Negotiating femininity: SA teenage girls' interpretation of teen magazine discourse constructed around Seventeen

[摘要] Adolescent girls' passage to womanhood is frequently exposed to a vast array ofmedia products. Mass communication products have become educational devices,guiding young women towards an understanding of femininity and all itsaccompanying intricacies. We are taught gender lessons throughout our lives, but ourteen years are of special significance in this regard. In a society that is becoming allthe more media saturated, advertisers are capitalising on different desires and idealsthat are being constructed in the media. Initially, only adult women were targeted, butthese days a number of mass media products aimed specifically at young women haveopened up a whole new market.Until a few years ago, South African teenage girls had only women'smagazines aimed at adult women to refer to. These days, however, a number of teenmagazine titles exist locally. The aim of this study was to look at teen magazines as anexample of texts that are aimed specifically at adolescent women. More specifically,the study looked at the discourse on femininity within the pages of the text – what isthe magazine in essence saying about womanhood?To take the research one step further, it was decided to look at how readers ofthe magazine engaged and negotiated with the text in order to inform their ownunderstanding of femininity. The goal of the study was to determine how thediscourse on femininity played out between the text and the reader.Combining quantitative and qualitative elements, the study was located withina cultural studies framework and referred to Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model asa representation of the communication process.It was found that the magazine under scrutiny had twelve specific thematiccategories that were most prominent. It was found that the femininity encoded in thesetexts revolved around consumerism, fashion and boys.The study found that the readers taking part in focus group research possesseda sufficient amount of educational 'cultural capital to be able to resist the dominantmessages encoded in the texts, yet they seemingly chose not to. This study alsoindicated that the femininity that was constructed in the studied text did not take thegreater South African context into account, and that it served to entertain readers fromhigher LSM groups rather than all South African girls.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University