Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 19

Lear's Vision of Modem Maturity

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Lear's magazine confronts many of the binary constructs (I
hesitate to call them "conflicts") that gnaw with particular intensity
at the consciousness of contemporary American women aged 40 to 60 in
the late 80s and the early 90s: male and female, body and mind,
indulgence and responsibility, pleasure and pain, freedom and
dependence, poverty and affluence, production and consumption,
individuality and community, novelty and tradition. This arena of
codified play is where the action is in contemporary, mass circulation
magazine publishing. In seeking to traffic in the codes of youth and
age, one of the most powerful and resistant binary oppositions of
ordinary human experience, Frances Lear has chosen an especially
interesting niche in this discursive market.
While Lear's, I think, pursues the goals of postmodemity with
greater success than do many of its comp>etitors, it remains caught in
the bind created by the incompatibility of the messages in much of its
editorial content and the messages in other editorial material, most
of its advertising, and the cultural context of its operations. An
examination of even a brief selection of some of what I take to be the
characteristics of "modernism" and "postmodernism" reflected in
Lear's reveals that "the.magazine for the woman who wasn't bom
yesterday," its postmodernist pretensions notwithstanding, remains
firmly grounded in naodemism.
n : Postmodernist Pretensions

Lear's abounds in the welter of signs that, to borrow Fredric
Jameson's expression, "replicates or reproduces-reinforces—the logic
of consumer capitalism" (125). To scan the entire run or even the