Reading the Women’s Weekly: Feminism, femininity and popular culture

The power of media representations of femininity, with which any woman must reckon in the production of her sexed subjectivity, her sense of self as female, has been a constant preoccupation of contemporary feminism. Many feminists have moved away from this approach, while still recognising the immense power of the media. They are asking more broadly conceived questions about the status of these representations in our culture, questions that go beyond the modernist dichotomy between serious and popular culture and its gendered associations. A feminist research agenda in cultural studies might be described as ‘articulating the relationship between different sites and making connections between the body, everyday practices, institutional inscriptions and cultural habits’. The British feminist Angela McRobbie has argued that subcultures are less relevant to working-class girls than ‘the intimate world of magazines’ which they can use ‘as a means of creating their own space in the school, the youth club or even in the home’.