In response to contemporary moral and feminist criticisms regarding the hypothesised effect magazine discourses of sexuality have on readers, this thesis explores how six groups of adolescents and young adults respond to representations of sexualities from the teen and women's magazines Cosmopolitan, Cleo, Girlfriend and Dolly. Drawing upon theories of poststructural feminism, cultural studies and audience reception this work expands upon existing magazine literature by attending to the ways teen and women's magazines are interpreted and talked about by different groups of adolescents and young adults. This analysis fills a gap in contemporary magazine research, which has generally failed to address how gender and sexuality, as they are portrayed in contemporary periodical publications, are made sense of by readers. Therefore, in focusing on reader talk this thesis is also able to address the ways in which individual and collective identities are constructed interactively in the socially specific context of focus group discussions. Attention is given to looking at the complexities surrounding the relationships that exist between magazine reading, representations of sexuality and adolescents and young adults through an examination of the discourses girls, boys, young women and young men draw upon in their talk on magazine representations of sexualities. I argue that readers of magazines are active producers of meaning who think and talk about magazine representations of sexualities in a variety of complex, contradictory and often ambiguous ways. Research participants employ interpretive repertoires, drawn together from various new, traditional and alternative discourses about sexuality, in the process of attributing meaning to contemporary sexualities, as both cultural objects and aspects of everyday life. Thus, rather than take up and accept the sexual subject positions that magazines make available to readers, the talk of the research participants in this project illustrates how sexualities are constantly being negotiated. The articulation and performance of masculine and feminine sexualities is therefore recognized within this thesis as a highly contradictory, contextual and negotiated process.

This thesis examines representations of ageing in women‟s magazines. Although ageing is an inevitable part of the human condition, this thesis takes the position that ageing is culturally constructed and that women‟s magazines are a key site in such constructions. It is noticeable that, within the Academy generally, there has been less work into the social construction of the ageing process than there has been into other relations of „difference‟ such as gender or race. That said, in the last two decades, work in this area has started to emerge. Factors which account for this include the influence of the baby boomer generation, a sizeable age cohort, born between 1945-1964 who are now growing older themselves. The thesis presents a textual and semiotic analysis of the way in which getting older is constituted through written, visual and spoken texts. The primary data in the research consists of articles from women‟s magazines, analysed using a range of semiotic and linguistic tools, most notably the theories of Roland Barthes, particularly his concept of „Myth‟. Metonymy and the function of stereotyping are also key theoretical concepts. In addition, I analyse data from transcriptions of informal interviews with women magazine readers drawing on the same theoretical concepts. In this way, I am able to examine how magazine texts are received by their readership and, moreover, how women position themselves in relation to what they are reading. The analysis is underpinned by three Myths of Ageing: firstly, that ageing is a decline scenario: it involves both mental and physical decline; secondly, that ageing is synonymous with loss of power: sexual, economic and social; and lastly that ageing must be resisted. I show how the „new positive‟ images of growing older that are being drawn out and portrayed in media representations are not necessarily positive in terms of the impact they have on contemporary women. These images are presented as „new‟, but I shall demonstrate that they are, in fact, a re-working of the underlying Myths of Ageing, myths which construct ageing as a culturally very negative experience, particularly for women in this historical moment.

The purpose of this study was to define the messages related to food preparation that are conveyed by women's magazines to homemakers as consumers during the post-World War II period, and to analyze any changes of those messages over time. A content analysis of food related articles and advertisements in representative issues of Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping magazines from 1947 to 1986 was conducted. Both manifest and latent content were coded and agreement between the two measures was analyzed. Of eighteen messages defined, five were found to account for 78.9 percent of the messages conveyed,. The five messages, listed in descending order, were (1) taste and visual appeal, (2) convenience and versatility, (3) nutrition, (4) quality, and (5) expertise in homemaking and hostessing skills. Using a test of chi-square, no significant difference in the distribution of the messages conveyed from year to year was found. Nevertheless, changes in presentation of the messages were found. Changes were geared to changing technological orientations, economic conditions, and gender roles.

This paper documents the decrease of short stories in three women's magazines from 1940 to 1970 and concludes that the decline results from readers turning to other sources for escape from housework. Chapter II describes patterns in plots, themes, characters, settings, and other elements of these stories. Chapter III shows the lack of influence which changes in writers, editors, and social and political developments in America have had on these short stories. The conclusion is reached that the magazine article is replacing magazine short stories.

The graduation thesis Magazines for women today: a shop-window of consumerism? focuses on analysis of editorials in periodicals Blesk pro ženy and ELLE. I analyzed the year 2009 by using qualitative content analysis. In this thesis I am trying to find out how much these editorials are engaged in consumerism and how much they are appealing to the consumer life style. I was also interested in values connected with consumerism and in the ways the consumer life style is being tied in the editorials. By using semiotic theories, sociology and critical media studies literature I am decoding that the pleasurable images and editorials are primarily rooted in the economic system of consumer goods distribution. This thesis is devoted to anyone who is interested in women's magazines and their economic background.

This thesis provides a comparative case study of two South African women's magazines, Cosmopolitan and True Love. The comparison is based on the fact that Cosmopolitan is an international magazine brand which is largely read by white women in this country, while True Love is a local publication produced for, and consumed by, black South African women. The case study makes use of both text and audience analysis. The text analysis begins as a genre study, in an attempt to 'denaturalize' the magazine form, and includes an intertextual analysis of the magazines and their secondary texts, or brand extensions. The magazine genre is considered from a cultural studies perspective and in the light of feminist media criticism. A reception analysis, informed by focus group research, provides the audience analysis component of this case study. Primarily, this thesis is concerned with the reception of women's magazines by teenage girls. It interrogates the assumption that, in the absence of a local 'teen' magazine industry and western rite-of-passage ritual, women's magazines serve as cultural developmental markers and informal educational devices in the passage from girlhood to adulthood. This study adopts a poststructuralist view on the self as socially constructed within discourse. In this view, the media serve as resources for identity construction and negotiation. Gender, a particular discourse organized around the constructs of 'masculinity' and 'femininity', is inscribed in the subject along with other discourses, such as those of race, class and ethnicity. Women's magazines, which provide an example of a 'women's genre', give 'femininity' a material form. Their glossy visual appeal is illustrative of the commodity fetishism associated with advanced capitalism and their continuing success demonstrates how consumption, identity and desire are intimately connected within postmodern consumer culture. Above all, this thesis recognizes that women's magazines are discursive sites-of-struggle which need to be considered from a position which is neither purely condemning nor purely celebratory, but finds instead a balance between 'creativity' and 'constraint'. Both the text-based and audience-centred components of this study draw on strands of discourse analysis. The critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Norman Fairclough informs the thesis as a whole but is applied specifically to the text analysis. The concept of 'interpretive repertoires' proposed by theorists who use discourse analysis in social psychology (DASP) is applied t6 the analysis of focus group material. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2002.

In this study I investigate gender representations in a South African magazine directed at a teenage female readership. It begins with a survey of sociolinguistic understandings of the relationship between language and gender, and of critical linguistic insights into how gender and gender relations are constructed through discourse. This is followed by the Critical Discourse Analysis of selected texts from the magazine. These analyses reveal that the writers draw on conventional representations of women and conventional social relations between men and women to perpetuate subordinate roles for woman in a male-dominated society. On the basis of this evidence I suggest that such magazines serve as instruments of social control in a patriarchal society by positioning women as being overwhelmingly concerned with their personal appearance and with developing and sustaining relationships with the opposite sex. I also point to the ways in which the writers have drawn on representations of femininity to position the readership as consumers, thereby serving the interests of the capitalist modes of production. This study concludes with suggestions on how the findings can be used to implement Critical Language Awareness in the classroom. / Theses (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2002.

Thesis (M.A. (Communication Studies))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

In this dissertation, I examine the constructions, maintenance, and resistance to dominant discourses concerning motherhood and non-motherhood in contemporary Hungary, using the popular Hungarian women’s magazine Nők Lapja as my key illustrative example. I strive to illuminate how gendered discourses, bio-power, history, and geo-politics are implicated not only in the construction of nationhood but also in defining women’s roles in nation-building. I hope to contribute to research that helps to better understand women’s contemporary social roles in Hungary, and the power relations that construct them. I argue that ideas regarding motherhood and non-motherhood in Hungary are often bound up in ideas concerning who should, or should not, have children, and why, and I explore in detail how these ideas have formed through the history of the nation. My analysis reveals different sites of power—focusing on policy and print media—that seek to determine women’s procreative decisions. I argue that, under various regimes, women’s procreative choices have consistently been systemically constrained, and framed as key to the nation’s success—or failure. Concerning Nők Lapja magazine, my research reveals that it both supports and resists traditional gender roles, at times contributing to discourses that naturalize childbearing and motherhood (also defining for readers whose motherhood is deemed desirable), but at other times disputing such ideas and redefining conceptions of womanhood to include women without children. Although ultimately the magazine pathologizes, disbelieves and negates the choice to be childless, Nők Lapja does resist and redefine limited definitions of womanhood and motherhood by carving out a small space for discussions of childlessness, and also by challenging conceptions of singletons as necessarily lonely and mothers as necessarily better if they stay at home.

Thesis (M.A. (Communication Studies))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.