Positioning the self

This article explores how a group of regular magazine readers interpreted representations of women's lives in women's magazines. These readers consistently evaluated magazine texts in relation to their own lives and their own conceptions of identity. They used their personal experiences and their notions of what a woman's life is really like in order to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant journalism in women's magazines. When talking about women's magazines they formulated narratives about their own identities, and they drew on various discourses that placed women's magazines in relation to their subjective experiences of ordinary everyday life. A reflexive positioning of the self was therefore crucial to their mode of interpretation. The analysis is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with subscribers to a popular Norwegian women's magazine, and the findings are discussed in the light of Anthony Giddens' theory of the reflexive self and Toril Moi's reading of Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminist philosophy.     

Hidden in Public View

This study analyzes the visual representations of women in Bulgaria from the 1950s to the 1980s, as depicted in photographs in the official daily newspaper of the communist party. The study is theoretically informed by feminist theories of media representations and engages specifically with Gaye Tuchman's idea of “symbolic annihilation,” which referred to Western media's condemnation, trivialization, and omission of women in public discourse. However, this analysis adapts Tuchman's theory to the specificities of socialist societies, where women's participation in public life was ideologically mandated. The authors propose the concept of “symbolic glorification” as a correlate to Tuchman's idea, and argue that symbolic glorification was a necessary part of ideological efforts to claim that women's participation in the labor force and political life was a sign of true emancipation. Nevertheless, the visual data reveal that certain aspects of femininity, related to motherhood and sexuality, were symbolically annihilated as a way to make female identities conform to ideological goals. The paper concludes by raising questions about the ways in which the ideologically constructed identities of women during socialism may impact on a feminist agenda after the end of the Cold War.     

“Your a Ugly,Whorish, Slut”

In recent years, the mainstream media has identified on-line vitriol as a worsening problem which is silencing women in public discourse, and is having a deleterious effect on the civility of the public cybersphere. This article examines the disconnect between representations of “e-bile” in media texts, and representations of e-bile in academic literature. An exhaustive review of thirty years of academic work on “flaming” shows that many theorists have routinely trivialized the experiences of flame targets, while downplaying, defending, and/or celebrating the discourse circulated by flame producers. Much contemporary scholarship, meanwhile, ignores e-bile completely. My argument is that this constitutes a form of chauvinism (in that it disregards women's experiences in on-line environments) and represents a failure of both theoretical acuity and nerve (given that it evades such a pervasive aspect of contemporary culture). The aim of this paper is not only to help establish the importance of on-line vitriol as a topic for interdisciplinary scholarly research, but to assist in establishing a theoretical problematic where what is seen is barely regarded as a problem. Overall, my argument is that—far from being a technology-related moral panic—e-bile constitutes a field of inquiry with a pressing need for recalibrated scholarly intervention.     

The Blunt Cutting-Edge: The Construction of Sexuality in the Bengali Feminist Magazine Sananda

This article focuses on the construction of one's relation to pornography in contemporary media by examining agony columns of young adult women's magazines. The analytical approach employed is a “close reading” from the perspective of queer theory, purposing both to “queer” the portrayals of heterosexuality and to critically review representations of non-heterosexuality. The focus is especially on the role of affects and emotions in moving subjects “toward” and “away” from porn and producing conceptions of gender and sexuality. On the one hand, the positive affects of excitement and interest are associated with men in the data corpus, whereas the negative affects of disgust and upset are usually connected to women. On the other hand, affects are absent when discussing queerness. The study thus offers an application of Ahmed's notion of the productive role of emotions both in expanding the idea of productivity from constituting ethnicity to establishing gender and sexuality and also in directing attention to the absence of affects or emotions in constituting norms.     

Straight Eye for the Gay Guy: Composing Queerness

Drawing on the work of Didier Eribon and his theorization of the construction of gay male subjectivity, this article examines different “texts,” broadly defined, that grapple specifically with straight men attempting to represent male homosexuality: Norman Mailer's essay, “The Homosexual Villain”; the Bravo reality television series Boy Meets Boy, and Michael Griffith's short story, “Hooper Gets a Perm.” These texts represent attempts by straight authors to grapple with queer experience in ways that move the imagination of queers beyond simple stereotypes or uncritical explorations of the sexual “other.” In the process of examining these texts, the following questions are addressed: What happens when a straight man attempts to represent a gay man? Does he “get it right,” and is such a question even useful? More specifically, what is the value in having straights imagine queerness? Is such an imagining possible? Is such desirable? And, if so, what are the contours of such an imagining—as well as its possibilities and limitations, pedagogically, personally, and politically? Ultimately, I contend that the straight imagining of queerness offers rich potential for mutual understanding; furthermore, attempting to understand what goes into the making of those representations tells us much about how queerness circulates in our culture as a subject, a figure of discussion, contention, and representation.     

Chick Non-Fic

This paper identifies a new variant of chick lit, a non-fiction variety derived from contemporary memoir that could be called “chick non-fic.” An emerging group of young women writers is capitalizing on the essential comedic nature of chick lit, but, rather than producing fictional texts, has taken the genre in the direction of creative non-fiction. Chelsea Handler, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Samantha Bee, and Olivia Munn—all young(ish), female comedians with loyal fan followings—have each penned memoirs that adopt literary conventions of chick-lit novels and invoke the same post-feminist or third-wave feminist concerns. Their texts embroider on the established conventions of two genres—chick-lit fiction and the memoir—to produce a provocative new variant.     

Politics of Sex Appeal in Advertising

This article is an ethnographic exploration of how gender ideologies were negotiated in the South Korea of the 2000s, in advertising texts and in advertising workplaces. Advertising has been criticized for reproducing gender stereotypes, and it is easy to assume that it is men within advertising agencies who are responsible for the objectifying and sexualizing portrayals of women. Yet behind some of the raciest South Korean advertising campaigns were ambitious women, who not only eagerly repeated the marketing adage that “sex sells” but also, provocatively, attempted to obliterate the lingering patriarchal norms and double sexual standards—with sexualized advertising. This article examines the politics of sex appeal in contemporary South Korean advertising by drawing on participant observation at an advertising agency, interviews, and public discourse analysis. Having situated the women's interventions within the cultural–historical context of South Korea, I, first, show how women's embrace of the sex-appeal aesthetic was a strategy to succeed in a male-dominated work environment and, second, detail how fighting gender discrimination with sex-appeal advertising was a profoundly contradictory project. I suggest that the politics of sex appeal in advertising was symptomatic of how women's struggles for equality were collapsing into neoliberal post-feminist sensibility.     

Iranian obstetricians’ views about the factors that influence pregnant women's choice of delivery method: A qualitative study

BackgroundCaesarean section is a commonly performed childbirth procedure. While caesarean section is undeniably a lifesaving procedure for some mothers and babies, it can also be an unnecessary procedure for others. Different factors may be involved in the rate of birth by caesarean section.QuestionThis qualitative study was conducted in Kashan city, Iran, to explore obstetrician's views of what might influence pregnant women's choice of delivery method.MethodsObstetricians’ views and experiences were collected using semi-structured interviews. Interviews were conducted in a clinic or hospital, based on the preference of the 18 physicians who agreed to participate in the study. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. Participants were asked key questions, including: “Why do some women prefer caesarean section?”; “What kind of delivery did you have and why?”; “What kind of delivery would you recommend to pregnant women and why?” Inductive qualitative content analysis was undertaken using the method described by Morreti with 120 initial codes categorized into six categories.FindingsThe six categories developed from the initial codes were: factors relating to women, obstetricians, delivery conditions, complications, society's beliefs and the health system.ConclusionA qualitative study conducted in Iran showed that most of the factors identified by participants facilitated the choice of caesarean section. Vaginal birth was anticipated as a painful and lengthy process, with low cultural acceptance and resulting in less income for obstetricians.     

Coming In: Queer Narratives of Sexual Self-Discovery

Many models of queer sexuality continue to depict a linear narrative of sexual development, beginning in repression/concealment and eventuating in coming out. The present study sought to challenge this by engaging in a hermeneutically informed thematic analysis of interviews with eight queer people living in Western Australia. Four themes were identified: “searching for identity,” “society, stigma, and self,” “sexual self-discovery,” and “coming in.” Interviewees discussed internalized homophobia and its impact on their life; experiences and implications of finding a community and achieving a sense of belonging; the concept of sexual self-discovery being a lifelong process; and sexuality as fluid, dynamic, and situational rather than static. The article concludes by suggesting that the idea of “coming in”—arriving at a place of acceptance of one’s sexuality, regardless of its fluidity or how it is viewed by society—offers considerable analytic leverage for understanding the journeys of sexual self-discovery of queer-identified people.     

Good Mothers Never Wane: Mothering at Menopause

ABSTRACT

Due to recent feminist scholarship, we know a considerable amount about women's mothering identities and activities, as well as the impact of mothering ideology on individual women. Nonetheless there are gaps in our knowledge about motherhood. For instance, we know mostly about experiences of mothers with young children, and an implicit assumption is that mothers are also fairly young themselves. Yet, what about mothers at midlife and beyond? What about menopausal mothers? This paper represents an initial attempt to explore motherhood experiences of middle-aged menopausal women. Findings presented in this article are based on 45 in-depth interviews with middle-class, heterosexual menopausal women in a midwestern state in 2001. Findings suggest that motherwork and the maintenance of “good” mothering ideology are still primary activities of women at menopause despite assumptions that menopausal women have completed mothering experiences and are now grandmothers (if caregivers at all). In analyzing menopausal mothers, I encourage broader explorations of women's experiences of both motherhood and menopause.     

Neoliberalism,Soul Food,and the Weight of Black Women

This article examines the representation of Black women's weight in contemporary diet advertising and African American film. It positions socioeconomic class as a significant factor that distinguishes between “good” weight and “bad” weight. I argue that there is a distinction to be made between representations of poor and working-class fat Black women and middle-class fat Black women. The increased presence of Black women as diet spokeswomen is also questioned. The social construction and filmic representation of the African American cuisine “Soul Food” and the political economic notion of neoliberalism are used as frameworks to deconstruct how notions of self-discipline, personal responsibility, and citizenship impact upon Black women's bodies. As a case study, I examine the careers of Oprah Winfrey and Gabourey Sidibe and the ways in which their weight has been differently coded based on class, the neoliberal rhetoric of “personal responsibility,” and food. I ultimately critique how contemporary media has helped to shape contemporary discourses on Black women's weight.     

Personal Problems and Women's Issues

Teen television drama series are centrally concerned with issues of sexuality as teenage characters gradually mature. Their sexual maturation is key in marking their transition from childhood to adulthood and the genre often emphasises significant moments in this development, such as first kisses, dates and/or sexual experiences. Within the genre's sexual culture, representations of sexual violence are common, yet have remained widely neglected by both teen and feminist television criticism. This article addresses this neglect by examining the kinds of stories about sexual violence that emerge in this genre. I argue that a fuller understanding of these narratives is offered by situating them in relation to series’ and generic frameworks more broadly, rather than analysing them in isolation. Specifically, I will explore episodic sexual violence narratives in US programmes between 1990 and 2008, outlining developments in these representations over time. The article begins by mapping where these episodes occur within broader series’ structures. This provides the context for a deeper analysis of how sexual violence functions both narratively and ideologically across these programmes.     

Was Killing the Queer Author Necessary to Liberate the Queer Text?: The Case of Andy Warhol's A: A Novel

In the decades since Roland Barthes' “The Death of the Author” (1968), Michel Foucault's “What Is an Author?” (1969), and Andy Warhol's novel A (1968), we have become comfortable with the idea that the author is separate from the text. In many ways, however, killing the author was an unnecessary act since critics inherently read their own ideas into texts. Within the span of less than two years, all three texts proposed the removal of the author from the text, all three by prominent gay men in academia and art. The act of removing the author represented a kind of closet protection, separating artist from art, author from text. This aricle examines the convergence of ideas of Barthes and Foucault and how they relate to Warhol's A. In these writers and texts, we see a sexuality eager to burst forth from the page, but one that is hesitant, worried that the sexual politics of the late 1960s are not so liberated as to freely accept homosexuality among the artistic and academic elite. This is the real tragedy in the death of the author, when the identity and spirit of the artist/writer is so denied by the audience that not only is the sexuality lost, but the artist as well.     

Chicks,Dicks, and Contradictions

This essay examines Playgirl as a rich, yet overlooked, archive in the history of American pornography. Although the magazine often is dismissed as the token attempt of a masculinist industry to equalize its representational politics, I argue instead that a significant synergy exists between Playgirl and entwined debates over pornography, gender, and commercialized sexuality in 1970s America. Employing established conventions of the women's magazine, Playgirl utilized that form toward granting women access to explicit images. Yet given its “better lifestyling” advice on how the sexually liberated woman might find empowerment by viewing male nudes, Playgirl's reluctance to display full-frontal nudity until the midpoint of its first year fashioned an initially compromised aesthetic. Not only were women interpolated as untutored viewers within this regime of genital obstruction, but models also were all but emasculated. Consequently, the degree of male exposure that could be handled by both viewers and models was questioned, critiqued, and debated across Playgirl's letters to the editor section, aptly entitled “In-ter-course.” As an artifact of sexual media history, Playgirl is invaluable because readers are able to trace throughout its pages the ways in which changing tides of gendered power began to problematize pornography's routine dichotomy between masculine subjectivity and female objectification.     

Engaged with eBay

eBay promises individuals varied identity positions but renders the most traditional roles—particularly wedding engagements and marriages between a woman and a man. The company indicates that “you can get it on eBay” and the site satisfies desires, fulfills consumer needs, and connects people. Yet, eBay also controls the messy and queer aspects of collecting, and institutes a normalizing structure that compels most individuals to follow eBay's directives, attend to its moral codes, and facilitate community trust. I use close visual and textual analysis and feminist and collecting literature to interrogate how eBay deploys narratives about engagement rings, weddings, and heterosexual unions. I also consider the related ways women sellers list their personal wedding dresses. By providing representations of their weddings and marriages, these women support eBay's normalizing structure and trouble some of its functions. Studying such practices is important because wedding cultures and related rituals ordinarily articulate gender, race, and sexuality positions; conceptions of the individual, family, community, and state; connections between love and consumerism; and the standards by which people are expected to live their lives.     

Drinking as a Feminine Practice: Post-Feminist images of women's drinking in Swedish women's magazines

Previous feminist analyses have pointed out how the news media demonize women who drink, labelling them as irresponsible, disturbing or behaving “like men.” Popular media such as women's magazines, however, construct alternative representations, that frame women's drinking encouragingly and as part of a successful and “modern” femininity. This study carries out an analysis of fashion reports from six Swedish women's magazines, published between 1984 and 2008. It concludes that despite the fact that women's magazines create an alternative to problematizing portrayals of women who drink, this does not necessarily make them unproblematic from a feminist point of view. While the prevalence of positive and encouraging images may be interpreted as indicating a change towards more gender equal or gender neutral depictions of drinking; this article argues instead that these images should be regarded as parts of a discourse that celebrates stereotypical femininity and reproduces gender difference. As such, the present article brings new perspectives to the complex discourses that give shape to ideas about gender and alcohol in general, and women's drinking in particular.     

Homosexual Experience,Desire and Identity Among Young Adults

ABSTRACT

Is young people's sexuality becoming more fluid and less tied to steady, stable identity patterns? Are we developing into a society where sexual relationships between individuals of the same sex are no longer reserved for the small minority of gay men and lesbian women? Adherents of so-called queer theory have promulgated such views. Using a population-based sample of young adults (aged 19 to 26, N 2753), we investigated homosexual experiences, desire and identity. We found that levels of prevalence of homosexuality were primarily a function of the criteria we used. Using the most restricted (“narrow”) definitions, we found that about one percent of both genders reported “exclusive” homosexual interest and identity. Using the most inclusive criteria, we found that one of ten young men and one of four young women reported having some homosexual experience, interest or identity. Still, the most striking finding involved the substantial gender-specific differences: homoerotic activity and interest are far more interwoven with heterosexual activity for women. There are strong indications that homosexuality is a lot more threatening and potentially in conflict with traditional male gender roles than we find to be the case for women. In other words, while there may be signs of more fluid sexual identity categories, this phenomenon primarily applies to women.     

A Body of Text

This article re-evaluates the relationship between gender identities, embodiment, sexuality and text-based, synchronous CMC (computer-mediated communication). A discourse analysis was conducted on two different IRC channels: #Cyberbar, a channel that hosts predominantly “straight” male/female gender performances; and #Queer, a channel mostly visited by participants who articulate “gay male” gender identities. The notion of embodiment played a pivotal role in both channels, as demonstrated by the identification of three “interpretative repertoires” that involve the invocation of corporeal aspects in the participants' performance of gender and sexuality. This invocation reaffirms gender's status as connected to a binary sexed body, which limits the scope of gender performances in a text-based environment such as IRC. However, the discursive interactions in #Queer did articulate alternative interpretations of masculinity, which challenged traditional heteronormative standards governing “male behavior.” Eventually, it is concluded that the discourse in both channels is constructed by participants who bring their everyday, embodied experiences online. IRC might be a textual environment, in contrast to many of the web's popular graphical spaces, but this does not mean that the body is any less present.     

The “Sassy Woman” and the “Performing Man”: Heterosexual casual sex advice and the (re)constitution of gendered subjectivities

Media forums that provide “sex advice” are a rich source of (sexual) information for heterosexual individuals and have been critically examined for the ways in which they construct heterosexuality (and sexual subjectivities). The representations of (heterosexual) casual sex are also prevalent across the mass media. This paper uses a Foucauldian/poststructuralist mode of discourse analysis to explore how casual sex “advice” in three self-help books (two aimed at women, one aimed at men), and online advice articles, constituted casual sex and masculine and feminine heterosexual subjectivities. Four main (profoundly gendered) subject positions were identified in the texts: the “strategic man”; the “performing man”; the “sassy woman”; and the “vulnerable woman.” It is argued that although some alternative ways of constituting heterosexual identities were provided (particularly for women), gender difference was not only implicated in such advice but also, at times, crudely exaggerated. The implications of these representations are discussed in relation to contemporary heterosexualities, heterosexual sexual identities, and heterosexual power relations.     

Women's Alternative Internet Radio and Feminist Interactive Communications

The nude male centrefold spread like a virus through the new women's magazines of the seventies. At the time, and since, the academic gaze has viewed the centrefold as little more than a joke, a failure for feminism and female sexuality. This article returns to the heyday of the centrefold and listens to the responses of ordinary women in reader letters published in the new Australian women's magazine Cleo from 1972 until 1985. It argues that far from being a failure, these representations of the nude male became a practice of popular feminism, one of the early representations of popular feminist desire in mainstream women's magazines.