The exercise of symbolic power by women’s magazines from the 1960s to the present: the discursive construction of fields, positions and resources in alcohol-related texts

Abstract

This study analyses alcohol-related articles appearing in Finnish women’s magazines from the 1960s to the present day. Women’s magazines are approached as institutions constituting feminine publicities that address issues of interest as well as problems and contradictions in women’s everyday life. Influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capital, data analysis focuses around three main questions: (1) in what kinds of fields do the texts locate drinking; (2) what kinds of drinking-related subject positions do the texts offer their readers; and (3) what kinds of economic, social, cultural, physical, emotional and symbolic resources do they discursively construct and attach to these subject positions? The analysis shows that throughout the study period, women’s magazines’ alcohol-related texts position women readers into the realm of home and family and construct capitals that reinforce a ‘caring ethics’. On the other hand, from the 1990s onwards, alcohol-related texts in women’s magazines also begin to assign women to consumer positions of hedonistic consumer, rational consumer, status-oriented consumer, expert consumer and the consumer who is keen to break away from formality and construct capitals for these positions as well as wage through them a symbolic struggle over which lifestyles are ‘in’ and which are ‘out’.