Theories of text and culture

Abstract

The cover of Cosmopolitan for January 1988 advertises one of its leading features with the caption ‘Men who hate women and the women who love them’. The world of the magazine is one in which men and women are eternally in opposition, always in struggle, but always in pursuit of each other; relations between them are beset by difficulty, frustration and failure. Yet, possible solutions like the dissolution of two exclusive and opposed gender categories, or the separation of women from men, or the dismantling of the power structures which now legitimate gender difference, have no place in the women’s magazine. The heterogeneity of the magazine form, then, has its limits. Certain solutions and conclusions that might result from its representation of heterosexual relations are clearly not meant to be drawn. How does the women’s magazine demarcate and delimit its own ‘reading’ of femininity?