Den perfekta kvinnan och den hippa killen : En receptionsstudie om läsarens uppfattning av genus i livsstilsmagasin

The purpose with this study was to find out about the perception of a couple of individuals regarding the feature of gender in lifestyle magazines. This is a qualitative journalistic study with focus on gender, lifestyle magazines and reception. One of our main questions was to find out about our respondents opinion concerning the content through a gender perspective. We were also interested in their thoughts about their own consciousness and others regarding the representation of gender in lifestyle magazines and how they think that their interpretation of male and female features in lifestyle magazines may shape their lives. In our study we chose to interview eight (8) people. We had a qualitative approach and an open structure regarding the questions during the interviews. Almost all of them took place in Kalmar and a few of them on Skype. To get our respondents to understand our definition of lifestyle magazines we chose to provide them with six (6) articles from the swedish lifestyle magazines Solo and Café, three (3) from each. The results of the study show that our respondents over all seemed to be conscious readers according to themselves. At the same time they thought that other readers besides themselves did not question how gender were presented in the magazines and therefore contributed to the gender structure in society. According to our respondents one of the main reasons for applying both content and values of the magazines seems to be driven by the age of the reader. Something that we thought was quite interesting, especially considering that almost all of them brought up this subject. We are hoping this study will contribute to the research about gender and in particular regarding lifestyle magazines and to inspire others to take interest in further studies about gender