From Marie-Claire Magazine’s Authoritative Pedagogy to the Hellocoton Blog Platform’s Knowledge Sharing: Between Gender Construction and Gender Appropriation

Abstract

When Marie-Claire magazine was first published in 1937 in France, it broke new journalistic ground as the first written format directed at women. Despite its favourable reception, this type of publication, now commonly referred to as a women’s magazine, is regularly decried as a vehicle for transmitting stereotyped models of a femininity that is confined to domestic life and superficial appearances. From a diachronic perspective, the participative web – ‘women’s’ blogs in particular – offers key areas of observation of what women do when they self-express directly to other women. Do they fall along the continuum of women’s magazines’ editorial style, or rather, do they break with those magazines’ gender codes and conceptions?