From makeovers to making over: Bodies, agency, and popular feminism in women's beauty magazines.

摘要

This project engages with a number of contemporary theoretical and disciplinary debates about representations of women's bodies, and about the ways in which the increasingly technologized body can be reflected upon in both popular culture and popular feminisms. Working at the conjuncture of media studies and debates about popular culture, cultural studies of bodies and technologies, and gender and feminist theories, it examines the written and visual text in a select group of women's beauty magazines in the 1990s--Glamour, Vogue, Allure and Self. It moves between close readings of the magazines, and broader considerations about the way in which they reflect the larger culture surrounding them, proposing that beauty magazines constitute one not commonly thought of site of feminism's saturation into that broader culture. Each chapter argues for this claim by examining a different narrative of women's bodies and women's agency, exploring in particular the never-ending, and never-changing promise to women that they can make-over everything about both women and concepts of 'woman.' The make-over, with its promise of seemingly limitless malleability, thus operates as both the central metaphor and the critical focus in this project. Chapter one explores the reliance on discourses of individualized self-help, chapter two analyzes the tensions and fears around technologically constructing bodies and gender, and chapter three examines the use of new imaging technologies to represent the before and after of any bodily change. Each chapter also examines how unacknowledged assumptions about the materiality of bodies continue to subtend these discussions about women's identities and social agency. The primary focus throughout this project is to explore the tensions and ambivalences generated by the magazines' contradictory emphases on both gender identity and gender difference, and to analyze the slippages in the visual and written text around the varied promises of making over as offered by the magazines. The play on the multiple meanings of the make-over thus also highlights these beauty magazines as a site of the contemporary fascinations and desires, and fears and anxieties, about the connections between gender, women's bodies, and women's agency.