Women's Magazines and Body Image - An empirical case study of the Danish Fashion Magazine Costume

This thesis is about the Danish fashion magazine Costume and women’s reception of it. The thesis is especially concerned with the body images in Costume and the way in which they influence women’s subjectivity and sense of self. The thesis is situated within feminist and cultural studies and uses an interdisciplinary approach. Through a combination of textual analysis and individual research interviews the thesis gives an insight into the life-world of six women and their reception of Costume. The thesis uses both avid and reluctant readers, which gives the thesis the opportunity to investigate the women’s life-world and reception of a media product such as Costume, from differing perspectives. By using a post-structuralist approach and drawing on theorists such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, the thesis provides a rigorous critique of Costume. The case study has proved that Costume carries a certain ideology, which deals with the construction of a female bodily ideal, an ideal, which is white, young, thin, heterosexual, beautiful and able-bodied. This ideology influences women and asks them to take on self-responsibility for the way they look. Costume thereby produces contemporary disciplines of ‘body projects’ and thus reproduces normative feminine practices within our culture. These are practices which train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands, which insist that all women should be slim and ‘perfect’, while at the same time being experienced in terms of ‘power’ and ‘control’