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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2015
The category of “woman” has historically been used not only to locate but also to regulate women. Women's magazines were and are part of that process, as Beetham maintains: “[T]hey not only defined readers as ‘women,’ they sought to bring into being the women they addressed” (Beetham 1996, p. ix). Since femininity is always represented as something to be achieved in women's magazines, they provide a context through which women learn their gender roles in the process of becoming feminine. The notion of femininity is not fixed and stable; on the contrary, definitions are continually changing, as evidenced by the consumer discourses that redefined femininity in almost every decade of the twentieth century. These various representations of femininity are ultimately related to the politics of identity. Magazines are, therefore, significant sources in circulating collective meanings, recognizing diverse female subjectivities, and constructing sexual differences.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Women and the Millennium: Gender, Culture and Globalisation” conference, July 1999, at the University of Warwick, England. The research is based on a wider comparative study of Turkish and British women's magazines.