Analysis Of Marie Claire

McRobbie highlights an important part of the production of magazines and magazine culture; many women’s magazines advocate feminism in their branding and persona in order to align the magazine’s brand with their target audience; to sell the magazine.

This leads to the magazine having dual purposes; on one hand the company has its client’s interests at heart, constantly marketing and promoting (in a magazine’s case) the reader’s ideals and interests, whilst on the other hand ensuring that it earns as much money as possible for its stakeholders – this is outlined by McRobbie – concerning magazines, especially (self-proclaimed) feminist magazines such as Marie Claire, that symbolically objectify and suppress women to sell things (McRobbie, 1999).

Using this approach to question the roles of sex and gender in society interrupts the heteronormative diaspora of historical western culture and introduces ideas that are progressive and potentially less biased. “Through forward thinking fashion, culture-defining opinions and inspirational points of view, Marie Claire is always challenging millions of women to up their game. How sexy can smart be?” – part of the Mary Claire editor’s mission statement.

Out of its context, Marie Claire’s mission statement would seem mostly ambiguous; ‘challenging millions of women to up their game’? What game?

Let us assume that ‘their game’ is femininity – as within the context of the magazine (looking at Marie Claire and asking what the ‘game’ is that must be ‘[upped]’) we can easily come to that conclusion. “Jacqueline Rose’s work [ .. ] showed how femininity as a normative structure of gender identity was never as assured as culture would want it to be. Hence the repetitive anxiety in cultural forms to keep on trying to tie it down, to secure this otherwise more meandering sexual identity to its correct place in the symbolic order. This indicated both a tension and an urgency in the invoking of femininity on such a regular basis as found in women’s magazines” (McRobbie,

The difference is not that one (type of feminist) enjoys that magazine and the other doesn’t (as implied McRobbie this must be clarified because it until recently has been the standard for differentiation) (McRobbie, 1999). Instead, McRobbie argues, the two (sides of feminism) are more alike than ever before; the ‘[feminist] inside the academy’ admits to being effected by magazine culture, and the more accepting magazine readers are more aware of the relentless production of femininity in their magazines. “[Magazines] no longer possess such predictability, some might say they have changed beyond recognition. The more solid version of femininity – with its romantic narratives, its lessons on the art of seduction and its advice about how to hold on to your man – have faded away. When romance appears it is within the knowing, ironic, self –mocking language of post-modernism. When Just Seventeen decided in 1994 to revive the love story, it did so with the quotation marks on full