When in Doubt, Choose “B”

Abstract

The interactive personality quiz regularly featured in teenage girls' magazines is a unique feature of the monthly publications. Using Hall's model of communication, I examine the ways in which the magazines encode information within the texts of the quizzes, paying special attention to the connotations that emerge from the structure of the quiz text, and the ways the quizzes operate to ensure the same disciplinary messages are presented to all readers.

Cosmo complaints: Reparative reading and the possibility of pleasure in Cosmopolitan magazine

“…Finally, some of the scholarship recognizes the contested and contradictory messages mediated in women’s magazines; even when recognizing those contradictions, however, these modes of inquiry conclude that the power of patriarchal ideologies overwhelms the worldmaking potential embedded in contradiction (Pattee, 2009). Amy Aronson puts it succinctly, noting that critiques highlighting the disparate and sometimes competing discourses circulating in women’s magazines “capture the inherent polyphony of the form, only to declare its relatively free play of voices an ambush rather than an opening or opportunity for agency, self-awareness or critique” (Aronson, 2010: 36).…”

What a Girl Wants, What a Girl Needs: Analyzing Postfeminist Themes in Girls’ Magazines

“…For the past four decades, magazines geared towards women and girls have been analyzed as sites representing specific discourses of femininity (McRobbie, 1982(McRobbie, , 1990. These studies have focused on how mediated communication provides girls with stereotypical, narrow and restricting range of role models of femininity centered on the importance of beauty, romance, and fashion (Budgeon & Currie, 1995;Firminger, 2006;Pattee, 2009;Schenkler, Caron, & Halteman, 1998;Willemsen, 1998). The central assumption being that girls are being fed a wealth of information that centers on normative femininity, heteronormativity, and a plethora of other hegemonic ideals to which girls should aspire.…”