Reversing the Romance: Class and Gender in the Supermarket Tabloids

Abstract

America's ubiquitous supermarket tabloids are a relatively recent invention. Sensational and hyperbolic, they nonetheless offer through their distinctive style and content a unique narrative that is focused quite specifically on the lived experience of many working-class American women. Indeed, because of this focus, the working-class feminine-gender role found in America's supermarket tabloids offers a unique vantage point in contemporary culture for understanding the ideological intersection of categories of class and gender. Perhaps because they are predominantly read by women, the tabloids are often ignored as part of American mass culture, but they deserve attention because they offer both a voice for some women who are rarely heard, and a unique perspective on the mass-culture debate that centers on the question of whether within Western capitalist societies mass-culture forms contain any possibility of resistance to commodification and exploitation.