Empowered Femininity: The Textual Construction of Femininity in Women's Fitness Magazines

Abstract

Women in the first decades of the 21st century encounter competing ideologies of femininity. This book traces the existence of two such ideologies - traditional femininity and resistant femininity - in language, in women's magazines, and in relation to the body. The book then uses a Discourse Analysis of women's fitness magazines to investigate how these ideologies, or discourses, are encoded and ultimately merged into a single discourse of femininity. The extremely thin female body encodes