[[alternative]]Deconstruction of Beauty Discourses in Women's Magazines

[[abstract]]Pursuing beauty has become a kind of fashion at present. Getting thinness, fitness and cosmetic surgery seem to be good ways that let us to across to become beautiful the class, sex and age. However, we often neglect the danger and the pain behind those ways. Beauty has developed normal discourses in the construction of the magazines. The main purposes of this study are trying to understand the women’s body images in the women’s magazines, discover the methods that construct women’s subject, and then explore the ideologies under the discourses. To guide this research, this study combines the theory of Foucault with poststructuralist feminism approach and the discourses analysis of ideologies approach. The study examines three some themes of the content in the popular women’s magazines -- thinness, fitness and cosmetic surgery --during 1999 to 2000 in Taiwan. According to the result of text analysis, women’s magazines constructed strict beauty standard for women’s body. They construct women’s subject by the mode of science, social classification and the mode of self-identity. The discourses of thinness, fitness and cosmetic surgery offer provocative material for discussing the cultural construction of the gendered body. Women’s magazines use the methods of prohibition, classification, inclusion, exaggeration and exclusion to make the effect caused by the power. Those discourses present the ideologies of authenticity, consumption, patriarchy, and medical technologies. However, the discourses in the women’s magazines are not only a form of oppression, there are also offered possibilities of resistance. Finally, the researcher has some suggestions for women’s subjects, Home-Economics education, gender education, media education, and advanced research.