Mediality, Seriality, and Desire : Women's Magazines and the Construction of Genre and Gendered Readings

Throughout literature and from various disciplinary viewpoints, women's magazines have been referred to as "guilty pleasures".The recurrence of such an association is in itself intriguing, and it appears to nudge the intrinsic tensions -between pleasure and guilt, between desire and sublimation, between aspiration and mass culture -that are played out at several levels in and through magazine pages.I contend that these tensions are, in fact, productively leveraged by women's magazines to promote their own, necessarily unbound consumption, fueling in turn ever more pleasure seeking and guilt. Gendered Practices of Consumption and Genre HorizonsAs Rosalind Ballaster, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron recount in their panoramic historical survey of the women's press, the rise of periodical literature aimed at women readers is indeed intimately tied to that of consumption: women's magazines appeared in the 18th century, in the context of the expansion of a capitalistic model.These publications boomed in the 19th century along with capitalist industrialization, and as markets were increasingly segmented, addressing an audience of women also meant defining what "women" were, or rather ought to be.Therefore, the emergence of converging mass-market titles aimed at women can be located in urban centers of consumerism; these titles supported the budding sphere of marketed goods notably through advertising.This argument, tied to the democratization of print generally speaking in the 19th century, can be made in relation to all periodicals, which largely underwrote the development of capitalist modernity.Yet women's magazines particularly emerge as a key site of and for consumption on account of their investment in "the instruction of femininity."As cultural theorist Jennifer Craik argues, "desirable" femininity was to be constructed through consumption, which is also to say it was to be consumed, with magazines tying up morality, work, and pleasure in their discourses, as well as in their representations.