ABSTRACT
In Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century, Richard Ohmann argues that mass circulation magazines functioned as vehicles for selling consumer culture and forging a modernist, professional-managerial class ethic. Expanding on Ohmann's analysis of the role of magazines in class formation, this chapter examines the role played by the rhetoric of scientific objectivity in the construction of middle-class consciousness. Hegemony theory explains how the ruling class manages the media; yet it also "sees ideology as the always-contested and often inconsistent product of various interests and outlooks". Coverage of genetics in middle-class magazines helped forge a class consciousness based on experimental science and biological determinism. In the magazines Ohmann studied, advertisements were both articulating and celebrating a modernist and progressive class identity while creating markets and profits for the very industrialists who were sometimes the objects of scorn in those magazines.
