Kım and Kadinca: Bridging the Gap between Feminism and Women's Magazines

2000 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 61-84
Author(s):  
Süheyla Kırca

The category of “woman” has historically been used not only to locate but also to regulate women. Women's magazines were and are part of that process, as Beetham maintains: “[T]hey not only defined readers as ‘women,’ they sought to bring into being the women they addressed” (Beetham 1996, p. ix). Since femininity is always represented as something to be achieved in women's magazines, they provide a context through which women learn their gender roles in the process of becoming feminine. The notion of femininity is not fixed and stable; on the contrary, definitions are continually changing, as evidenced by the consumer discourses that redefined femininity in almost every decade of the twentieth century. These various representations of femininity are ultimately related to the politics of identity. Magazines are, therefore, significant sources in circulating collective meanings, recognizing diverse female subjectivities, and constructing sexual differences.

2002 ◽  
pp. 267-278
Author(s):  
Isidora Jaric

The main intention of the research is to retrospectively decode changes in mainstream construct of female gender roles within the period of ''developed self-management socialism'' (1970s), period of structural crisis of socialism (1980s) and post-socialist period of Serbian/Yugoslav society. The mainstream construct of female gender roles will be reconstruct from Serbian women's magazine 'Bazar''. Through the basic presumptions of theoretical framework the research will try to conceptualize theoretical approach which will correspond with co called 'new communicative research model' which will be capable to incorporate contemporary changes within the process of communication among the emitter and recipients in order to better understand the content of the message.


Author(s):  
Maysaa Husam Jaber

This article proposes that Charles Williams’s mid-twentieth-century noir fiction reshapes post-war representations of gender roles and paves the way for various renditions and developments of noir. Williams’s works are narratives of transgression meeting domesticity, crime meeting docility, and cunning meeting conformity; they portray a deadly recipe that comprises different, even conflicting ingredients of a fusion between domesticity, crime, and suspense. By examining the recurring figure of the criminal housewife in his work, especially Hell Hath No Fury (1953), this article argues that Williams brings forth a complex and subversive gender schema to trouble both the creed of domesticity popular in the 1950s and the stereotyping of the lethal seductress prevalent in noir fiction. By so doing, Williams’s noir not only brings the transgression of women to the fore but also displays a compelling picture of post-war gender roles in the US under McCarthyism.


Author(s):  
Motoe Sasaki

This chapter shows how the notion of modern science brought to China by American New Women missionaries in the form of medicine and nursing generated concrete responses from their Chinese counterparts. The notion of science as a universally applicable and fundamentally egalitarian element for the development of a modern society and its constituents was increasingly influential in both the United States and China during the early twentieth century. Consequently, American New Women missionaries were able to establish their status as scientific professionals whose expertise could contribute to China's modernization process. At the same time, however, their faith in the new notion of science brought with it the idea of “separate but equal” gender roles, which brought them into conflict with many of their male counterparts from the United States who wanted to compete with other imperial powers to gain influence in China.


2019 ◽  
pp. 11-37
Author(s):  
Emily Suzanne Johnson

In 1973, Marabel Morgan published the phenomenally successful evangelical marriage manual Total Woman. Morgan has always insisted that she had no political intention in publishing this book, but its traditionalist vision of marital roles meant that she was very quickly drawn into contemporary arguments about gender, family, and feminism. The boundaries of the political realm were shifting in the 1970s, as Morgan’s experience demonstrates. This chapter traces the mid-twentieth-century development of a national evangelical women’s subculture that produced figures like Morgan and disseminated conservative ideas about gender and family in the purportedly apolitical venues of marital advice, women’s magazines, and inspirational conferences.


2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-668
Author(s):  
John Peterson

Mary Austin’s novel The Ford recounts the water transfer from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles in the early twentieth century. Previous critical analysis of the text has focused on its vision of regional development and its concern with gender roles, while largely ignoring the novel’s extensive use of biblical narratives and symbolism. In this article I examine Austin’s use of these narratives, in particular the story of Jacob’s wrestling with God, in order to better understand the racial and gender diversity that complicates the protagonist’s coming of age.


Author(s):  
Brooke Erin Duffy

This chapter examines the changes taking place in the economies, technologies, and markets of women's magazines in the late twentieth century by focusing on three publishers: Hearst Magazines, Condé Nast, and Time, Inc. Although each of these companies produces several women's fashion, beauty, and/or service titles, their organizational structures are becoming quite varied as they reorient departments, positions, and routines to address contemporary industry challenges. The chapter considers the extent to which changes in the magazine industry can be ascribed exclusively to digital innovations, whether such changes are being felt evenly across the industry, and how they have created a perfect storm that has opened up the question of “what is a magazine?” It also discusses the ways that Condé Nast, Time, and Hearst are addressing the challenges of digitization. The chapter shows that women's magazine companies venture into online and digital spaces as part of their concentrated efforts to resuscitate their magazine titles.


2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
HALLIE LIEBERMAN

The electromechanical vibrator originated in the late nineteenth century as a device for medical therapy. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, however, marketing of vibrators as consumer appliances became pervasive. Ads appeared in the pages ofThe New York TimesandScientific Americanand plastered street cars. Companies marketed vibrators to grandparents, mothers, infants, and young adults. Vibrators are widely sold today, however, as instruments for masturbation, a use that was rarely mentioned but well known before World War II. How was vibrator advertising able to become so ubiquitous during the early twentieth century, despite draconian antiobscenity laws and antimasturbation rhetoric? This article argues that companies achieved this result by shaping the meaning of vibrators through strategic marketing. This marketing overtly portrayed vibrators as nonsexual while covertly conveying their sexual uses through imagery and the sale of phallic, dildo-like attachments.Companies positioned vibrators within two major consumer product categories in the early 1900s: labor-saving household appliances and electrotherapeutic devices. By advertising the vibrator as both a labor-saving household appliance and a sexualized health panacea, companies could slip vibrator ads past the censors, while supplying user manuals that clued consumers into specific sexual uses. In household appliance ads, companies drew on traditional gender roles to present vibrators as emblems of domesticity and motherhood, whereas in electrotherapeutic ads they presented vibrators as symbols of progressive gender roles, the sexualized new woman and the body-conscious “self-made man.”


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