In the contemporary subfield of feminine journalism,18 the relationship between feminism and femininity has become more complex and reflexive, as feminism and its criticisms of feminine consumer culture have informed the production of magazines. As McRobbie notes many of the women who work in magazines are the product of academic study that includes feminist scholarship, and are often ‘feminist‐inclined’ (McRobbie, 1997:206). This shared educational background means that when studying such journalists the feminist academic cannot assume a position of total theoretical superiority or be sure that the ground of feminism is entirely hers. Indeed discourses of feminist emancipation have been taken up and woven into the traditional fabric of women’s magazines, producing a new postfeminist19 version of femininity. As Brunsdon points out, one of the achievements of the 1970s feminism she documents was to
denaturalise notions of a ‘woman’s place’. However, this resulted not in the complete dissolution of the feminine, which was perhaps envisaged, but ‘in complex, contradictory and to some extent unpredictable negotiations with
18 I use contemporary subfield to denote the period from the launch of British ELLE onward which I delineated in the Chapter One.
19 Postfeminism is a notoriously contested term, which incorporates many, often conflicting discourses, indeed
‘it seems to have entered wide use without necessarily any clear agreement about its meanings and it exhibits a plasticity that enables it to be used in contradictory ways’ (Negra 2004). Postfeminism can at once used to describe a rejection and backlash against feminism (Faludi 1993) and as a more positive term describing the intersection of feminism and post‐colonialism (Brooks 1997). The term becomes a marker of periodization, used to describe the end of second‐wave feminism (Hollows 2000) and a descriptor for a type of third wave
‘sex‐positive’ feminism (Baumgardner and Richards 2004). However, it has perhaps been most widely used to
‘describe mainstream redefinitions of feminism’ (Projansky 2001) which have emerged in popular culture since the early 1980s and it is this final definition which is most useful for the current discussion. In fact the term is best used as Charlotte Brunsdon suggests ‘in an historically specific sense to mark changes in popularly available understandings of femininity and a woman’s place that are generally recognized as occurring in the 1980s” (Brunsdon 2000:297).
traditional femininities’ (Brunsdon, 2000:14). One of the key sites for this negotiation has been the women’s magazine, where a re‐imagined ‘modernised’
discourse of femininity has both appropriated and repudiated feminist ideas to produce a distinct ‘postfeminist sensibility’ (Gill, 2007b). In Gill’s analysis, this
‘postfeminist discourse’ is composed of a number of features:
The notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; the emphasis upon self‐surveillance, monitoring and discipline; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the
dominance of a makeover paradigm; a resurgence in ideas of natural sexual difference; a marked sexualisation of culture; and an emphasis upon
consumerism and the commodification of difference. (149)
Feminine journalism forms a key part of Gill’s postfeminist sensibility, indeed many of the elements she identifies were developed within women’s magazines.
A strong discourse of choice and empowerment expressed through consumption alongside an attendant emphasis on bodily discipline and self‐ surveillance defines the contemporary field of feminine journalism.
The brand of consumption and style‐oriented women’s magazines that were heralded by the launch of ELLE in 1983 were instrumental in the creation of a postfeminist sensibility and the term was even used to describe the magazine in the publicity surrounding its launch (Chapter One). Such magazines belong in a wider media context and can be considered along with other explicitly feminine media products. Films like Working Girl and Pretty Woman (Brunsdon, 1997) and television programmes like Sex and the City (Arthurs, 2003; Negra, 2004)
dramatise the concern with dress, fashion and the performance of femininity to be found in the pages of ELLE and Cosmopolitan. Brunsdon recognises that the antecedents of this new relationship with femininity may lie in magazines, in her 1997 consideration of ‘shopping films’, when she says, ‘what in critical theory is called the performativity of gender, always an element of the common sense of women’s magazines, is currently much more widely available in the popular
media’(86). What these products have in common is an overwhelming concern with the pleasures of consumption, which explains Brunsdon desire to ‘juxtapose two terms, ‘postfeminism’ and ‘shopping’’ (Brunsdon, 1997:83). Her contention that, ‘something happens in 1980s in the conjunction (in the West) of the new social movements, with their stress on the claiming and reclaiming of identities, and the expansion of leisure shopping and consumption’ (84), can be applied, not just to the films she is discussing but to the women’s magazines of the period. As Brunsdon argues, the subject of this postfeminist media is ‘a figure partly
constructed through a relation to consumption’ (85) but she ‘also has ideas about her life and being in control which clearly come from feminism’ (86). The reader of women’s magazines may be largely defined by how she looks and what she wants to buy, but the bank balance is her own and she is firmly characterised as in control of her own life. This imagined reader, like the leading ladies of Eighties shopping films, is ‘a new kind of girly heroine who, while formed in the wake of 1970s feminism, disavows this formation’ (Brunsdon, 1997:101). It seems that just as in the late Victorian period (Chapter One), consumption offers women opportunities for access to the public sphere and news forms of feminine subjectivities.
Consumption practices promise these ‘girly heroines’ empowerment, enjoyment and self expression. The protagonists of ‘shopping films’ and
television series and the readers of women’s magazines are offered what Hilary Radner terms, ‘a space of privilege’ (1995:2). The occupant of this space is often a journalist, specifically a fashion journalist. Such journalists not only produce feminine consumer culture, but figure within its texts, often taking centre stage in both magazine editorials20 and as characters in fictional works21. These texts represent the female journalist as the ultimate subject of consumption, the
20 Female journalists are increasingly present within the pages of magazines, both visually often acting as models in fashion pieces and textually discussing their lives and bodies in articles (see Chapter Five).
21 Carrie Bradshaw the heroine of Television series Sex and The City is a journalist who we see writing for Vogue while Ugly Betty is set in MODE magazine, the heroines of films such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Day (2003), 13 Going on 30 (2004), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), and Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009) are all magazine journalists and their relationship with consumption provides much of the dramatic content of these films.
entitled bearer of feminine expertise and skill. Their working environments and practices are portrayed as the apotheosis of feminine expertise and opportunity;
indeed, it is the fetishized fashion magazine closet22 that most vividly represents Radner’s ‘space of privilege’ within feminine texts. This cupboard filled with a dizzying array of designer clothes and shoes, features in numerous almost orgasmic scenes23 of pleasure in both the fictional and factual products of feminine consumer culture. The closet is portrayed as a space of unlimited potential that offers not just pleasure but transformative opportunity, (of the kind Gill highlights in her foregrounding of the postfeminist makeover), and empowerment to those who are able to access its space. The fashion journalist is the privileged subject who, through her feminine expertise and dedication to consumption, has gained admission through the hallowed portals of the fashion closet. The ability to access these products, combined with the skill and
knowledge to make the right choices, is depicted as the ultimate act of empowering self actualisation and this self expression is achieved entirely through consumption practices. This project seeks to investigate the production and consumption of feminine culture not through its texts or its ‘ordinary’
consumers, but rather through these paradigmatic ideal subjects. Examining the working lives of these professional consumers offers an opportunity to develop a more material and grounded understanding of the ways in which the demands of capital and discourses surrounding gender combine to create conditions in which feminine subjectivities are produced through the skills and practices of
consumption.