The selling of postfeminism: Lucky magazine and gendered consumerism

摘要

Since the early days of modern consumer culture, women have been a highly desirable demographic to advertisers given the long-held belief that women make significant decisions regarding spending for households and for themselves. One form of consumption-oriented discourse targeted to women is the fashion and beauty magazine, an enduring and profitable staple of American popular culture that continues to play a pivotal role in focusing consumption trends for millions of women. Through both their editorial and advertising content, magazines such as Allure and Vogue attempt to present the appropriate hairstyle, skirt length and lipstick shade for women consumers. But they also promote other values. As mainstream women's magazines have long provided a colorful guide for women through fashion must-haves, such magazines also offer advice about or portrayals of career choices, motherhood and socially acceptable gender roles. Such messages may also have demographic variations.;This project attempts to analyze the socio-cultural implications of Lucky magazine as a hypercommercialized and women-targeted magazine-catalog hybrid and shopping-oriented media brand. In particular, in drawing on the broad range of commercial culture criticism and postfeminist scholarship, I analyze to what extent and in what ways this hybrid publication may co-opt feminist and class discourses by collapsing consumerism with feminist empowerment and gendered class mobility. In addition, the targeting of the postfeminist woman or at least those with postfeminist values as Lucky readers is also addressed in this project. The degree to which social media has extended both the reach and the integration of hypercommercialized, postfeminist messages is also an important part of the project.