From Genius of the Home to Party Princess

The data for this article consist of alcohol-related advertisements published in seven Finnish women's magazines from 1967 to 2006. We are interested in finding out what kind of alcohol-related subject positions these magazines have created for women audiences from the 1960s onwards, to see how those positions have changed and what these changes tell us about the changes that have happened in the cultural position of drinking in Finland. Our analysis applies semiotic and discourse analytical methods. It shows that in the advertisements from the 1960s, women were placed in the subject position of full-time mother responsible for taking care of the heterosexual relationship. Women's drinking was associated with the private space of the home, with eating meals and socialising with family and friends. Women's subject positions in the 1970s and 1980s were still largely the same, but they also took on slightly new features. The 1990s and 2000s saw the emergence of the active woman who appears in public places, and drinking was associated with women's own time, enjoyment and pleasure. During the period under review we see the emergence of a drinking, self-assertive woman who is a responsible and distinctive consumer, a consumer who toys with stereotypes, and a partying consumer.     

From Mothers of the “People's Home” to Biologically Rational Consumers

The aim of the present article is to study how women's alcohol consumption has been defined and contested in the Swedish press from 1955 to 2010 in relation to the development of Swedish society from a social democratic welfare state to a neoliberal competition state. Our material consists of articles published in the largest Swedish national and regional newspapers in 1955, 1965, 1977, 1982, 1995, 2004, and 2010. In the study, we apply Fraser's concepts of recognition and redistribution to analyse how the press contributed to the formation of cultural injustices and counter-claims through its recognition of women's drinking, and how these cultural injustices and counter-claims have conditioned the redistribution of societal resources. Our analysis shows that, during the study period, women were recognized in the Swedish press in limited and stigmatizing subject positions. These dominating representations of drinking women changed over time in an unpredictable way. As collectively shared, widely accepted cultural images, they tended to downplay the possibility of women achieving equal and just participation in cultural interaction, social activities, and healthcare services. In counter-discourses, the possibilities for women to formulate public claims in order to make surrounding structures more “enabling” of their independency, weakened during the study period.     

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.     

Border Narratives,HIV/AIDS,and Latina/o Health in the United States: A Cultural Analysis

Part of the promise of new technologies at the turn of the millennium included claims that they would engender new forms of social equality. At this time, US marketers promoted new technologies as ushering in a new era of globalized prosperity. My analysis of advertisements within Wired, the flagship magazine of the “digital revolution,” compares marketing texts appearing at the height of the technology boom with more recent examples. In the face of economic uncertainties and increasingly fractured audiences, marketers adopted narrower portrayals of masculinity and femininity. Here, advertisements cultivated a pervasive form of maverick masculinity to place technologies as the province of an elite, white, male subculture. This (re)turn to traditional and conservative imagery is particularly alarming given evidence of women's continuing exclusion in technological cultures and occupations. Ultimately, these portrayals provide insight into the ongoing commodification of notions of dis/empowerment, rebellion, and countercultural revolution within US marketing discourses.     

Increasing Use of Ageist Language in Skin-Care Product Advertising:

This study examined frequencies in the use of ageist language in skin-care product advertisements in Vogue magazine from 1969 through 1988 to determine any trends. Findings indicate that there has been a statistically significant nonlinear increase in the frequency of use of ageist language in skin-care product advertising in Vogue magazine over the 20-year study period. That is, data show a decline throughout the 1970's with a marked rise in the 1980's. Possible influencing factors may reflect changes in Vogue's readership related to cohort age range, increased educational and personal income levels, and work force participation, inflation rates, and fear of aging.     

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.     

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.     

There’s a cream for that: A textual analysis of beauty and body-related advertisements aimed at middle-aged women

This article explores the magazine advertising strategies and tactics used by health and beauty products to target middle-aged women. Advertisements found in the April 2013 issues of Shape, Fitness, and Women’s Health were analyzed using intersectionality to determine how these advertisements are presenting messages pertaining to age, gender, and sexuality and how these messages can “other” and marginalize certain identities. The findings suggest that advertisement strategies implement pseudoscience, heteronormativity, hegemonic beauty, and body ideals to establish an idealized version of middle-aged womanhood.     

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.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Research has found negative stereotyping and differential treatment both of women and of the elderly in everyday interactions and in mass media representations. An underresearched cateeorv is middle-aged women. This research included a content L a analysis of 12 issues of a Canadian English-language women's magazine and a comparison of the results with selected characteristics of women 40 to 59 years of age as reported by Statistics Canada. The investigation found that younger middle-aged women (under 50 years) are included, but are underrepresented when compared to the population and to the magazine's readers. Middle-aged women are absent from the covers and the fashion and beauty sections; they are underrepresented in the advertisements, overrepresented in the fiction, portrayed positively but realistically in the editorials, and are shown as winners in a world of challenges in articles on health, family, work, and public life. In general the middle-aged women are white, middle class, heterosexual, well-educated, and employed. Messages about women's aging as portrayed in Chatelaine are interpreted especially in the light on feminist theory.     

The Great Convergence: Gender and Unpaid Work in Europe and the United States

Over the past decades, men's and women's time use in industrialized nations has changed dramatically, suggesting a gender revolution. Women increased their time in paid work and reduced time in unpaid activities, while men increased their time in unpaid work, but not enough to compensate for women's retreat. We investigate developments regarding men's and women's unpaid work across Europe and the United States, using time diary data from the mid‐1980s and onward. We find evidence for gender convergence in unpaid work over time, but different trends for housework and childcare. Gender convergence in housework primarily resulted from women reducing their time, whereas childcare time increased for both sexes, resulting in convergence only where men increased more than did women. Decomposition analyses show that trends in housework and childcare are explained by changes in behavior rather than compositional changes in population characteristics. Though level differences in unpaid work persist, our findings regarding trends support gender convergence in that they are general across country contexts that vary regarding policy and social norms about gender, family, and work.     

Boys will be boys

While lad's magazines such as FHM and Loaded have been subject to critical attention with respect to the way they represent and negotiate models of masculinity, there has been a significant absence of work that addresses the representation of women in these and other publications, such as Zoo and Nuts. In this paper I argue that these magazines normalise pornography through an invocation of the “real,” by encouraging reader action and interaction, and through alignment with women's magazines. The construction and representation of the “real” is difficult to reconcile with the claims of irony used to excuse representation of women as sexual objects. Such claims are indefensible and are symptomatic of hegemonic gender norms in which women are not yet recognised as human.     

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.     

The role of education in the reconciliation between female occupation and family responsibilities at mid-life: the Italian case

This study, based on the data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, deals with the labour market participation of mid-aged women and the reconciliation with family responsibilities. The analysis focuses on Italy, a fast ageing country with a very low female occupation rate. By performing a comparison with Sweden and France, we set three European models, different in terms of welfare system and gender roles, against each other. Women’s educational attainment is shown to be the most important factor associated with being in the labour market between 50 and 59 years old in all the countries analysed. Our findings suggest a couple-oriented approach to study women’s balancing of career and family: for married women, husbands’ education plays an ambivalent role concerning women's participation in the labour market, according to its combination with wives’ resources. The depressive effect on female employment of living close to a parent in poor health holds especially in Italy, suggesting the need to invest more on welfare policies in this country.     

Liberated and Inclusive? An Analysis of Self-Representation in a Popular Lesbian Magazine

Comparisons of a popular lesbian lifestyle magazine to a popular heterosexual women's magazine show that lesbian-controlled media do indeed expand representation when it comes to weight, age, and degree of femininity/masculinity, but not in terms of racial representation. An examination of the textual material and visual images also shows that the lesbian publication gives women a more active role, while the heterosexual magazine depicts females as more passive. However, the evidence also shows that the lesbian and heterosexual magazines have similar rates of objectification, but substantively, the lesbian magazine is less severe in degree of objectification.     

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.     

The justice of earnings in dual-earner households

Over recent decades, the rise in female labor market participation and the increase in “atypical” employment arrangements have brought about a steady decline in traditional “male breadwinner” households and an increasing number of dual-earner households. Against this backdrop, the present paper investigates how different household contexts—ranging from traditional “male breadwinner” households to those challenging this model through joint contributions to household income—affect household members’ subjective evaluations of the justice of their personal income. In the first step, we derive three criteria used by individuals to evaluate the justice of personal earnings: compensation for services rendered, coverage of basic needs, and the opportunity to earn social approval. In the second step, we apply considerations from household economics and new approaches from gender research to explain why men's and women's evaluations of justice are determined to a considerable degree by the specific situation within their household. The assumptions derived regarding gender-specific patterns in justice attitudes are then tested on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). The results support our central thesis that dual-earner households both reinforce and undermine gender-specific patterns in the evaluation of personal earnings. These patterns are undermined because women in dual-income households tend to have higher income expectations that challenge the existing gender wage gap. At the same time, gender-specific patterns are reinforced because men evaluate the justice of their personal income in relation to their ability to fulfill traditional gender norms.     

A new estimate of Ukrainian population losses during the crises of the 1930s and 1940s

The standardized rate of third births declined by over 50 percent in Austria between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. The third birth was also postponed gradually over the years until 1991-92, after which the tempo of childbearing suddenly increased in response to a change in the parental-leave policy. This new policy inadvertently favoured women who had their second or subsequent child shortly after their previous one. We cannot find any indication that the general decline in third births can be seen as a consequence of women's increasing independence from their husbands at the stage in life we study. Furthermore, it still seems to be more difficult to combine motherhood and labour-force participation in Austria than in Sweden, which is a leader in reducing this incompatibility. These developments reflect the tension between advancing gender equality and the dominance of traditional norms in Austria.     

Women's and Men's Relative Status and Intimate Partner Violence in India

In recent years, gender‐based violence in South Asia has been of great concern to scholars and policymakers alike. This study explores the effects of women's relative resources on several dimensions of intimate partner violence in India, and tests whether economic resources allow women to “bargain” for less violence, or exacerbate the violence they face. To explore both possibilities, I use data from the 2005–06 Indian National Family Health Survey. The findings indicate that women with relatively higher education, employment, or earnings status than their spouse face more frequent and severe violence than women with lower status. Together, these findings suggest that women's superior material power bases threaten patriarchal norms and are responded to with the use of violence.     

“Sexy” And “Laddish” Girls

Unpacking ideologies at work within contemporary popular media discourses about young womanhood can be challenging when the terrain of their representation is often presented in a kind of binary-oppositional fashion. There is concern that in contemporary popular culture traditional gender roles are becoming even more entrenched, with femininity increasingly defined around notions of (hyper, hetero-normative) “sexiness.” At the same time, it seems that certain aspects of masculinity, namely sexual hedonism and social, drinking-centred hedonism, have conditionally opened up to young women. The panics that exist around both the figures of the “sexy girl” and the “laddish girl” lead me to unpack here how it is that concerns about women's excessive “sexiness,” and the gendered reinforcement of the sex-object role, relate to discourses of gender “transgression” that often circulate around the figure of the “ladette,” and the supposedly new-found freedoms she is exercising. I suggest that while the figures of the “sexy girl” and the “laddish girl” are both to some extent deplored and constructed as “excessive” and “transgressive” in recent media discourses, they are also both normalised and publicly imag(in)ed through such discourses as central post-feminist paradigms of young womanhood. I go on to explore a possible ideological function of the co-existence of “sexy” and “laddish” girls as normative figures within contemporary media culture.