Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 7 Gender and sexuality
interested experiences of them. Whether intentionally or not, feminists are setting
themselves distinctly apart: ‘us’ who know and reject most popular cultural forms
(including women’s magazines), ‘them’ who remain in ignorance and continue to
buy Woman’s Own or watch Dallas. The irony, however, is that many of ‘us’ feel
like ‘them’: closet readers and viewers of this fare (140).
Winship’s comments bring us to the complex question of post-feminism. Does the
term imply that the moment of feminism has been and gone; that it is now a movement
of the past? Certainly, there are those who would wish to suggest that this is the
case. According to Winship, ‘if it means anything useful’, the term refers to the way in
which the ‘boundaries between feminists and non-feminists have become fuzzy’ (149).
This is to a large extent due to the way in which ‘with the “success” of feminism some
feminist ideas no longer have an oppositional charge but have become part of many
people’s, not just a minority’s, common sense’ (ibid.). Of course this does not mean
that all feminist demands have been met (far from it), and that feminism is now
redundant. On the contrary, ‘it suggests that feminism no longer has a simple coherence
around a set of easily defined principles . . . but instead is a much richer, more
diverse and contradictory mix than it ever was in the 1970s’ (ibid.).
In Reading Women’s Magazines, Joke Hermes (1995) begins with an observation on
previous feminist work on women’s magazines: ‘I have always felt strongly that the
feminist struggle in general should be aimed at claiming respect. It is probably for that
reason that I have never felt comfortable with the majority of (feminist) work that has
been done on women’s magazines. Almost all of these studies show concern rather than
respect for those who read women’s magazines’ (1). This kind of approach (what might
be called ‘modernist feminism’), she maintains, generates a form of media criticism in
which the feminist scholar is both ‘prophet and exorcist’ (ibid.). As she explains,
‘Feminists using modernity discourse speak on behalf of others who are, implicitly,
thought to be unable to see for themselves how bad such media texts as women’s
magazines are. They need to be enlightened; they need good feminist texts in order to
be saved from their false consciousness and to live a life free of false depictions as
mediated by women’s magazines, of where a woman might find happiness’ (ibid.).
Against this way of thinking and working, Hermes advocates what she calls ‘a more
postmodern view, in which respect rather than concern – or, for that matter, celebration,
a term often seen as the hallmark of a postmodern perspective – would have a
central place’ (ibid.). She is aware ‘that readers of all kinds (including we critics) enjoy
texts in some contexts that we are critical of in other contexts’ (2). The focus of her
study, therefore, is to ‘understand how women’s magazines are read while accepting
the preferences of [the women she interviewed]’ (ibid.). Working from the perspective
of ‘a postmodern feminist position’, she advocates an ‘appreciation that readers are
producers of meaning rather than the cultural dupes of the media institutions.
Appreciation too of the local and specific meanings we give to media texts and the different
identities any one person may bring to bear on living our multi-faceted lives
in societies saturated with media images and texts of which women’s magazines are
a part’ (ibid.). More specifically, she seeks to situate her work in a middle ground