decoding femininity

Decoding Femininity: Advertisements and Their Teenage ReadersAuthor(s): Dawn H. CurrieSource: Gender and Society, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Aug., 1997), pp. 453-477Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/190482 .Accessed: 04/03/2014 06:07

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DECODING FEMININITY Advertisements and Their Teenage Readers

DAWN H. CURRIE University of British Columbia

The author explores how the discursive practices of social texts relate to the subjectivities of readers. Employing Dorothy Smith's notion offemininity as textually mediated discourse, the author analyzes how teenage girls read the depictions offemininity in the glossy advertisements offashion magazines. Through interviews with 48 girls aged 13 to 17 years, she explores both why and how young girls negotiate "what it means to be a woman. " Most young girls in herstudy draw on stereotypical meanings of adult femininity. By giving these stereotypes truth status, these readers valorize not only patriarchal meanings of womanhood but also naturalize associations between femininity and the commodities through which this femininity is expressed as the everyday doing of gender The author concludes by discussing implications of this study for both a feminist theory and a feminist politics of culture.

While sociology has been central in establishing feminist studies within univer- sities in both North America and Britain, Barrett claims that the social sciences have "lost their purchase within feminism and the rising star lies with the arts, humanities and philosophy" (1992, 204). She locates the eclipse of the social sciences within a growing interest, across all disciplines, in symbolization and representation. Within feminist scholarship, interest in issues surrounding sexual identity, political agency, and cultural process has shifted feminist theorizing away from determinist models of "social structure" that foreclose questions about subjectivity, the social construction of the gendered "Self," and the importance of the psyche. Although Barrett suggests that the recent interest in literary theory and methods has the potential to initiate a "paradigm shift" in sociology, it is not yet clear how sociologists can draw on the humanities to better understand aspects of social life

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The research for this article was made possible by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank my research assistants, especially Jennifer Fenton, Anne MacLean, Rebecca Raby, and Alissa Sacks. Time to work on the preparation of this article was made possible through a visiting professorship at the Centre for Women's Studies at the Queen's University of Belfast. Finally, I thank Nancy Theberge and Ann Clark, Visiting Scholars at the Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender at the University of British Columbia, for their comments on this article.

REPRINT REQUESTS: Dawn H. Currie, University of British Columbia, Anthropology and Sociology, 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T IZ1.

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 11 No. 4, August 1997 453-477 ? 1997 Sociologists for Women in Society

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454 GENDER & SOCIETY / August 1997

historically neglected by social scientific investigation. Given the enticement of a paradigm centering on women as social agents, considerable motivation surrounds the reformulation of sociology through the incorporation of literary theory and methods.

In a consideration of how sociology might fruitfully draw on developments in the humanities, Valverde points out that debates about literary methods in social research:

have thus far failed to highlight the specificities of social (as opposed to literary) ways of reading texts or, in general, analyzing systems of signifiers .... While literary modes of reading seek to uncover the internal workings of discourses, social analysis is characterized by a concern for the formation and re-formation of social subjectivity. (1991, 173) Her emphasis on social subjectivity is important, because it emphasizes the

search for an account of the systemic, rather than individual reconstitution of women's patriarchal subordination through what Millett (1970) called women's "engineered consent" to domination. This search directs attention to everyday texts through which commonsense understandings of "the social" are formulated- newspapers, television programs, political speeches, and so on. Valverde cites the work of Stuart Hall as an example of theorizing that directs attention to the ways in which social subjectivity is formed, internalized, contested, and re-formed through the struggles of competing accounts of "the social." In these analyses Hall employs literary techniques that enable him to connect discursive practices and the "practical" subjectivities of those who produce or consume social texts. Although informed by Marxist critique, the legacy of Hall through the Centre for Contempo- rary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham, England, moves critical social theory well beyond the determinist interpretations that plagued earlier attempts by sociologists to theorize the place of ideas and culture in analyses of the material relations of domination and subordination.

Despite the advance that the shift from sociological structuralism to discourse analysis represents, Valverde maintains that much further work is needed before we can adequately determine the usefulness of literary theories of subjectivity. Poststructural theory, as one expression, is at this point in time "often vague and abstract, consisting more of caveats about how not to think of subjectivity than of positive guides to social research" (Valverde 1991, 182; also see Barrett 1992). She maintains that the challenge is to theorize social subjectivity in ways that break down the sociological dichotomy of structure versus agency through explication of the dynamic nature of struggles over meaning.

This article takes up her challenge, exploring women's magazines as social texts engaged in struggles surrounding what it means in our society "to be a woman." I locate this exploration within ongoing debates surrounding both the theory and politics of women's magazines, tracing the analytic shift from magazines as "gender scripts" to their current treatment as "social texts." This review thus identifies the beginnings of a "paradigm shift" in the sociological study of subjectivity. I credit


Currie / DECODING FEMININITY 455

this shift to the influence of cultural studies as an interdisciplinary field that includes, but extends, sociological inquiry into culture. The purpose of this review is to raise empirical, rather than simply theoretical, questions about the nature of a paradigm that takes as its starting point women's understandings of self and "the social." These questions are explored through my current research on adolescent reading of fashion magazines. In conclusion, I reconsider the notion of subjectivity as an effect of social texts. With culture becoming redefined as the "new" site of women's oppression/liberation, urgency surrounds this question of how we become women through social texts that operate as vehicles of power.

BECOMING WOMEN: MAGAZINES AS SOCIAL TEXTS

Subjectivity refers to "the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her relation to the world" (Weedon 1987, 32). The notion that women's magazines are implicated in women's social subjectivity follows, in large part, from Beauvoir's now com- monplace observation that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" (1961, 9). Because of their ability to shape consensual images and definitions of femininity, women's magazines exert "cultural leadership" in struggles surrounding what it means "to be a woman" (McCracken 1993). This attribution of leadership is based on the seemingly self-evident claim that these magazines "shape both a woman's view of herself, and society's view of her" (Ferguson 1983, 1). Ferguson points out that "the fact that they exist at all makes a statement about the position of women in society as one which requires special consideration and distinctive treatment." Against the misogynist neglect of women's magazines by malestream scholars, feminist sociologists continue to document the extensive stereotyping of women in both North American and British mass media.1 Taken at face value, the representations in women's magazines seem to imply that we become women naturally through domestic and sexual roles.

Throughout the 1970s, feminist sociologists drew attention to the restrictive and often demeaning representations of women in their magazines (see Ballaster et al. 1991; Courtney and Whipple 1983; Ferguson 1983; Kaiser 1979; McCracken 1993; Ruggiero and Weston 1985). Despite the fact that women's magazines are one of the very few media "for women, about women" and very often "by women," feminists identified ideological constructions that work to define women's understandings of their experiences in ways that guarantee the reproduction of patriarchal definitions of the social world (Winship 1978, 135). Reflecting the Althusserian Marxism of the CCCS, Winship (1978) pointed out that what is represented in women's magazines is not an accurate portrayal of the gender relations that characterize readers' everyday lives but an imaginary relation of women to the relations of patriarchal subordination. In a study of magazines for teenage girls, McRobbie (1978) advanced a similar observation. She argued that adolescence, as



an ideological construction, is given meaning and made comprehensible through magazine topics such as "problems," "romance," and "jealousy." She found that female readers who are the subjects of this discourse derive meanings for their experiences as "girls" through these categories of magazine discourse.

Through the 1980s, feminist sociologists characterized the advertisements, feature articles, and stories appearing in women's magazines as vehicles of women's socialization into subordinate roles. Following sex role theory, much of this work takes the view that women, as readers of social texts, internalize messages that represent the "scripts" of femininity. Although research on adolescent magazines is sparse, these magazines are similarly characterized as promoting the socialization of girls into traditional womanhood through messages that emphasize physical beautification and heterosexual romance (Evans et al. 1991; Peirce 1990). More important, content analysis has shown that the messages in both women's and teenage magazines have not kept pace with the societal changes accompanying "women's liberation." Because these observations connected women's magazines to dominant societal interests in perpetuating the subordination of women, "an almost conspiratorial notion of mass media" emerged among feminist media critics (Walters 1995, 35). Within the media research and theory that dominated feminist sociology into the 1980s, women's magazines were attributed the power to unilat- erally reproduce existing social arrangements.

As problematic as media research based on content analysis has proven to be, I agree with Walters (1995) that the documentation of restricting and stereotypical roles for women has been an important effort (also see Press 1994). Before the work of feminist researchers in the 1970s, little attention was paid to the reconstitution of gender roles in the mass media. This lack of interest reflects the pervasive naturalization of gender, which was not challenged until the emergence of feminist scholarship (see Sydie 1987). At the same time, however useful theories of ideology have been in identifying social texts as vehicles of power, their legacy has proven problematic. Most of this work assumes that knowledge about the content of women's magazines permits inferences about the effects of that content. As tempt- ing as this inference may be, Walters points out that it is too simplistic to claim that "bad images produce bad attitudes and behaviours; unfortunately, the situation is more complex than that" (1995, 3). Within Marxist sociology generally, the treatment of social texts as ideological scripts brought with it the problems of Althusserian structuralism. For our purposes, three problems that arise from treating women's magazines as gender scripts propel the current search for new approaches. All three problems reflect the inadequacy of treating subjectivity as the self-evident effect of magazine reading.

As a theory of social reproduction, the interpretation of women's magazines as ideological scripts is committed to the thesis that social integration depends on the "interalization" of common values. Giddens (1983, 65) argues that this thesis, widespread in sociology, obscures the knowledgeability of social actors: The taken-for-granted cannot be equated with the accepted as legitimate. This equation implies an inherent connection between motives, norms, and legitimation in the


Currie / DECODING FEMINNITY 457

activities of everyday life. He points out that social life contains many practices that are sustained in and through the knowledgeability of social actors but that they do not reproduce as a matter of normative commitment. The second problem concerns political rather than analytic debates that played themselves out in feminist cultural studies. Specifically, a number of writers have drawn attention to an unacknowledged elitism that follows from the dichotomization of patriarchal ideology versus feminist knowledge. While feminist researchers have been ac- corded the ability to identify (hence reject) the patriarchal subtexts of women's magazines, female readers were never portrayed as similarly capable of subversive reading. Unlike researchers, ordinary readers were characterized as being "duped" by the text (see Ang 1988). Finally, ethnographic research disappointed theorists convinced of the ideological effects of reading. Actual readers were discovered to behave in ways that contradict theories of ideology and the notion that women's magazines act as social scripts.

Given the interest among feminist sociologists in women's magazines, research on readers of women's media is virtually absent (see Frazer 1987; Gray 1987; McRobbie 1991a). While sketchy, existing research challenges the view that women passively internalize the scripts of patriarchal oppression. For example, Radway (1984) found that the everyday practice of romance reading actually challenges the patriarchal proscription for women to give primacy to the needs of others. In her study, reading romance novels was one way in which women made time in their domestic schedules for an activity that put their own needs ahead of those of others. Moreover, Radway claims that by selecting as well as rejecting specific texts, readers are actively taking emotional benefits for themselves: "They at least partly reclaim the patriarchal form of romance for their own use" (1984, 184). In the final analysis, because Radway (1984) identifies both potential benefits as well as dangers of romance reading, she is reluctant to definitively condemn (hetero)romance fiction. This call for more cautious speculation about the effects of mass media is echoed in the work of Frazer (1987). Exploring the acquisition of feminine gender and sexual identity through magazine reading, Frazer found that adolescent readers of Jackie did not coincide with the theoretical reader constructed through textual analysis. In real life, her readers were much freer than theories of ideology allow. More important, ideological messages were undercut by readers' reflexivity and reflectiveness.

Following these types of challenges, feminists began to argue that "it is one thing to describe the construction of femininity in magazines, another to suggest that readers identify with or behave in the ways advocated" (Winship 1991, 136). Drawing on their own magazine reading, a number of feminist cultural critics confessed that they personally found magazine reading highly pleasurable, despite their acknowledged "dangers." Within this context, pleasure became "the new catchword" of cultural theory that posits a liberatory potential for magazine reading (Walters 1995, 89). Wilson (1985, see also Barrett 1981) interprets this reframing of debate on women's magazines as a healthy reaction against the moralism of second-wave feminism. For example, fashion and beauty culture were denounced



throughout the 1970s as capitulation to patriarchal proscriptions of femininity, and yet at the same time they were recognized as one of the few legitimate avenues of women's creative self-expression.

Among the "new" feminist cultural critics, Winship maintains that while cultural representations of women can still be condemned for being reactionary, to experience pleasure from them is an entirely different issue. For Ang, pleasure arises because fantasy and fiction do not "function in the place of, but beside, other dimensions of life" so that our pleasure "need not imply that we are also bound to take up these positions and solutions in our relations to our loved ones and friends, our work, our political ideals, and so on" (1988, 135). From this perspective writers support as commonsense Winship's claim that feminist criticism often overlooks the fact that women's magazines "are first and foremost fantasies for pleasure rather than practical action, and that they are recognized as such by the viewer" (1987, 55). Commenting on the glossy ads for fashion, beauty, cookery, and home, Winship maintains:

[W]e frequently luxuriate in the advertising without ever a thought of the product.... I've gained enormous pleasure from [ads, even though] I have no intention of buying the product. Indeed, I am hard put even to remember what it is the image is advertising. We recognize and relish the vocabulary of dreams in which ads deal; we become involved in the fictions they create; but we know full well that those commodities will not elicit the promised fictions. (1987, 55-56)

In contrast to much of the writing by sociologists, within cultural studies postmodern critics refuse to simply dismiss popular culture "as merely serving the complementary systems of capitalism and patriarchy, peddling 'false consciousness' to the duped masses" (Gamman and Marshment 1988, 1). The condemnation of women's magazines reenacts misogynist devaluation of the feminine, a devaluation that then extends to women readers. Instead of dismissing magazine reading as preventing women from achieving their potential, a number of writers attempt to not only explain (in order to redeem) the widespread appeal of activities (such as magazine reading) that are deemed "bad" for women but advance these activities as potential avenues for social change. Writers such as Kaplan (1987) maintain that reader indulgence in the fantasies of consumer lifestyles, an activity that feminists deplored throughout the 1970s, is as much an expression of the failure of the market as incorporation into it. Indulgence thus offers a narrative of openness in which our relationships with pleasurable cultural forms do not "sentence us to a social imprisonment, but can indicate our continual refusals of, anxieties about and dissociations from those relations" (Pleasance 1991, 83).

For the large part, this postmodern celebration of cultural consumption receives "mixed" reviews among social scientists; in some cases it has been met with outright hostility (see Seaman 1992). Much of the hostility within sociology toward agency through cultural consumption stems from the postmodern challenge to the humanism that makes social science possible. While humanism implies a con-



scious, unified, and rational subject who stands apart from the text, postmodern poststructuralism posits agency in the linguistic and other signifying systems through which "the subject" is formed. Because identity is experienced as frag- mented and conflictual, subjectivity is likewise an unstable site of continual contestation. Reading cultural texts (whether by critics or ordinary readers) has been redescribed as "production," rather than consumption because it generates multiple meanings and subjectivities. Drawing on psychoanalysis rather than socialization theory, magazine reading is posited as an activity inviting the constant undoing of meaning and subjectivity, rather than the stabilization of identity. From this perspective, postmodern critics uncover provocative, often subversive, subtexts in women's magazines that challenge earlier interpretations (see, e.g., Fuss 1992; Griggers 1990).

While I agree that the tendency to distinguish between feminist reading and the everyday consumption of mass culture sets up an unfeminist politics of "us" and "them," I also share McRobbie's (1991 b) worry that the celebration of consumption can transform political movements into "life styles." She observes that the issue of pleasure, connected to consumerism, was

drawn into a political vocabulary as feminists and gay men attempted to theorize those experiences which they enjoyed, even though orthodox left opinion seemed to disapprove. In both cases consumer goods had a role to play in the insistence that "guilty pleasure" could be used as part of a process of self- and collective empower- ment. (1991b, 7) McRobbie concludes that the celebration of the pleasures of creative

self-expression through consumption extrapolates objects "out of the context of their materiality" (1991b, 3), positing them instead in a vacuum of aesthetic pleasure and personal style.

To conclude. Although I am sympathetic toward the everyday practices whereby people "make do" in consumer culture (Fiske 1989), I reject the celebration of cultural consumption as productive activity by "ordinary people." While reasons for this rejection are more complicated than can be conveyed here, they include my observation that the claims advancing a subversive role for women's magazines are based, for the large part, on the practices of academic critics as researcher-readers. One problem is that the status of the academic-typically a White, middle-class feminist reader-is given ontological privilege (see Bobo and Seiter 1991; hooks 1992). While the shift from ideological scripts to textual subjectivity is, overall, an analytic advance, this shift has been accompanied by the disappearance of "real" women as historically embodied readers. As a consequence, although poststructuralist theories of subjectivity have more appeal than sociological structuralism because they posit agency for readers, they cannot help us theorize that agency as an everyday activity (Valverde 1991). Below I explore social subjectivity to agency as the everyday activity of women mediated by social texts that influence, but do not determine, our experiences of "being women."



SUBJECTIVITY AS A TEXTUALLY MEDIATED PROCESS

Walters (1995, 145-47) identifies three problems with current cultural analysis based on texts: These problems concern the absence of "real" women, of social relationships, and of politics (therefore history). She claims that we have reached an impasse in cultural studies. While sociological structuralism patronized women as unthinking consumers of capitalist culture, the notion that media cannot be criticized if audiences enjoy them simply replaces elitism with populism. Along with a small but growing number of commentators, Walters calls for research with an intersubjective focus as one possible way of moving beyond the current impasse.

Also critical of many of the current trends in textual analysis, Smith (1990, 4) locates the impasse in the seldom questioned tendency to treat the text as a "specimen" of analysis. By specimen, she refers to the "strategy of working from within the textual" to read people's lives off the text. Such an approach necessarily treats both women and social texts as objects. Livingstone notes of this manner of working that

[a]nalysts tend to deny the role of the analyst (or any other reader) and of the analyst's sociohistorical position when identifying "the" meaning of the text. They tend to conceive of the text as static rather than dynamic, to reify their own analytic categories as features of the text, to underestimate the role of contexts both of production and reading, seeking instead context-free universals in meaning. (1990, 33) However alarming, these problems are not an inevitable consequence of treating

cultural texts as a phenomenon worthy of serious scholarly investigation. Analyzing women's magazines as social texts that mediate women's sense of themselves and their social world, Smith (1987, 1988, 1990) develops a framework that does not displace human agency in favor of a determining role for the text and does not reduce political struggle to the signifying practices associated with consumption.

Smith (1988, 1990) notes that gender, as it is typically viewed, appears as an already accomplished mode of being. Against this view, she problematizes gender by treating it as an accomplishment that requires explanation. Phenomenologically, for women, gender is an accomplishment that is sustained through ongoing, everyday practices that resonate with (or react against) dominant definitions of what it means "to be a woman." In our culture, the meanings affixed to "being women" are increasingly mediated by social texts, specifically women's magazines as a commercial medium that orchestrates women's activities in relation to their bodies. For example, these magazines suggest what we should wear as women, show us how to prepare our makeup and hair, inform us of attitudes and behaviors acceptable for "modern" women "in the know," and so on. In short, women's magazines offer a meaning of femininity that is tied to the everyday activities and beliefs of women that bring this meaning into being and thereby sustain it (1990, 163). While these texts do not "determine" women's practices, as a social discourse2 they mediate practices of femininity among both magazine readers and nonreaders. In other



words, while "gender" is an individual accomplishment-expressing compliance or resistance-it is not carried out in a context of women's making.

Investigation of social subjectivity does not limit itself to either a study of the text or to its reading: The ways in which individual women read and talk about fashion magazines, for example, cannot be understood in isolation from the production of commercial texts as the context of the everyday practices of being women. It takes us to the text's point of origin beyond its reading, an origin that marks magazines and women's talk about them, even though women themselves may not consciously draw connections between their everyday practices and those of social institutions, like the mass media and fashion industries, which attempt to narrow and finalize the range of meanings that social actors can attribute to their actions. As a mode of social consciousness, "femininity" can be studied as actual practices of embodied women, practices that phenomenologically display an array of individual choices and personal preferences (see Beausoleil 1992). However diverse these individual practices may appear, shared assumptions about the meaning of being a woman3 belie the coordination of cultural knowledge surrounding femininity. In our society this coordination occurs through discourses that join women's individual practices to multinational interests in the consumption of fashion and beauty products. Through the discourse of femininity contained within commercial media such as women's magazines, the fashion and publishing industries actively seek to coordinate the multiplicity of local sites within which desire is translated into demand for the commodities they produce (Smith 1990, 173; also Smith 1988). As social texts, fashion magazines thus affix meanings to our everyday experiences as women that support patriarchal and capitalist interests in the subordination of women. As such, social texts are thus constituent of the ruling apparatus. The special capacity of commercial media is "the organization of particular places, persons, and events into generalized and abstracted modes vested in categorical systems, rules, laws, and conceptual practices. The former thereby become subject to an abstracted and universalizing system of ruling mediated by texts" (Smith 1987, 108). In short, Smith reconnects women's magazines as cultural artifacts to their material production, a connection that links the subjectivity of individual women to those institutions that have an interest in restricting and affixing specific meanings to their experiences as "women."

Framed in this way, a feminist investigation of social texts and the individual subjectivities that these texts mediate offers the potential to integrate methods of cultural studies into the sociological analysis of the arrangements through which a social "order" is reconstituted, bridging the sociological dichotomy of structure and agency. While this position does not deny lived diversity among (or within) women, it does acknowledge that the activities of powerful institutions are centrally orga- nized around the accomplishment of specific goals. In the final analysis, any meaningful politics of culture cannot ignore the powerful interest that women's magazines, however pleasurable, represent.

However suggestive, to date Smith's notion of femininity as textually mediated discourse remains a theoretical, rather than empirical, consideration of women as



embodied readers. The remainder of this article explores empirical issues surrounding the treatment of women's magazines as a discourse that mediates the subjectivity of readers. While the questions raised by Smith's approach are far too numerous to be addressed in the current format, this approach displaces academic with "everyday" reading of social texts. One problem is that at this point we know very little about how embodied readers, rather than middle-aged feminist researchers, read women's magazines. To what extent do insights gleaned from our own readings of women's magazines apply to "ordinary" readers?4

FROM HYPOTHETICAL TO EMBODIED READERS

Given the importance of adolescence as a period during which young women are pressured to conform to dominant ideals of femininity, the paucity of feminist research on adolescent magazines is curious. Challenging this neglect, the "real" readers for this study are 48 girls between the ages of 13 and 17 years, most but not all regular teenzine readers. A referral sample of girls living around the lower mainland of Vancouver was developed by asking volunteers to suggest the names of two or three friends. While five different individuals5 initiated the process of referral, to avoid sampling a social network, no more than two "generations" of referrals were used from each initial contact. Criteria for participation included simply an interest in talking to researchers about "being a girl" and written consent from parents. Of the 48 girls whose readings are discussed in this article, 33 are Euro Canadian, 9 Asian Canadian, 2 African Canadian, and 4 "other" ethnic/racial origins. In this group, 12 girls came from families with (at least) one professional parent with university education, 10 from families with one parent in a skilled occupation requiring postsecondary education, 10 from families with one parent in a managerial or entrepreneurial occupation, 15 from families with one parent working in trades, and 1 respondent with unemployed parents. In terms of family contexts, most of the girls came from two-parent families (often with parents in second marriages), although about one-quarter were in households with one parent and 1 respondent was a "foster" child. Overall, these characteristics suggest that the sample is more or less "typical" of the population from which it was drawn. While a referral sample is never representative, we have no reason to believe that the girls in this study are not "ordinary" teenagers who can tell us something meaningful about their lives.

An interview schedule was developed following group discussion with five girls.6 The focus group helped identify magazine reading interest and habits, as well as the most appropriate style of discussion. Four trained research assistants conducted tape-recorded interviews. Overall, participants seemed to enjoy the opportunity to talk about "girl things": Interview topics covered "getting ready for school" in the context of peer relations and conflicts with parents; leisure activities, including magazine reading preferences and habits; and the enjoyable as well as difficult aspects of being a teenager. Thirty girls participated in follow-up inter-


Currie / DECODING FEMINITY 463

views that elaborated on important themes and explored specific issues in greater detail. During the focus group girls discussed advertising images taken from popular teenzines7 presented to the group in an unprompted manner. The fruitful- ness of this innovation led me to include this exercise in individual interviews. During first-stage interviews, girls were asked to discuss a series of images taken from Seventeen, the teenzine with both the longest history of publication in North America and the largest circulation. During second-stage interviews, girls discussed things that they had read in a recent issue of their favorite magazine.

In the final analysis, the current study develops an

investigative approach where the mode of research is more impersonal, where the subjects remain more or less respondents, where the procedure involves structured interviews supplemented with often short periods of observation [with] the whole process tak[ing] on a more documentary character. (McRobbie 1991a, xi) Given the paucity of research on magazine reading by adolescents, this study

necessarily has an exploratory character: The insights discussed below require follow-up and replication. As Ballaster et al. (1991) note, one problem with the type of research discussed here is that the setting produces "displaced" or "mediated" readings of texts. While I do not claim that this study produced natural readings, the girls were asked simply to "say the first thing that comes to mind" when looking at the pictures or to talk about what "they saw." Readings of images that appeared to be structured by the respondent's perception of the exercise as a "test" (i.e., that we were looking for correct answers) were excluded from the analysis below. The most interesting comments about whether, and how, magazine discourse resonates with the respondent's lived experience come from unprompted disclosures, sug- gesting that ethnographic research can best answer the kinds of questions raised by this study.

Below I treat the girls' readings of ads, rather than my analysis of the texts as data to be thematically analyzed. In other words, emphasis is given to discovery over confirmation. The themes discussed below emerged from interview tran- scripts; I deliberately avoided partitioning the interviews for analysis by age or ethnicity, for example. One unanticipated finding is that although racism emerged as one of the most frequently mentioned "problems" in discussions of school culture, I could detect no substantive differences in the readings of dominant femininity (i.e., a femininity favoring whiteness) by majority versus minority readers.8

Similar to many cultural commentators, girls claimed that they read magazines primarily for entertainment. However, reading for entertainment did not preclude reading to learn about the social world; in fact, the girls repeatedly maintained that their magazines are useful sources of knowledge. Anne, a 13-year-old Euro Cana- dian explained,

I like reading other people's things and seeing what happens with their lives and then I'11 try and make sure it doesn't happen with mine [laughs] .... I like that [shows



interviewer]-"Problems at Home, How to Cope." Like, if you're having family problems, you could probably find out what the problems were and see how they solved their problems.

Fourteen-year old Jasmine, an Asian Canadian, also claimed that magazines teach her a lot of things:

They [magazines] teach you a lot of things, like what you should do, what you should think. Sometimes they're really helpful-like your Mom dies, right? They might have advice on how to struggle through this. Like problems and things like that. And maybe makeover. Like you know, "how to do a makeover." I mean you can just look at those for suggestions.

Learning is facilitated when readers like this 15-year-old felt that magazine content addressed their particular age group:

It's about people like our age and funny things that happen to them, and has like questions you can ask-like about your body. There's questions, uhm like everyday questions. You can also ask questions to this model that answers them. They just seem to relate more to me, agewise and everything.

In this study, fantasy themes are not prominent in girls' readings, although a few did emerge. For the large part, the girls' readings are motivated by a desire to know about themselves, their everyday problems, and their social world. This motivation did not lead the girls to uncritically accept all texts as presented. While participants gave differing titles as preferred reading, the overriding characteristic of a favorite magazine was that it is "realistic": "Teen, I don't know, it's just more to my liking. It just seems more realistic. I think it deals more with the problems that people actually have" (16-year-old Euro Canadian). Fifteen-year-old Faye (Euro Cana- dian) relates teenzine content to the realism of her life:

And in Seventeen, the articles are better than YM ... The ones in Seventeen are about like real life, or sometimes they're stories that people have wrote [sic], and I like reading that. [showing an example to interviewer] Well, we have had a family friend that had breast cancer, and sometimes I like things like this-that have, say, happened to my friends or something.

For Yvonne, a 13-year-old African Canadian, using "real" people and their stories improves a magazine's appeal:

Sassy is a little better than YM. I mean it's in the same category, but it's a little better because they put real people on the cover and real people inside the magazine.... Sassy seems to pride itself on being more realistic than the other magazines.

From these excerpts we can see that reading preferences are not based on simply content: In fact, content analysis of the magazines9 reveals very few differences in the topics and issues covered. In choosing from magazine similarity, participants stated preferences for titles that treat their content in what is deemed to be a "realistic" manner. Given both the ubiquity of teenzine reading'0 and participants' willingness to assign "truth" status to these social texts, I set as my task an understanding of how "reality" is negotiated during the everyday reading of



adolescent magazines. Given that all magazine texts are constructions, why are some texts, but not others, deemed by readers to represent real life?

The ways in which editorial texts-such as stories and advice columns-mediate girls' negotiation of "the social" is the subject of discussion elsewhere; below I focus on advertisements. Ads are an obvious beginning point for an analysis of fashion and beauty magazines: They comprise about half of total magazine page space and are the major source of glossy imagery that makes these magazines such a visually pleasurable read. Dyer (1982, 86) claims that pictures such as those prominent in advertisements have more impact than words because they are easier for readers to understand. More important, advertisements feature prominently in academic discussion about the pleasures of magazine reading; including them in a study of girls' readings allows us to compare meaning making by adolescent girls to that by middle-aged researchers.

As indicated above, girls were given as few "prompts" as possible when asked to "talk" about pictures. One point of discussion that emerged with most readers was whether or not they enjoyed the ad-hence would spend time scrutinizing it as opposed to "flipping" past. As we shall see, taking pleasure from the text is implicated in girls' decision making about the realism of the text. Drawing on these discussions, I attend to the processes that govern girls' meaning making from advertising texts. While these processes include the linguistic conventions or semantic constructions unself-consciously deployed by readers, in this article I explore the agency of reading as conscious negotiation. Below I draw on the readings of a series of 25 typical advertisements for beauty products, fashion, and engagement rings (plus one car ad) taken from Seventeen. Because all of these ads feature women, they invite negotiation over what it means "to be a woman."

READING AS EVERYDAY PRACTICE

Like researchers, adolescent readers did not passively accept the images presented; the girls actively selected ads that they enjoyed, while rejecting others. To begin, girls outright rejected some ads on the basis that they are not internally consistent. Reading an ad for Liz Claiborne Fragrance, 16-year-old Melinda, like most of the readers, employed logic in the creation of meaning: "I would think, why is he painting her toenails-How would he know how to do it?" Advertising a car by placing it in the middle of the desert, for example, was deemed illogical by a number of readers: "I don't understand why she would be wearing something like that when it's all cloudy and stuff. And I wonder how they got the car in the middle of nowhere" (16-year-old Asian Canadian reading Saturn ad). Similarly, 15-year-old Angela (Asian Canadian) could not make sense of this ad: "This is strange, weird, like just a girl, a drink, and a car. If I looked at it, I wouldn't know what they're trying to do-it's confusing." The sense that some advertising images are confusing also appears in African Canadian, 14-year-old Noga's claim that she simply did not understand an ad that associates the comfort of jeans, rather than the



discomfort of high-heeled shoes and false nails, with women. As a result, she would ignore it: "[pause] I don't understand it. It says 'created for men' and then it has all these women things, and then it says 'created for women'-never mind, I wouldn't read that part." As in the case of 16-year-old Heather, rejection of images was typically accompanied by an expression of displeasure with the ad. She notes, "and I think her shoes are ugly [laughs] and it doesn't look like a very realistic situation. Why? Well, you can't really tell where they are. It's almost as if they're lying on some turf, but it looks kind of bumpy" (Euro Canadian reading ad for Guess shoes).

Lived experience was also a basis for making sense of advertising texts, as expressed by girls looking at an ad that simulates a "pajama party." For 15-year-old Angela, this image recalled past experiences, which she assigned to "all" girls: "Oh, this is neat! Like being with friends and having fun-a typical girls' night, this is a good one because I guess, like all girls have been there" (Asian Canadian reading ad for Caboodles makeup kit). Fifteen-year-old Cindy (Euro Canadian) described this image as depicting the life of an "average" teenage girl:

This appeals to me because I can like relate to this, in the picture I can like relate to sitting around with your friends and everything, and it looks sort of like an average- just getting ready to go out and I'd probably read this and see more about what's on here [text] because I can relate to the picture. (also reading the Caboodles ad) Similarly, because 13-year-old Yvonne can relate this image to past activities,

she claimed that it shows "realistic" people doing "real" things: It kind of shows people doing real things. I would do that, sit at my friend's and have Sara pluck my eyebrows ... the models are on the realistic side-at least she's got curlers in her hair and they're not all perfect-they're in their underwear!

Conversely, other readers rejected the same image because it does not reflect their experiences of being a teenage girl. Fifteen-year-old Faye called the image "fake":

This one seems a bitfake to me. Like I'd read it over to see what it says, you know, but it's so like-talking on the phone, curlers in your hair, like doing your makeup and laughing in your pajamas, like it's so, like TV-that's what they do on TV. It's like a slumber party, it's a good one for a girls' magazine, but it's kind of fake to me.

Seventeen-year-old Margie also claimed that while the image portrayed an activity shared by many teenage girls, the specifics of the event did not tally with her experiences of teenage life:

From a teenage point of view, from my teenage point of view, from where I am-this kind of thing doesn't happen in this kind of sense. We will do this, teenage girls will do this, but we don't all look like this. Like some of us would be shaving our legs, we wouldn't all be laughing, and we won't be this clean-cut, and looking this pretty-we'd be like no makeup, lying on the bed discussing things that we'd never discuss anywhere else.



Clearly, for participants in this study the negotiation of realism is not dependent on simply the content of the image. From the vantage point of different life experiences, girls could draw differing conclusions about identical ads. It is important, therefore, to see what happens when young readers reach the limits of their lived experiences of womanhood. Ads were included that portray three icons of traditional adult (hetero)femininity: a diamond ring, a bride, and an infant child. While responses to other ads across the group were mixed, there was surprising uniformity in responses to these latter signifiers. Looking at an ad for diamond engagement rings, 17-year-old Maelynn commented,

I like this one... it seems really, he seems really like he's really in love with her and it kind of shows, I guess, that guys care about girls and they're the ones that are kind of taking care of them and buying them stuff [laughs] which is good-plus it's also just kind of cute. (Asian Canadian) Images of a White bride in an ad for Beautiful Perfume drew similar approval

from the majority of girls. For example, 16-year-old Heather commented, "I like that-it says what it means. They're advertising for Beautiful [perfume] and she's in a wedding dress and you always think of a bride as beautiful and stuff... it's nice." With only one exception, an Eternity Perfume ad featuring a woman playfully holding a toddler was read as a mother with her child. Thirteen-year-old Anne (Euro Canadian) described the image as "showing love": "That's really nice, like showing love there-she really looks like a mom... it's a really nice picture." As in the case of seventeen-year-old Margie, this sentimental reading of motherhood was also described as depicting "real" life: "You know she's a model but she could be a mum still. And the little kid is really cute. And that is how mommies and little kids interact-it's real."

While previous readings suggest that contradictory or overly ambiguous meanings may invite readers to reject messages that are subsequently deemed implausi- ble, in the above ads readers uncritically drew on ideological knowledge of romance and motherhood to arrive at unambiguous meanings. This type of reading is perhaps most apparent in discussion surrounding the ad for diamond engagement rings. Here it is interesting to note that the "actors" in this ad are simply shadows cast against a brick wall. And yet, 17-year-old Roxanne (Asian Canadian) read affective details into this image:

It looks good. Why? Because "two months salary lasts forever" [reading slogan], like two months salary maybe lasts, like, less than that, and a diamond "lasts forever" so it's worth spending that money. I like that, the idea of that-showing how happy she is, you know. He gave her a ring and everything. In many cases readers did not feel it necessary to discuss the ads in length,

because the ads were claimed to simply "say what they mean." In these readings it appears that the girls did not negotiate at all. As Hall (1977, 325) notes, ideology



as common sense does not require thought because it is spontaneously available, thoroughly recognizable, widely shared: It feels as if it has always been there. This description of how ideology works is captured in 16-year-old Joan's discussion of the Eternity ad: "I like that. I don't know, it's just neat. If there wasn't any name on it, when I look at something like that I'd know it was 'eternity.'" Like Joan, 14-year-old Jasmine (Asian Canadian) found this ad pleasurable: "I think it's appropriate to the title and everything. I like that one. 'Eternity'-life's like that-one generation goes on after another." Unlike the ad that portrays a pajama party and thus provided an opportunity for readers to compare the representation to their own life, images of adult femininity cannot be negotiated on the basis of "direct" experience. Only two girls rejected the image of the bride, one because it "reminded her of her mother." Overall, the ideological appeals of romantic love and motherhood were so strong that they overrode the criterion of logic. As we see above, the shadowy silhouette of a woman was read as "happy" because it was associated with a diamond engagement ring, while a woman playfully embracing a toddler was read as a "loving mother" by the vast majority of girls. Clearly, these types of decisions are not made on the level of denotation but rather through connotation.

Because ideological stereotypes associate women with babies through the patriarchal institution of motherhood, for example, readers drawing on this knowledge of motherhood make that association in their reading. It is therefore interesting to consider the reactions of these young readers to the image of a woman in a party dress dispassionately breast-feeding an unclothed baby. While readers were emphatic that the woman playing with a toddler is a mother, there was general skepticism that the latter image depicted motherhood. For example, one 16-year-old Euro Canadian reading the Bisou Bisou ad notes,

It kind of bothers me that they put that there. I don't really think she looks like the motherly type, she's just kind of sitting there, kind of-I don't know, trying to make it look like something it's not... I don't think that's the way most new mothers look.

Thirteen-year-old Yvonne (African Canadian) was similarly emphatic: "She's wearing way too much makeup and she's too young to look like a mother." In short, a woman breast-feeding is, logically, more certainly the mother of the infant than is a woman simply playing with a toddler. In fact, the latter image does not depict a relationship at all. Clearly, readers concluded that this woman is a "mother" by employing ideological associations for making sense. In contrast to this construction of a "loving" mother, readers overall rejected the notion that the woman in the Bisou Bisou ad was possibly a mother. In contrast to the Eternity ad, this image was roundly denounced. A 13-year-old Euro Canadian says, "I don't think they should have a picture like that in a magazine, Ijust don't think it's like, kind of appropriate-but her dress is really nice though." Their reasons for rejection varied. While thirteen- year-old Anne emphatically disliked the image, she could only justify her response on the grounds that the ad is "weird." Sixteen-year-old Melinda (Asian Canadian)



claimed that such imagery does not belong in a magazine, even though she also noted that only women would be likely to view it:

I don't like it [immediate response]. I don't think it suits, like a magazine, I think people might be offended by this ... But you shouldn't be, but it's just-you don't want to see it in a magazine, like it's something which is "reality," not like something you want to see in a magazine. Unlike the Eternity Perfume ad, many readers claimed that they could not find

any "point" to including a baby in a fashion ad. One 17-year-old Asian Canadian tried to figure out its aim:

I don't see the point, it's kind of stupid I think-like her breast-feeding a baby has anything to do with like-unless there's an article on it, or something but, maybe they're trying to show her family side, but I don't know. I just think it's kind of weird. I don't think there's a good point to it.

What these readings show is that while the image of the "loving mother" in the Eternity ad was almost universally appealing to the girls in this study, their definitions of a loving mother did not include the act of breast-feeding. Suggested by these rejections is the possibility that the ad is "too realistic," in that it portrays the stark physicality of mothering, rather than the emotionality of ideological motherhood.

In summary, readers did not typically have problems accepting the affective portrayal of motherhood in the ad for Eternity perfume-in fact, affective motherhood and the commodity seemed to "naturally" belong together. One reader, for example, maintained that she liked the Eternity ad because unlike the other pictures, "it was not trying to sell anything." As seen above, many readers could not see any reason to associate breast-feeding and a woman in a party dress, a potentially more liberating view of motherhood. Seventeen-year-old Stephanie maintained that the image "wasn't saying anything":

I'd probably look at this because I wear Bazoobazoo, I wear that brand, but uhm I don't really think the ad, really I don't like it-like what's the point of the baby, you know, it doesn't really seem like it's trying to say anything except a pretty girl with a baby [laughs]. Overall, judgments of this "deviant" image were extremely harsh. Sixteen-year-old

Melinda described the image as "cheap," a term that usually associates women with prostitution: "I don't see the point for them putting that there at all. Women are the majority that read that magazine, so what would be the point. I don't really like it. It looks cheap." In effect, the reality constructed by these readers associates ideological femininity with the world of commodities in a way that this association appears "natural" or makes sense: This association does not hold when atypical imagery is used. In conclusion, the readings discussed here demonstrate a marked tendency for the young readers in this study to assign ideology an ontological status. By ontological status I mean that ideological images are given the status of truth



claims. Accepted as "realistic" images of femininity, readers expressed considerable pleasure reading ideologically charged representations of "what it means to be a woman." What do these findings tell us about the discursive construction of womanhood and the notion that pleasure signals resistance?

BEYOND THE IMPASSE IN CULTURAL STUDIES

I want to consider two questions that structure this article. First, what do girls as actual, embodied readers of women's magazines tell us about the role of cultural imagery in the everyday experiences of "becoming a woman"? Second, can we claim reading pleasure as resistance?

Answering the first question engages us in a consideration of how commercial texts are implicated in the social subjectivity of women. However, to begin, we must acknowledge that achieving womanhood is a complex and ongoing process that engages girls in a number of discourses about what it means to be a woman. Not discussed here are the social texts of school curriculum, television, and student culture (to name a few). However complex the resulting negotiation of femininity thus appears, in this study teenzines are important: These magazines are among the few social texts that address young readers, as "teenagers" but also as "women." These texts create a space, outside of school and beyond parental supervision, where topics of relevance to young women are given serious consideration. For this reason alone, these texts deserve scholarly investigation.

This study brings to light considerable differences between researcher and everyday reading. While middle-aged critics treat women's magazines as vehicles of fantasy and vicarious membership in the glamorized world of commodity consumption, in this study young readers favor texts that address their concerns and interests as teenagers in what they deem a "realistic" manner. This search for the "truth" of teenagerhood encourages readers to look for consistency-rather than play or subversive irony-in meaning; elsewhere, I argue that this consistency arises from the cultural ambiguity that currently surrounds the status of being "a teenage girl." Paradoxically, this search for consistency is one reason why magazines, despite their limited repertoire and repetitive messages, can appeal to a diversity of readers. Although we have seen that experience is capable of calling cultural constructions of reality into question, it is interesting that racial difference (as one obvious source of diversity) did not lead these readers to reject a venue with racist subtext. While this appeal of dominant imagery requires further research, in this study it testifies to the ability of teenzine discourse to construct a universalizing discourse about teenage femininity. Elaborated elsewhere, this construction arises through emphasis on the biological, hence natural, processes accompanying adolescence. Because these texts ground descriptions of White, middle-class femininity in the realm of "the natural," one corollary of magazine discourse is the naturalization of White supremacy. This naturalization of both a sexual and racialized hierarchy is not a "conspiracy" however: It reflects market segmentation as a



nondiscursive practice that necessarily reconstitutes relations of ruling. In this article we have seen that texts are able to sustain universalizing means of address because readers from various backgrounds assign stereotypical, dominant definitions of femininity ontological status: That is, the ideological definitions of what it means "to be a woman" are assigned truth status. As in the discourse about magazines produced by academics, "reality" is an important discursive category in "teen talk" about their magazines. However, unlike postmodern critics, adolescent readers draw distinctions between reality and the fantastic within the text, not prior to its reading. This is not to say that these readers "mistake" the text for the real world; rather, it means that they actively negotiate which individual texts are "realistic." In doing so they blur the boundaries of the discursive and the lived world.

This blurring of boundaries is an important finding; nevertheless, it does not mean that reading patriarchal images of womanhood is a moment of destabilization and negotiation of feminine identity. For the large part, the converse was more likely to be true. That is to say, although participants freely acknowledged that magazines are "only" texts, motivated by economic interests, girls in this study engaged in a manner of reading that brought their construction of self, rather than magazine discourse, into question. One unanticipated finding is the way in which many young readers compared themselves to constructed texts. In the cases of 16-year-old Heather and 15-year-old Cindy:

I've seen this [ad] a few times. It's kind of intimidating to me 'cause there's like five models right across there, and it's making it look like if you wear this, then it'll look as good as it looks on these people and so I don't like it too much. (Heather, reading an ad for Revlon makeup) This is one of the ones that you just kind of flip past because you know you're not like her- When you say "like her," what do you mean? Well, she's really pretty and everything and I guess it intimidates the person who reads it. Like myself. It would intimidate me because she's more pretty than me. (Cindy, reading an ad for Conair Wavemaker) As evidenced in these excerpts, the boundaries between the discursive and

material world of adolescence are not as distinct as commentators often claim. In this study, while experiences of teenagerhood could bring representations of teenage life into question, not all girls were so quick to reject representations of feminine beauty when they were at variance with the reader's sense of self. Although the girls freely acknowledged that their magazines set unrealistic beauty standards, the reality of a dominant culture that emphasizes good looks for women reinforced the power that magazine messages could hold for readers. Sixteen-year-old Euro Canadian Joan, for example, argued that fashion magazines are useful because even though they can make readers feel bad about themselves, they can help readers:

Sometimes you look at the models and you feel worse. But I guess sometimes when they have like different-like what you can do to detract from something that you don't like [about yourself]. Like ways to cover it up, I guess that kind of makes you



feel better 'cause you think that-say, if you really think you have big hips, sometimes they'll give you kinds of clothes that you can wear that will make them look, like make you look slimmer.

In the final analysis, although readers often criticized their magazine's use of beautiful models with "perfect" bodies, they seldom challenged the cultural man- date for women to look good. Seventeen-year-old Roxanne (Asian Canadian) directed her displeasure toward the magazines:

The one thing that's actually always bothered me about all magazines is that they always have these perfect models, and that's something that I would say is really annoying sometimes because every page you open to there's like a girl who's absolutely perfect. You know, she's got gorgeous hair, gorgeous features, she's thin and tall, and everything. I think that that's one thing that affects all girls, you know, because the average girl that's looking or buying this magazine is not going to look like that. I think even for myself sometimes, sometimes you tend to compare yourself to it without even noticing it. Like you'll see these girls and like the way they look so good and everything and you try to look really good, and you want to be really thin and stuff. I just wish for any magazine that would have girls that are, like average. However, 14-year-old Paula directed displeasure toward herself:

I hate how they always have pretty girls in advertisements [laughs]. [I would] just like to see, like just more average girls, like more not so skinny and perfect type of thing. It makes you feel really ugly reading it [laughs] ... Like at one point because of magazines I got a like bit anorexic and stuff. That's gone now, but I used to get really upset and throw the magazine across the room [laughs] and that type of thing. (Euro Canadian)

However discouraging it may be to feminist cultural critics, girls in this study linked feeling good about themselves to "looking good." Most participants did not have any hesitation in listing "things that they would like to change about themselves." The girls were remarkably detailed when describing their physical flaws, many of which they were either actively working to improve:

I look exactly like my dad. My mom has really nice-yeah, my cheekbones, I don't really have any, but I look exactly like my dad and my mom is really pretty and I don't have any of her features. Like she has like nice cheekbones and the kind of lips that, you know-I think that I have a really ugly mouth, it kind of goes up here and it's like, kind of puffy. (17-year-old Euro Canadian) I'd like to have lighter eyes-I have green contacts. Why? It actually attracts more people, I've noticed. Does it? Yeah, 'cause it's not very common for an East Indian or a brown person to have light-colored eyes. (17-year-old Asian Canadian) I would lose a bit of weight. Yeah, I'd probably lose a bit of weight and I want longer eyelashes, and less zits, and straight teeth. (15-year-old Euro Canadian) [I like to] get like skinny, for one thing [laughs]. That's number one. And my nose-it's big [laughs], and then I'd get a-I don't know, it sounds really dumb, but my lips are too thin [laughs]. And I hate freckles! (14-year-old Euro Canadian)



[I'd like to] change my face, how it like [laughs] like get rid of all the pimples I have, uhm, get my teeth straightened, like made them go more inwards and nice like models' [teeth] because I want to be a model. Yeah? Sometimes they have auditions for being a model in there and I want to be a model so I-Teen magazine for the last year has a model thing in it, so I'm going to send away for it. (13-year-old Euro Canadian) While not all the girls aspired like Anne to become models, many more expressed

the desire to be like what a magazine model was seen to stand for:

In all honesty, I'd like to be what the magazines advertise, not necessarily just in body and looks but the confidence they advertise. Someone who can wake up in the morning and not care what she looks like and still look good when she goes out somewhere. That's the kind of person I want to be like. There's a part of me that wants to be absolutely beautiful in the fact that I don't have to care, and there's another part of me that want's not to care whether I am or not. These two things are constantly fighting, and constantly doing it, and just, I'd like to be happy and secure, and above all, I don't want that to depend on my looks or on what I'm wearing, or anything like that, most of all. (17-year-old Euro Canadian) Given these types of responses, it is not surprising that when asked "whom they

would like to be like," several girls mentioned celebrities, including three who had been (coincidentally) featured in Seventeen's "Who's Hot, Who's Not" during the period when interviews were conducted. For example, 14-year-old Paula, a Euro Canadian, wanted to be like Kate Moss:

I'd like to be like probably Kate Moss, she's skinny. She's really pretty, but she doesn't care what people think, like she just goes natural. Like she doesn't wear lots of makeup like the other models, and she wears jeans and stuff all the time. In interviews and stuff she sounds pretty friendly.

Reflecting the association between dominant femininity and whiteness, minority readers often mentioned Caucasian role models. Seventeen-year-old Maelynn, a Chinese Canadian participant, responded:

So like attitude-wise I really like her [Madonna], and lookwise I would say that I kind of would like to be like Janet Jackson, because I think she's kind of got a really-you know, like innocent look, kind of sexy look to her.

Thirteen-year-old Yvonne, an African Canadian, also mentioned Madonna, although in this case she was included along with a racially similar role model:

Cher, Madonna, and Tina Turner all rolled together because they're all-they all have attitude and they know what they want. Well, Cher's kind of plastic, but she does what she wants and she doesn't really care what other people think. Madonna's really made something out of herself and even though it's kind of strange and I don't really listen-watch any of her movies, or particularly like any of her videos, she's got that "get out of my way" personality.

What does all this tell us about the role of commercial magazines in the process of becoming women?



Valverde (1991, 173) notes that debates about signification in social research so far fail to identify the specificities of social, as opposed to literary, ways of reading texts or, more generally, of analyzing systems of signification sociologically. While I do not claim to have provided all the answers here, I believe that answers will only come through research on everyday reading. As shown here, this research may find the notion of femininity as a textually mediated discourse more fruitful than the treatment of magazines as either scripts or social texts analyzed outside their everyday reading. Furthermore, such research cannot ignore the need for a theory of ideology. In this study, pleasure does not rule out the operation of ideology; in fact, ideological definitions enhance reading pleasure because they encourage girls to focus on affective, romanticized expressions of heterosexual womanhood. As McCracken (1993, 136) points out, simply because magazines are connected to women's subordination, it does not mean that they cannot also provide pleasure: Few women would buy magazines if they were overtly negative.

Finally, we have also seen that ideology does not rule out agency: This study is stark illustration of how ideology works through the text as knowledge. Ideology becomes everyday practice because of its ability to dominate the discursive space through which we make sense of the world and our place in it. As we have seen here, it is not simply that ideology provides a mistaken or distorted representation of reality but is constitutive of everyday reality. As noted above, the ideological dimension of women's magazines implicates them in the everyday reconstitution of the ruling apparatus. While I do not view the girls in this study as simply "cultural dupes," I disagree that these readers have the "power" to subvert patriarchy or capitalism simply through alternative readings of fashion magazines. I merely point out that while the readings and discussions in this article illustrate fairly well Beauvoir's claim that we make ourselves as women-including through the ways we describe ourselves-they also illustrate that the conditions in which we do so are not of our making.

NOTES

1. Earnshaw (1984, 411) points out that although more than 26 percent of adult women in Britain read Women's Own, this publication has never been subjected to the investigation that surrounds texts such as the Times, read by a mere 1.9 percent of the British population. Other writers link this neglect to the misogynist and racist reference to women's magazines as "journalism for squaws" (cited in Winship 1987; also see Randall 1991).

2. The reference to discourse, rather than to texts, brings together women's magazines as texts, public discussion of these texts (including feminist discussion), and the activities that these texts and their discussion generate.

3. This is not to imply that experience is monolithic. 4. Elsewhere, I extend this problematic by exploring the implications of this research as readings

of participants' readings (Currie forthcoming). 5. The five beginning points for recruitment were myself and the four research assistants, mentioned

above.



6. While it was initially expected that group discussions would be the most suitable way to proceed, in part because they might put young girls at ease, in practice this did not turn out to be true. Follow-up interviews of participants in the group discussion revealed a self-acknowledged tendency for girls to not want to disagree with others. The group discussions were subsequently dropped. Participants in the group discussion are not included in the 48 girls who comprise the sample discussed here.

7. Four teenzines are readily available in Vancouver and are used for the textual analysis: Teen, Seventeen, Young and Modem, and Sassy. Ads were chosen that were one full page in size and that reappeared over time and across different titles.

8. This finding may reflect the self-selected nature of the sample. The construction of racialized hierarchies and of racial difference through magazines and their reading requires follow-up, focused study. I have identified the racialized identity of girls to allow the reader to assess my claim of similarity among girls' manner of reading.

9. Content analysis of Teen, Seventeen, Young and Modem, and Sassy is included in the overall project.

10. Only two girls in this study had never read, or were not at all familiar with, this cultural genre.

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Dawn H. Currie completed her M.A. at the University of Saskatchewan and her Ph.D. at the London School of Economics. Her areas of interest include feminist research methodologies, cultural studies, and international feminism. She has coedited a number of anthologies in the areas of gender studies and socialjustice. Currently, she is completing a book-length manuscript on adolescent girls readingfashion magazines. With Anoja Wickramasinghe she is also conduct- ing research on women workers in the garmentfactories of Sri Lanka. She is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia and is currently serving as the Chair of Women's Studies.


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Issue Table of ContentsGender and Society, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Aug., 1997), pp. 385-536Front Matter [pp. 385 - 388]From the Editor [pp. 389 - 390]Standing at the Crossroads of Modernist Thought: Collins, Smith, and the New Feminist Epistemologies [pp. 391 - 408]When Wives are Major Providers: Culture, Gender, and Family Work [pp. 409 - 433]Reading Romance Novels in Postcolonial India [pp. 434 - 452]Decoding Femininity: Advertisements and Their Teenage Readers [pp. 453 - 477]Coming out and Crossing over: Identity Formation and Proclamation in a Transgender Community [pp. 478 - 508]PerspectivesDispersing the "Public" and the "Private": Gender and the State in the Birth Planning Policy of China [pp. 509 - 525]

Book Reviewsuntitled [pp. 526 - 527]untitled [pp. 527 - 529]untitled [pp. 529 - 530]untitled [pp. 530 - 531]

Back Matter [pp. 532 - 536]

decoding femininity

Documents

social sciences

social construction

feminist theory

teenage girls

jstor terms

feminist scholarship

jstor archive

feminist theorizing