This essay is an analysis of mythologies in the Swedish women´s magazine VeckoRevyn. The magazine’s own explicit purpose is to break down the unhealthy opinion of what beauty is in their industry today. By content and linguistic analysis the results of this study are interconnected to the beauty myth as it was established by Naomi Wolf in 1991. The goal is to pinpoint how VeckoRevyn’s question and answer columns construct relationships to their readers, and the mythologies that they maintain. The columns mostly focus on the readers’ physical appearance, and the beauty myth is clearly an inevitable influence. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the beauty myth is hard-wired into our society’s subconscious. VeckoRevyn is working to prevent this, and even though they have not fully succeeded, they are a part of bringing the phenomenon to the surface of society.

This theises aims to extend the understanding of how representation of gender is produced and reproduced in the young women’s magazine Frida. We examine this through analyzing pictures of male and female celebrities in a selected number of magazines from the year of 2013. We use a quantitative analysis of the pictures, as well as a supplementary quantitative analysis of ajectives used to describe male and female celebrities in captions. We research what types of patterns we can find in these analyses that construct representations of gender, also surveying how the celebrities in the magazine look. Our analysis shows us that the context of Frida contains several recurring visual patterns that preserves a representation of men being superior to women. We also find that for both men and women in the magazine- their attractive exterior is their most prominent attribute. That is not only perceived visually, but also reinforced by the editorial text. The result also shows us that the celebrities shown in the Frida is a very homogeneous group, with very similar attributes.

The aim of this master thesis is to contribute to a more profound knowledge of women's magazine reading by giving insights into the readerships’ interpretations of magazine texts. Three different dimensions of interpretation were thereby identified: the relation to the audiences’ own situations in life, the audiences’ reflections on their prior experiences, and the emerging emotions in the interpretation process. Audience and reception theory, as well as feminist media theory, form the theoretical framework of my research. As audience reception concerns the dynamic interaction between text and the audiences’ reception of it, I decided to concentrate on both text analysis and qualitative interviews. With my qualitative, methodological approach – comprising an analysis of three articles concerning texting advice and interviews with six regular readers, I was able to explore nuances and depths of the phenomenon. I identified four interpretative repertoires which the women used for making meaning of the texts: pleasure, rejection, self-reflection, and practical relevance. Pleasure and rejection were found to be the women’s predominant emotions in the interpretation process. Moreover, my research illustrates that women are interpreting the texting advice in a practical as well as in a self-reflexive way. Their own circumstances and prior experiences are thereby variables, which influence the reception. My work strengthens the perspective of readers as being empowered to understand, evaluate, and critique the media content they consume. This is an important finding influencing society at large. As my research outlines, critical readings were found to be superior to possible ideological influences of women’s magazines. Future research should focus on a further in-depth analysis of individual influencing variables in relation to the audiences’ interpretations as I was only able to evaluate some in my study.

This study was a qualitative analysis of the covers of six lifestyle magazines, three addressed to women and three addressed to men. We have studied the cover photographs, the teasers and their relations.   The purpose of this study was to answer the questions: According to the magazines, what are male interests and what are typical female interests? Who is the ideal man and who is the ideal woman? Is there a certain way you need to look to be able to be on a magazine cover? And how often do the magazines encourage you to consume?   The study was based on thirty covers, five from each magazine. The Swedish magazines are VeckoRevyn, Amelia, Damernas Värld, King of Sweden, Café and the American version of GQ. We’ve used semiotics and rhetorical methods to analyze the material. We have studied the words in the teasers to find their connotations, we have studied the poses of the cover models and investigated their body language and counted how many times the magazines teases for something that will lead to you as reader having to buy something.   We found out that both male and female magazines use very stereotypical gender roles and they do not show any signs of changing, even though the society in general has broken free from many typical gender roles. They presented an ideal man that are very successful, handsome, well dressed, meat eating and interested in sports. He is neither black nor gay. The ideal woman is a slim, beautiful, successful, white, heterosexual woman who can joggle many things at once.

《臺灣婦人界》（1934-1939）為日治時期最具規模的女性雜誌，也是1930年代刊載最大量通俗小說的刊物。本論文以殖民現代性與女性經驗的交織為主軸，提出《臺灣婦人界》小說的後殖民閱讀。日治時期台灣女性最初的現代體驗，奠基於殖民現代性所帶來的教育機會與物質文明，一方面秉持啟蒙開化的信念給予女性前所未有的自由與選擇，另一方面則訴諸文明優劣程度築起一道文化同化的門檻。「世界」指新女性走出家屋展望世界的文本效應。女性透過教養、知識提升成為公領域典範的可能，以及不同族裔、背景的女性基於文明信念而想像出的共同體，是《臺灣婦人界》一再宣揚的普遍價值。「民俗」是與上述普遍性對照之下的差異性，信仰漢人宗教的女性成為奇觀的拼貼素材，也化身被排除的迷信舊慣。這些文化差異性復又受到「帝國」殖民同化計畫的整編與改造，其透過女性之於家庭與社會的角色，以日本現代文明與大和民族的優越位階，對不同出身、階級與族裔的差異主體實行精神統馭。 　　筆者從《臺灣婦人界》觀察到上述三個大方向，並參照史碧娃克（Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak）、霍米巴巴（Homi Bhabha）的後殖民觀點，進一步解析殖民現代性排除與整編的策略如何在小說中一一受到挑戰。被體制重重壓迫的底層女性身影解構了以自由主義理念為根基、中產階級身份為前提的文明女性想像。被現代理性準繩貶抑的民俗迷信拯救了台灣女性的主體分裂危機，證明原生文化始終是殖民現代性無法割除斬斷的一部份。混血的女性身體隱喻著台灣多層歷史與地緣脈絡的軌跡，那難以馴化的混雜性揭發了殖民改造計畫的破綻。本論文探討的包括黃寶桃、西川滿等已受學界所知的作家，以及陳華培、別所夏子等未曾受到討論的台日創作者，期能為這份議題性與份量兼具、卻幾乎未受到注意的史料梳理一個輪廓，揭示《臺灣婦人界》之於日治時期文學研究、女性史研究以及後殖民研究的價值。 / Taiwan Fujinkai (1934-1939) was the most influential women’s magazine in colonial Taiwan, on which women’s experience were closely interweaved with colonial modernity. For women in colonial Taiwan, the first experience of modernization was founded on the modern education and material environment by Japanese power, and thus contained double sides. One was the sense of liberation brought by the belief of enlightenment, another was the awareness of discrimination between the superior and the inferior. “The cosmopolitan” refers to an imagined community where women from all backgrounds can be canonized if they followed the universal route of modernization. Being a contrast of this universality, images of women in “the folklore” was represented as the backwardness eliminated from the modern society. In the civilizing mission of “the empire,” these eliminated cultures were assimilated into the imperial project again, which seek to rule and reform the colonized through the hand of civilized wives and mothers. With Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial concepts, this paper examines how Japan’s strategy of elimination and assimilation was challenged in the fictions in Taiwan Fujinkai. The subaltern women in the bottom of social system broke the liberalist imagination of women’s civilizing route. A ghost haunted in Taiwan women’s mind implied that the native folklore can be oppressed but never divisible. The mixed-blood woman’s body disclosed the invalidity of Japan’s attempt to discipline the hybridity of it colony. My discussion includes Huang Pao-tao, Nishikawa Mitsuru and other undiscovered texts. Probing into this important but rarely investigated magazine, I seek to uncover its value for the literature study, women’s study and postcolonial study in the field of Taiwan literature.