ABSTRACT
Targeting audiences as wide as possible for economic and sociocultural reasons, women’s magazines have been instrumental in establishing norms of femininity—notoriously promoting and essentializing narrow models of a white, upper-class, young, and thin ideal. Yet upon closer observation, these same magazines are rife with countermodels. Relying on a holistic analysis of women’s fashion magazines and singling out the enduring American mainstream titles Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, this chapter ponders fashion magazines’ ambivalent representations of “femininity.” To understand how a lingering, normalized conception of womanhood effectively unfolds in their pages, it first sheds some light on the mechanisms underlying their production (especially their professional organization), analyzing how these are also engrained in the genre’s specific media format, that counterbalances their characteristic miscellaneity. A case study, examining the representation of three feminist figures (journalists Gloria Steinem, Susan Brownmiller, Jane O'Reilly), illustrates how these editorial strategies are enacted. Looking at these magazines’ reception, however, complicates the vision of a hegemonic enunciator. In the past decades, studies from various disciplines (ranging from sociology and psychology to cultural studies, amongst others) have pointed out the heterogeneous readings afforded by women’s magazines. Playing out conservatism against readers’ agency and pleasure, such a shift in focus highlights the potential for magazines to be sites of deconstruction(s) of normative femininity, precisely on account of their broad circulation and reach. This chapter thus weighs fashion magazines’ enduring ecosystem of representations to assess how they can represent (re)sources to negotiate womanhood, for varied audiences ranging from scholars to readers.
