Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 7 Gender and sexuality
that makes limited demands on its readers. It is a genre that can be easily picked up
and easily put down, and because of this, it can be easily accommodated into the routines
of everyday life.
The second repertoire, clearly related to the first, and perhaps as expected as the first
repertoire, identifies reading women’s magazines as a form of ‘relaxation’. But, as
Hermes points out, relaxation (like ‘escapism’ discussed earlier in this chapter) should
not be understood as an innocent or a self-evident term – it is, as she maintains, ‘ideologically
loaded’ (36). On the one hand, the term can be employed simply as a valid
description of a particular activity, and, on the other, it can be used as a blocking mechanism
in defence against personal intrusion. Given the low cultural status of women’s
magazines, as Hermes reminds us, using the term ‘relaxation’ as a means to block further
entry into a private realm is perhaps understandable. In other words, I am reading
this magazine to indicate to others that I am currently not available to do other things.
The third repertoire, the repertoire of ‘practical knowledge’, can range from tips on
cooking to film and book reviews. But its apparently secure anchorage in practical
application is deceptive. The repertoire of practical knowledge may offer much more
than practical hints on how to become adept at making Indian cuisine or culturally
knowing about which films are worth going to the cinema to see. Readers can use these
practical tips, Hermes claims, to fantasize an ‘ideal self . . . [who] is pragmatic and
solution-oriented, and a person who can take decisions and is an emancipated consumer;
but above all she is a person in control’ (39). The final repertoire, the repertoire
of ‘emotional learning and connected knowing’, is also about learning, but rather than
being about the collection of practical tips, it is learning through the recognition
of oneself, one’s lifestyle and one’s potential problems, in the problems of others as
represented in the pages of magazine stories and articles. As one interviewee told
Hermes, she likes to read ‘short pieces about people who have had certain problems .
. . [and] how such a problem can be solved’ (41). Or as another interviewee told her,
‘I like to read about how people deal with things’ (42). With specific reference to problem
pages, another interviewee observed, ‘you learn a lot from other people’s problems
. . . and the advice they [the magazine] give’ (43). As with the repertoire of practical
knowledge, the repertoire of emotional and connected learning may also involve
the production of an ideal self, a self who is prepared for all the potential emotional
dangers and human crises that might need to be confronted in the social practices
of everyday life. As Hermes explains, ‘Both the repertoire of practical knowledge and
the repertoire of connected knowing may help readers to gain (an imaginary and temporary)
sense of identity and confidence, of being in control or feeling at peace with
life, that lasts while they are reading and dissipates quickly [unlike the practical tips]
when the magazine is put down’ (48).
Hermes’s originality is to have broken decisively with an approach to cultural analysis
in which the researcher insists on the necessity to establish first the substantive
meaning of a text or texts and then how an audience may or may not read the text to
make this meaning. Against this way of working, as she observes, ‘the repertoires that
readers use give meaning to women’s magazine genres in a way that to a quite remarkable
extent is independent of the women’s magazine text. Readers construct new texts