Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Reading women’s magazines 157
between a focus on how meanings are made of specific texts (Ang, 1985, Radway,
1987, for example) and a focus on the contexts of media consumption (Gray, 1992,
Morley, 1986, for example). In other words, rather than begin with a text and show
how people appropriate it and make it meaningful, or begin with the contexts of consumption
and show how these constrain the ways in which appropriation and the
making of meaning can take place, she has ‘tried to reconstruct the diffuse genre or set
of genres that is called women’s magazines and [to demonstrate] how they become
meaningful exclusively through the perception of their readers’ (Hermes, 1995: 6). She
calls this approach ‘the theorisation of meaning production in everyday contexts’
(ibid.). In working in this way, she is able to avoid the deployment of textual analysis,
with its implied notion of an identifiably correct meaning, or limited set of meanings,
which a reader may or may not activate. ‘My perspective’, she explains, ‘is that texts
acquire meaning only in the interaction between readers and texts and that analysis of
the text on its own is never enough to reconstruct these meanings’ (10). To enable this
way of working she introduces the concept of ‘repertoires’. She explains the concept as
follows: ‘Repertoires are the cultural resources that speakers fall back on and refer to.
Which repertoires are used depends on the cultural capital of an individual reader’ (8).
Moreover, ‘Texts do not directly have meaning. The various repertoires readers use
make texts meaningful’ (40).
Hermes conducted eighty interviews with both women and men. She was initially
disappointed at the fact that her interviewees seemed reluctant to talk about how they
made meanings from the women’s magazines they read; and when they did discuss this
issue, they often suggested instead, against the ‘common sense’ of much media and cultural
theory, that their encounters with these magazines were hardly meaningful at all.
After the initial disappointment, these discussions gradually prompted Hermes to recognize
what she calls ‘the fallacy of meaningfulness’ (16). What this phrase is intended
to convey is her rejection of a way of working in media and cultural analysis that is
premised on the view that the encounter between reader and text should always be
understood solely in terms of the production of meaning. This general preoccupation
with meaning, she claims, has resulted from an influential body of work that concentrated
on fans (and, I would add, youth subcultures), rather than on the consumption
practices of ordinary people; and, moreover, it resulted from a conspicuous failure to
situate consumption in the routines of everyday life. Against the influence of this body
of work, she argues for a critical perspective in which ‘the media text has to be displaced
in favour of readers’ reports of their everyday lives’ (148). As she explains, ‘To understand
and theorize everyday media use, a more sophisticated view of meaning production
is required than one that does not recognise different levels of psychological
investment or emotional commitment and reflection’ (16).
By a detailed and critical analysis of recurrent themes and repeated issues that arise
in the interview material she collected, Hermes attempts to reconstruct the various
repertoires employed by the interviewees in the consumption of women’s magazines.
She identifies four repertoires: ‘easily put down’, ‘relaxation’, ‘practical knowledge’ and
‘emotional learning and connected knowing’ (31). The first of these repertoires, perhaps
the most straightforward to understand, identifies women’s magazines as a genre