Magazine Genre Research Articles

Magazine Reading and Involvement and Young Adults' Sexual Health Knowledge, Efficacy, and Behaviors

These studies investigate connections between magazine reading and involvement and young people's sexual health knowledge, self-efficacy, intentions, and contraception use. Study 1 assessed sexual health behaviors and magazine reading among 579 undergraduate students (69% were female; 68% were White; Mage = 19.73). As expected, more frequent reading of mainstream magazines was associated with greater sexual health knowledge, safe-sex self-efficacy, and consistency of using contraception, although results varied across sex and magazine genre. Study 2 replicated and expanded on these findings with a survey of 422 undergraduate students (51% were female; 71% were White; 49% were age 18 or younger), incorporating a more extensive knowledge scale, questions about safe-sex intentions, and measures of magazine involvement. Results suggest that magazine use is associated with positive sexual health outcomes among young people.

Semiotics Ideology and Femininity in Popular Pakistani Women's Magazines

AbstractDrawing on theoretical perspectives from Western feminist research on the genre of women's magazines, I adapt Lazar's model of feminist critical discourse analysis (2005; henceforth referred to as FCDA) to write a critique on the genre of popular Pakistani women's magazines as linguistic and semiotic constructs, which articulate a certain ideology regarding the construction of Pakistani womens' identity. Through semiotic analysis of certain sections of the magazines, I point out the underlying normative and ideological assumptions in order to show how these magazine representations position women; and how semiotics wield power in marginalizing the role of women in society. The restrictive nature of discourses on femininities is highlighted through an analysis of discursive linguistic and semiotic techniques and devices. I argue that the role of semiotics is central in shaping and reinforcing such asymmetrical, gendered and sexist social patterns and practices and that these images (can) have repercussions with regard to women's sexuality(ies) and their social roles and identities.

Gaming magazines and the drive for muscularity in preadolescent boys: A longitudinal examination

The development of a drive for muscularity among boys has been linked to various cultural influences, one of which is exposure to mass media depicting the muscular male body ideal. We sought to determine whether self-reported exposure to four ideal-body magazine genres (health/fitness, fashion, sports, and gaming) predicted an increased drive for muscularity 1 year later. A sample of 104 Black and 77 White preadolescent boys (mean age 8.77) participated in a 2-wave longitudinal panel study. Controlling Wave 1 grade, perceived thinness/adiposity, and drive for muscularity, exposure to video gaming magazines predicted a significant increase in Wave 2 drive for muscularity, but only for White boys. Discussion calls for the inclusion of video gaming magazine exposure measures in future research on print media and male body ideals, along with empirical exploration of racial themes in gaming magazines.

Health Disparities and Direct-to-Consumer Prescription Drug Advertising: A Content Analysis of Targeted Magazine Genres, 1992–2002

Health disparities exist in the United States based on race, gender, and socioeconomic status. One way to alleviate some of the disparities regarding certain diseases or conditions is to increase awareness among populations most affected. Physicians have suggested that direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs could play a role in awareness. Social identity theory suggests that individuals are likely to attend messages if they can identify, often based on race or gender, with people portrayed in the messages. This study analyzed DTCA in 11 years of Black, women's, news, and entertainment magazines to determine whether models in the ads targeted specific populations. Black magazines were more likely to contain ads featuring Black models only than were other genres, which had more DTCA picturing White models only. Health conditions the drugs were intended for varied by genre and over time, with STD drugs appearing primarily in Black magazines, and DTCA for heart disease not published in Black magazines, despite cardiovascular diseases being the No. 1 cause of death for Blacks (and Whites). Women's magazines featured DTCA for a wide variety of drugs, reinforcing their roles as caretakers, with proportionally few ads for women's health. Implications for targeted use of magazine genres as a means of providing health information to specific populations are discussed.

“Teena Goes to Market”: Seventeen Magazine and the Early Construction of the Teen Girl (As) Consumer

And this was really a time, it was like discovering a whole new country. Because there was no awareness -not only of teenagers -but there was no awareness of girls, there was no awareness of how they dressed, or clothes they needed. There wasn't even anyone producing clothes for this age group. There was no cosmetics being created for this age group. So it's hard to believe it, but at that time, it was totally ... new terrain. New territory, new country to be discovered. (Estelle Ellis, Promotion Director at Seventeen, 9/44-3/50; Personal Interview, 6/19/03) As hard as it is to imagine today when it can be argued that youth rules culture, teenagers are really-at least as a social category-a rather recent cultural phenomenon. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall is most often credited with introducing idea of adolescence as a specific (and troublesome) stage of life through his widely read 1904 text, Adolescence (Cook 127; Hine 4; Kett 6; Palladino 5). It was not until several decades later, around 1940s, that moniker teenager moved into wide circulation in popular culture discourse (Palladino 93; Schrum 138). This was also decade that saw teenagers become a distinct consumer category, with their own clothing and product lines being marketed to them (Cook 127). Not coincidentally, 1940s were and developmental years for Seventeen, magazine that has since grown up to become queen of teen magazine genre. The economics of magazine industry necessitated one of Seventeen's initial tasks: to introduce and then sell teen girl to business community. Its first promotional campaign, Meet Teena, would prove instrumental in constructing teen girls as consumers -a legacy that remains with our culture today. The Birth of a Teen Queen As with most human births, two people -a man and a woman-were present at conception and birth of Seventeen: publishing magnate Walter Annenberg and Seventeen's first editor, Helen Valentine. Early in 1944, Annenberg approached Valentine, a grandmother who had spent her entire adult life in magazine industry and who was then working as promotion director of Mademoiselle, with a business proposition. He offered her editorship of his failing movie magazine, Stardom, with mandate to revitalize it as a women's fashion magazine. Replying that she was not the least bit interested in such an endeavor, Valentine responded with an alternative: she would like to edit a service magazine directed at high school age young women (Cooney 183; Ogden 285; Reynolds 231; Valentine 5-6). She told Annenberg: There's room today for a publication aimed at teen-agers. They have been neglected by established fashion publications. Everyone treats them as though they were silly, swooning bobby soxers. I think they are young adults and should be treated accordingly (Reynolds 231). Valentine quickly convinced Annenberg that women needed a magazine of their own - and that they had potential to become an important new consumer market segment. Upon magazine's launch into marketplace, Seventeen and its staffers treaded boldly into cultural wilderness of teen culture, constructing concept of teenage girl in diverse venues and to different constituencies. In actual magazine issues, they advised high school reader on how to be an ideal teen. But Seventeen was also instrumental in constructing teen girl as a consumer through its education and instruction of adults, particularly those in advertising and retail industries. Because economic foundation of magazine industry is built upon financial resources of advertising, successful magazines must garner support of business (Croteau and Hoynes 66; Kilbourne 34; McCracken 4; Zuckerman 26). Seventeen's young promotion director, Estelle Ellis, was charged with job of liaison between magazine and business community, and she produced an extremely innovative promotion campaign that served as formal introduction of teen girl to business(men) -a match that would lead to a lucrative long-term relationship. …

All for Him: Articles About Sex in American Lad Magazines

Research on sources of information about sex indicates that independent reading is a primary source of information for many young people. For young men, such reading is likely to involve lad magazines, a relatively new but very popular genre of lifestyle magazines targeted at young men. In the present study, a systematic representative sample of articles about sex from American lad magazines was subjected to content analysis. Results suggest that, although many articles focus on what women want sexually, the overall message of these articles privileges a fairly narrow male sexuality oriented toward sexual variety. At the same time, the normative relational context of sex is depicted as serious dating relationships. These results are consistent with predominant gender stereotypes about sex.

Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (review)

Reviewed by: Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation Margaret Beetham (bio) Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation, by Jennifer Phegley; pp. x + 233. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004, $39.95. In the 1860s a new kind of middle-class magazine was launched. These made serialised fiction and often lavish illustration their selling points. Jennifer Phegley's book takes a close look at five years' publication of three of these magazines: The Cornhill, Belgravia, and The Victoria Magazine. [End Page 615] Historians of the periodical press describe these as "shilling monthlies," a new kind of journalism presaging the mass press at the end of the century. Literary historians compare the quality of the writing in The Cornhill under W. M. Thackeray's editorship with the sensationalism of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Belgravia. Feminist scholars treat The Victoria Magazine as a politically radical and proto-feminist product of Emily Faithfull's Victoria Press. Phegley draws intelligently on scholarly work in all these areas. She understands that the magazine is a mixed or hybrid form and deals with illustration as well as text, with articles as well as fiction. She makes central to her argument the debates about realism and sensationalism that have engaged literary critics, both Victorian and contemporary. She understands the challenges posed to the radical project of the Victoria Press by the launch of a magazine that was not overtly political. Phegley draws on these debates, but gives them a new significance. She does this in three ways: by relating these rather different journals to each other, by inventing the term "family literary magazine" to describe them all, and by arguing that they are all concerned with empowering the woman reader. Even more radical than this grouping of British periodicals of the 1860s, is her decision to begin her account by looking across the Atlantic to Harper's New Monthly Magazine, an American journal launched in the 1850s. Phegley's argument is that Harper's blazed a trail through the thickets of nineteenth-century publishing and gender politics, which the British magazines followed a decade later. Harper's, she argues, was a pioneer in that it defined its readers as women and insisted that "women were crucial to the development of a superior literary culture" (54). Her case is that Harper's undertook to educate its women readers in good taste, which they would in turn instil in their families, thus ensuring a culturally healthy society. Phegley acknowledges that Harper's was very differently situated from, say, The Cornhill, not least because establishing a healthy national culture in America involved, as Harper's discovered, distinguishing itself from English literary culture and not simply imitating it. I find this the weakest bit of Phegley's argument. Fascinating in itself though the discussion of Harper's is, the relationship between this middle-class literary magazine and the rush of such journals in Britain in the 1860s needs to be made more clearly. Once her focus turns to Britain, however, Phegley's account is convincing and well argued. Concerns about "healthy reading" centered on reading by women and the working class in the second half of the Victorian period. Though Phegley acknowledges the class-based nature of these debates, she does not address working-class reading at all. Instead she focuses on middle-class women's reading, as represented in the chosen journals—and she has, as I have suggested, a sophisticated understanding of the complexity and hybridity of the magazine genre and of the nature of its representations. She uses the term "family literary magazine" as a descriptor because this conveys the two central elements of these journals for her argument. First, each of these titles was intended for domestic reading and the reader constructed in the text is therefore the woman who managed the middle-class home. Her task was ensuring the physical and cultural health of the nation's families—and therefore, by extension, of the nation itself. Phegley argues that, contrary to a prevailing anxiety about women's reading as endemically unhealthy, these journals gave the female reader...

Legitimating TV journalism in 60 Minutes : the ramifications of subordinating the visual to the primacy of the word

–The television news magazine genre carries with it an implicit bias that began in an earlier stage of television's dissemination when TV journalism sought to be legitimized by using standards of objectivity handed down from newspapers and magazines. This article contends that this legitimation was attempted by valorizing the rhetorical power of the spoken word and effectively ignoring that visual images carry independent persuasive power–persuasive power, moreover, that often contradicts the verbal and escapes the containment of the objective word. In support of this contention, the essay examines several episodes of 60 Minutes programming. Particular attention is paid to verbal and visual juxtapositions in which the visual imagery and editing choices subvert the stated intentions of the verbal elements. The aim is two-fold: to contribute to critical rhetorical analyses that seek to comprehend the impact of the visual in verbal or print-oriented contexts; and to uncover some of 60 Minutes' ideological underpinnings by casting light on the particular version of reality it constructs, and the beliefs, attitudes, and values it shapes.

Machine

Machine

Overheard

Although ET is not a literary magazine, poetry and other genres of literature can nonetheless be grist to our linguistic mill. Canadian poet JUDITH COWAN here brings both the linguistic and the poetic together, to highlight in the free flow of her verse a style of speech now widely heard in North America today.