Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 25

Writing Women’s Magazines

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the distant and cool viewer/reader/listener. However, Baudrillard’s suspicion of
the capacity of the media to generate genuine social response is not shared by all
theorists. The shift towards participation can be seen in the interactive media of
television talk shows like O p ra h (Livingstone and Lunt 1994), audience
participation programmes such as Crimewafch where victims of crime tell their
stoiA (Brow n 1995) and the deliberate dissolving of the distinction between audience
and performer, characteristic of much postmodern art and media, in which everyday
life has imploded into the media. The divisions between the real and imaginary
have become fused in an environment characterised by a proliferation of signs and
signifiers (Featherstone 1991) and magazines together with other cultural forms
have changed considerably over the last decade, making it difficult to identify real
life and fiction in contemporary media-oriented culture, particularly on television.
This development is intensified when the producers of media and culture claim to
be just like their viewers or readers, which is how some magazine editors see their
position. McRobbie (1996) found that the editor and writers of More!, a fortnightly
magazine for young women, identified with their readers and aimed the magazine
at an audience similar to themselves and their friends. The young staff believed
they enjoyed similar tastes and interests to their peers and therefore if the staff
found a topic attractive and wanted to read about it, it was felt the readers would
too.
If readers and producers are blurring their traditional boundaries, there is an
implication that the struggles over representation and gender identity in the
magazines might be less marked than previous research has suggested (Ballaster
et a l 1991). Identity is, of course, a highly emotive topic for feminist researchers.
To deconstruct the subject, as post-structuralists do, is to deny the existence of an
essential identity (but without denying common experiences) and instead to suggest
that humans are constructed by social discourses and cultural practice (Alcoff 1988).
The concept of woman is fiction, to be problematized and challenged by feminists.
Such a view opens up possibilities of difference for women, released from a
predetermined and fixed gender identity and able continually to construct their
subjectivity in the historical and cultural field of the moment. Alcoff (1988) suggests
the notion of position to avoid essentializing gender. She writes:
When the concept ‘woman’ is defined not by a particular set of
attributes but by a particular position, the internal characteristics
of the person thus identified are not denoted so much as the
external context within which that person is situated (Alcoff
1988:433).
The concept of position allows the subject to move in relation to altering