magazinesineverydaylifenegotiatingidentity,femininity.docVIP

Magazines in Everyday Life: negotiating identity, femininity and belonging in lifestyle magazines for minority ethnic women in France and the UK Joanna Helcké Sex, beauty and fashion, wrapped up in a heavy dose of advertising, have long been the staple contents of the cultural phenomenon known as the woman’s magazine. Titles have been directed at the female sex for over 300 years, with the first recorded woman’s magazine, the London-based Ladies Mercury, launched in 1693 (Braithwaite 1995). It was advertised as providing answers to all “the most nice and curious questions concerning love, marriage, behaviour, dress and humour of the female sex”, setting a pattern that would be reworked and built upon over the centuries (Braithwaite 1995: 10). It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, however, that the first cheap magazine was introduced onto the market, thus opening the floodgates to a middle class readership. Today, women’s magazines are big business with new titles proliferating and many of them dying expensive deaths. The most successful titles, such as Cosmopolitan, Elle and Marie Claire, are franchised and so France and the UK have their own versions of these magazines in their respective languages (Hermes 1995). Despite this linguistic diversity, Braithwaite comments on how “strikingly homogenous” (1995: 7) women’s magazines can appear to the casual male reader, whilst Hermes notes that this medium is “overwhelmingly heterosexual in orientation and predominantly white in colour” (1995: 9). The latter observation is echoed by Taylor’s assertion that “the old adage is: […] black people don’t sell your magazine” (2002). Amidst the row upon row of glamorous glossies featuring white cover girls, a new type of magazine may be spotted, usually tucked away unobtrusively on the bottom shelf at the newsagent’s: the lifestyle magazine for minority ethnic women. Titles aimed at post-colonial minorities are a very recent phenomenon in both France and the UK. Repu