This paper aims to bridge the gap between gender, genre and translation studies by taking an interdisciplinary approach across these research areas and employing some of the tools of corpus ...linguistics to provide a contrastive analysis of the linguistic construction of femininity in the American and French editions of early-1920s Vogue. In particular, it takes as a sample twenty-four Vogue issues published in 1921 and focuses on its extensive fashion features, originally written in English and then translated or adapted so as to appear in the French edition. A contrastive analysis of two parallel corpora (one consisting of the fashion articles published in 1921 Vogue US and another comprising their translations/adaptations for Vogue France) as regards frequency, collocational patterning and co-textual environment of lexical items pertaining to the domains of fashion and femininity reveals both similarities and differences in the linguistic representation of gender identity across two different cultures, alongside the adoption of particular translation strategies.
This essay adopts a Critical Stylistic approach to uncover the linguistic mechanisms of implicit, (counter-)ideological meaning in the female-targeted periodical Good Housekeeping during the interwar ...period, and chiefly in its "Household Engineering" article series, where a complex discourse of modern housewifery, based on expert advice and industrial rationalisation, was shaped and negotiated through a rhetoric of scientific management and efficiency. In particular, this study investigates the discursive construction of the pervasive image of the female professional homemaker interested in the latest technological methods and innovations, by considering the role played by implicit meaning in shaping feminine roles and dominant gender ideologies. A Critical Stylistic analysis of presupposition and implicature in Good Housekeeping featured articles shows how these strategies reveal implicitly construed ideologies of womanhood, and particularly the way in which the magazine adopted linguistic devices to accommodate modern ideals of femininity without rejecting more traditional ones.
Abstract
The aim of the article is to examine the representation of ageing in selected issues of the Polish women’s magazine
Twój Styl
. With reference to Wolf’s concept of the “beauty myth,” the ...article argues that ageing is presented as a threat to women’s psychological integrity. Although the theme of old age is rarely directly addressed in the magazines, its presence is implied in the advertised anti-age beauty products. Based on semiotic theory and Cognitive Metaphor Theory, the paper demonstrates that the advertising of anti-ageing beauty products serves the function of controlling ageing female bodies, which are positioned outside of the mainstream concept of femininity.
This article draws on a special issue of La'isha, Israel's most popular women's magazine, to study media representations of post-Soviet women. The March 2020 issue, dedicated to the 30th anniversary ...of the wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union to Israel of the 1990s, focused on 1.5 generation post-Soviet women. Past studies suggest that first-generation post-Soviet women in Israel are represented as morally and socially fragmented. In light of this, we ask whether this special issue suggests a different representation. Our study is based on analysis of the contents and visual images of the special issue, as well as interviews with parties involved in the production of the issue. Our findings reveal four discourses constructing the identity of 1.5 generation post-Soviet women: that is, discourses of nationality, Russianness, becoming an Israeli, and being a successful immigrant woman. Our main argument is that La'isha presents the 1.5 generation post-Soviet woman as the successful image of Western neoliberal feminism while maintaining the traditional discourse of Israeli gender order and ethno-national ethos. We further conclude that the feminist neoliberal discourse in La'isha's special issue mobilizes the immigrants' identities, producing a model of the successful immigrant woman.
A consequence of the digitisation of the media is the rapidly transforming business models of news organisations. While many studies have looked at how news journalists and newspapers deal with the ...changing relationship between editorial and commerce, less attention has been paid to how this relationship has evolved in lifestyle publications. This study examines the extent to which lifestyle journalists from women's magazines experience commercial pressures, how they handle such pressures, and how economic influences are reflected in the content they produce. Based on interviews with journalists from Singaporean women's magazines and supported by a textual analysis of the content of these magazines, the results show that commercial influences have increased drastically and have led to changes in the conceptualisation of professional identity and editorial outputs. These journalists are subject to overwhelming economic pressures that they find difficult to challenge, and thus frequently succumb to advertiser demands, leading to severe compromises on the integrity of their content. Furthermore, for younger journalists especially, there appears to be a sense of disillusionment caused by the mismatch between their journalistic expectations and the realities of their work. The findings from this study pose some serious implications on how we can understand journalism practice.
In this article I focus on how the Spanish feminist writer María Martínez Sierra (1874-1974) brings to the surface one of the themes on which the author will reflect most in-tensely during her exile ...in Argentina: the old age of women and the significance of work at that stage of life. For Martínez Sierra, work in old age is not only a means of subsistence, but also a way of actively participating in society and one of the focal points of her feminist thinking through her cultural productions. I argue that, despite the scant attention paid by critics to her contributions to radio and women's magazines, a careful reading of some of these materials shows that Martínez Sierra's feminist militancy continues in exile and is resituated in these media, paying special attention to the issue of old age in women.
Examining women's magazines and lifestyle coaching, the article explores how positivity imperatives in contemporary culture call forth a happy, confident, hopeful, and vibrant subject during the ...COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis shows how these positivity imperatives acknowledge stress and difficulty, and at times highlight their gendered impacts, yet nevertheless systematically figure responses and solutions in individual, psychological, and often consumerist terms. The discussion demonstrates how positivity imperatives operate not only through verbal advice but also through visual, embodied, and affective means and through an emphasis on developing new social practices—from holding one's body differently, to keeping gratitude journals, to cultivating a new virtual persona for online work meetings. The article highlights a profound paradox: in times of a global pandemic that has affected women disproportionally, and when structural injustices and inequalities have been made ever more visible, positivity and individualized self-care interpellations to women flourish, anger is muted, and critiques of structural inequality are largely silenced. Thus seemingly benign and often undoubtedly well-meaning messages of confidence, calm, and positivity during the pandemic work to buttress a neoliberal imaginary and persistent social inequalities.
Using the postwar magazine Shufu no tomo（Housewife's Friend）as a primary source, this paper examines how the "tradition" of local cuisine/food has been emphasized, and how housewives have been ...designated as the keepers of this "tradition." In my paper, "tradition" consists of "continuity," i.e., continued since ancient times, and "goodness," i.e., valued as good. An analysis of these narratives was carried out on articles published through 1979.The results of this study are as follows:（1）By the mid-1960s, articles suggested innovations or improvements in local cuisine/food. At that time, the "tradition" of local cuisine/food was not emphasized;（2）Essays on the local cuisine/food choices of celebrities were published in large numbers from the mid-1950s onward, and many of these stories featured the local cuisine/food of the celebritiesʼ hometowns（ "goodness" ）;（3）Since the mid-1960s, "Ofukuro no Aji" has been acclaimed. "Ofukuro no Aji" and local cuisine/food have long beenconsidered to be handed down（ "continuity" ）by women passing on traditions to other women-this was generalized to be their role in maintaining that continuity; （4）Housewives were given new responsibilities; this contributed to the prevention of gender order from changing.
This study investigates how the wellbeing trend in popular media regulates women's bodies and their selves through establishing norms around successful aging. We report on an exploratory qualitative ...content analysis of representations of wellbeing and aging from The Australian Women's Weekly (AWW) magazine. While some articles emphasized self-care and self-responsibility, many articulated relational and social/structural understandings of wellbeing. Compared with an earlier analysis of the AWW, our study found largely positive views of experiences of aging, associated with new opportunities and increased self-acceptance. These findings demonstrate how magazines both reflect and reinforce subtle processes of social change.
This article focuses on the intertextual relationship between women's glossy fashion magazines and Instagram, questioning how magazines and their representations of femininity are shaped by their ...co-existence with Instagram. This study is based on a textual analysis of a theoretical sample of three monthly glossy magazines-Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vogue-collected between April and September 2017.
These magazines have partially adopted, and adapted, social media logic, particularly the logic of quantified popularity, emphasising the large number of Instagram followers of the celebrities and Insta-famous users featured in the magazines. Furthermore, magazines have embraced several Instagram conventions, such as the use of hashtags, username handles or emojis, although using them in ways that are divorced from the original technological affordances. These magazines have also adopted seemingly feminist discourses, echoing the popularity of fourth-wave feminism. Yet these discourses co-exist with postfeminist sensibilities that focus on celebrating individual achievements and fashion as empowering, losing the focus on institutionalised inequalities.
This paper seeks to understand the complex intertextual relationship between women's magazines and Instagram, and its oscillation between contradictory, yet co-existing, discourses.
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