"A Woman's Two Bodies: Fashion Magazines, Consumerism, and Feminism" Leslie W. Rabine - 1994

Rabine's article is the closest to the writings of the 2nd wave feminists we read last week. She traces a shift in psychology with the actual physicality of the magazines and the shifts in their articles and how this is reflected in culture. Rabine argues that the blurring of boundaries between realistic and fantastic are contained in one flip through Vogue. Now we have learned a fluidity of subjectivity so that we can move through both bodies. Unlike last week's readings where the magazine image is something we imitate that is helping us to participate in our oppression. Rabine is close to Bordo, always returning us to material conditions.

Rabine looks at the contradictions of fashion and women's identity presented in Vogue and other fashion magazines, primarily in how the editorials are juxtaposed to the advertisements. She traces these representations historically. "Fashion does not merely express this self [women's self expression], but, as a powerful symbolic system, is a major force in producing it. Women of fashion become "speaking" subjects of a symbolic system which inseparably entangles signs of oppression and liberation within the images of the fashion feminine body." (p.60) So women abandon heavy, encumbering garments, symbolically freeing themselves from men, but the new clothes are more revealing, making them more likely to be sex objects to men. in one issue of Vogue, 2 separate articles , one talking about a secure, self-reflexive modern woman is placed next to one about domestic violence. "The 'secure,' 'free' woman and the victim of domestic violence are the same 'modern woman.'" (p.62) Then she relates the woman rape victim whose rapist was acquitted because she dressed to sexy, when an article in Vogue is telling her that it is okay to dress sexy and be empowered by your clothes. The jurors "projected upon the rapist the authority to decide the single correct reading of the woman's clothing and to determine the true addressee as himself." (p.62) This happened in 1989. SHIT.

The reader of the magazine is presumed to have a desire for identity, that can be found within the pages of the magazine through "heightened self-reflexivity, a more blatant sexy look, and the voice of progressive social movements." "The contradictory symbolic system of fashion works according to a logical figure that modifies two common views of postmodern cultural logic as either the recuperation and containment of resistance within hegemonic culture or as the indeterminate oscillation between two terms. In the logic of fashion, it is not resistance that is contained, but the conflict itself between freedom and dominance." (p.63) There is a shift in magazines from the 60s to the 80s from telling readers what to wear to offering them a choice of looks. Again there is a relation to fantasy and self production and this shift "represents a shift from assuming a reader who uncritically imitates an established social role to assuming a reader who produces a self through a proliferation of theatrical roles created through a judicious use of costume and masquerade." (p.64)

There is a double language in the magazines, one "in which a woman is free to make her body into an image of feminine sexual power but not to walk her body down the street." (p.67)

--> All of the readings are trying to get at contradictions. Give us different lenses to understand points of contradiction. No one gives an answer. Feminism and cultural studies become institutionalized in this moment. Unpacking contradictions and navigate the production/consumption divide, not fixate it as a divide, but as a place of practice, not a monolith. New exploration of methodology with an engagement of cultural studies is often tied to political activism. Analyzing how power operates as complex, not a monolithic site of oppression (patriarchy is not the one enemy) “personal is political” dovetails with cultural studies creating a feedback loop between feminism and cultural studies.