Perfect bodies, ideal women : beauty, the female body and the construction of femininity in popular women's magazines in Turkey in the 1990s

Abstract

This thesis addresses a certain form of media, i.e popular women's magazines that began to be published in Turkey in the 1990s. These magazines were characterized by their emphasis on beauty, the female body, sexuality and fashion. Therefore they were loaded with gendered discourses, images and meanings from cover to end page. Presenting models and life styles to their readers, they attempted to integrate a specific woman identity into a gendered social space. This study primarily examines how these magazines, which have a specific discourse of beauty and sexuality, played a role in setting beauty ideals and standards, and influenced the relationship between women and their own physical appearance and body. At the same time, the thesis intends to discover the meaning ascribed to beauty and the female body in the 1990s on the basis of the concept of gender. It also deals with how these magazines tried to construct sexual subjectivities and pleasures. Paying particular attention to the economic, social and cultural context of the 1990s, this study underlines the relation between the publication policies and discourses of the magazines, and the economic and cultural values of global capitalism. It endeavors to show how traditional male dominated regime, on the one hand, and global capitalism's market-oriented liberation discourse, on the other, coexisted in the magazines. These magazines, which never limited their content to beauty and fashion related issues, tried to contribute to the re-organization of gender relations via their discourses. These magazines which had a discourse different than traditional women's magazines and attempted to construct a different type of womanhood produced a popular version of feminism in their pages as a consequence of the social and cultural transformation in the 1990s. While encouraging women to be stronger and active in private and public spaces, they reduced women's problems and gender relations that had a historical and social dimension to psychological cases. Likewise, assigning new meanings to the concept of 'femininity', they tried to define 'the ideal woman'. One other objective of this thesis is to display how the magazines addressed gender problems, the limits and contradictions of their feminist discourses, and changing femininity discourses, symbols and codes.