Article

Embodying class and gender

January 2015

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In March 1937, when the first issue of Marie-Claire was published, the images of the female body it presented to its female readers from working-class backgrounds contrasted sharply with those featured in previous magazines. The female bodies are dressed and groomed to seduce and replace the hieratic bodies that presented fashions synonymous with membership in the upper classes. The present essay examines this shift and shows that the visual repertoire employed is borrowed from that of the female star constructed by movie magazines. By depicting women as stars, this iconography alters not only the image of the female body but the paradigm of femininity itself. The codes of this new appearance symbolize the social conquests of those who succeed by dint of their beauty, but they also represent women’s reappropriation of their sexuality in a context where the heterosexual couple was being reconfigured on the basis of love.

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Article

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Chapter

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Chapter

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Article

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Article

Full-text available

Sleeping with Beauty: Romantic Love, Sex, Power and the Construction of Femininity in Heterosexual Y...

November 2004 · Asian Women

This article draws on solicited diary entries detailing the lives and loves of eight young undergraduate women at an elite institution of higher education in South Africa. The research participants are occupants of a privileged place in society with access to education, and a middle-class lifestyle, have control over their reproductive functioning, are not wives, mothers or homemakers, and ... [Show full abstract] potentially have access to fulfilling, status-rich and materially rewarding occupations which make independence both of their parental families and of male partners a real possibility. Theirs then, is a world of information, choice and opportunity and if of anyone at all in society we would predict the emergence of a critical gender consciousness, it might be of these women. One way of gauging the extent of the emergence of a critical consciousness among women is to examine the extent to which, in the stories they tell about their intimate relationships, they depart from, or conform to both the content and structure of the traditional romance genre and in particular, to the positioning of themselves in their stories as passive, submissive, dependent subjects while their partners are dominant and active. The present article argues that far from the democratisation of intimacy, the young, seemingly privileged and empowered women in the study remain locked into romantic narratives of love with their concomitant passive construction of femininity. In a social context characterised by putative sexual emancipation, these young women find themselves in the unenviable position of having to play a game of liberated sexual and gender politics while at the same time living a reality of feminine oppression.