Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 26

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Popular Culture Review

contexts of culture, economy, friendship networks and so on, highlighting
differences amongst women. Within these fields, subjects actively contribute to
their position by interpreting and reconstructing their history according to their
access to different discourses. Individuals may define themselves in relation to
socially held ideals of beauty and femininity, where representations of gender in
magazines (and other media) can play an important role as cultural sources on
which readers can draw and also use for (often negative) comparison.
Despite post-structuralist developments in feminist thought, there remains the
possibility, particularly in media research, of seeing women solely in terms of
class. This is identified by Ang and Hermes as ‘creeping essentialism’ (1991:313),
meaning the danger that lies in interpreting responses from audiences as originating
in a working class or middle class experience. In their view, this precludes a
recognition of the multiple ways in which viewers or readers make sense of media
like women’s magazines. This is not to deny the existence of class differences (and
magazines identify and target audiences in terms of class) but it is to see them as
part of a subject’s identity, rather than the whole. However, Skeggs (1997) argues
that class is a structural, rather [