRACT
Covering a wide array of subject matter and time periods from the Progressive Era through the present, the essays in this section examine different ways in which femininity is constructed through magazines in different moments. Many of the essays in this section pay close attention to the ways that the images in magazines tell stories, often running counter to those offered by the text of magazines. These essays reveal the ways that The Women’s Era stove to train Black women as political actors in the nineteenth century; mid-twentiethcentury Seventeen magazine attempted to create respectable teen consumers, but unknowingly produced a powerful lesbian subtext; Essence magazine constructs an image of the independent and cosmopolitan single Black woman through travel, but always with an eye on respectable notions for heterosexual romance in the 1970s; in the same period Vogue magazine constructed images of African women on its pages, inviting readers to encounter them in the unique space of the fashion magazine; and contemporary fashion magazines have used blackface in editorial photography to construct the white female body of the model as a privileged site of radical racial transformation, which problematically constructs race as something that can be put on and taken off like a hat.
