Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

approach to mass culture’, and that she is out of touch with the new postmodern
sensibility, still clinging instead ‘to mythic notions of culture as tragedy, culture as
meaning’ (202). The idea that the ideology of mass culture is antiquated and anachronistic
might be true in the fantasy realms of American academic psychoanalytic cultural
criticism, but it is still very much alive in the conscious/unconscious world of everyday
culture.
Reading women’s magazines
Reading women’s magazines 153
In the Preface to Inside Women’s Magazines, Janice Winship (1987) explains how she
has been doing research on women’s magazines since 1969. She also tells us that it was
also around the same time that she began to regard herself as a feminist. Integrating the
two, she admits, has sometimes proved difficult; often it was hinted that she should
research ‘something more important politically’. But she insists that the two must be
integrated: ‘to simply dismiss women’s magazines was also to dismiss the lives of millions
of women who read and enjoyed them each week. More than that, I still enjoyed
them, found them useful and escaped with them. And I knew I couldn’t be the only
feminist who was a “closet” reader’ (ibid.). As she continues, this did not mean that she
was not (or is not still) critical of women’s magazines, but what is crucial to a feminist
cultural politics is this dialectic of ‘attraction and rejection’ (ibid.).
Many of the guises of femininity in women’s magazines contribute to the secondary
status from which we still desire to free ourselves. At the same time it is the
dress of femininity which is both source of the pleasure of being a woman – and
not a man – and in part the raw material for a feminist vision of the future. . . .
Thus for feminists one important issue women’s magazines can raise is how do we
take over their feminine ground to create new untrammelled images of and for
ourselves? (xiii–xiv).
Part of the aim of Inside Women’s Magazines is, ‘then, to explain the appeal of the magazine
formula and to critically consider its limitations and potential for change’ (8).
Since their inception in the late eighteenth century, women’s magazines have
offered their readers a mixture of advice and entertainment. Regardless of politics,
women’s magazines continue to operate as survival manuals, providing their readers
with practical advice on how to survive in a patriarchal culture. This might take the
form of an explicit feminist politics, as in Spare Rib, for example; or stories of women
triumphing over adversity, as, for example, in Woman’s Own. The politics may be different,
but the formula is much the same.
Women’s magazines appeal to their readers by means of a combination of entertainment
and useful advice. This appeal, according to Winship, is organized around
a range of ‘fictions’. These can be the visual fictions of advertisements, or items on