Reflection: Lived and Idealized Self and Other in Women’s Journals
Cooke, Nathalie, and Jennifer Garland. “Reflection: Lived and Idealized Self and Other in Women’s Journals.” Michel Hockx, Joan Judge and Barbara Mittler, editors. Women and the Periodical Press in China's Long Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own? Cambridge University Press, August 2018. 215-217
3 Pages Posted: 19 Mar 2021
Date Written: August 1, 2018
Abstract
Women’s magazines serve as sites of negotiation between prescriptive and descriptive practice – what women are told to do (in advertising, feature articles, and editorial copy, for example) and what they describe themselves as doing (in testimonials, interviews, columns, and letters to the editor). As such, they reinforce existing stereotypes of women’s roles through their editorials and advertising while also providing an outlet for women’s creative and life writing, opening avenues for lived and idealized selves and others. While this paradigm can account for the popularity of women’s magazines for both readers and advertisers, it fails to capture the dynamic and “contestatory” space that studies in this section of the book on “Gendered Space and Global Context” describe as constituting the genre. Consequently, we propose here a more nuanced paradigm, one foregrounding interplay and exchange of opinions – multidirectional rather than unidirectional – where the act of reading brings individual readers into contestatory negotiation with gender and body ideals, as well as with sociocultural norms from many parts of the world, not just China.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation