Empowered Femininity: The Textual Construction of Femininity in Womens Fitness Magazines (English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Japanese, ... Japanese, Chinese, Hindi and Korean Edition)

Women in the first decade 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, women's magazines, and on 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 idealized female body today - an extremely thin body - encodes traditional femininity in that it represents social values of beauty, smallness, and others-orientation, but it also encodes resistant femininity in that it represents determination, dedication, and strength. Similarly, fitness instructional texts from women's fitness magazines demonstrate a hybrid discourse which integrates the language of traditional femininity and the language of resistant femininity. This hybrid discourse, which I call empowered femininity, appears as a seamless combination of the two parent discourses by placing itself in the middle of a continuum between traditional femininity and resistant femininity through two themes: limited achievement and celebrating objectification. The empowered femininity discourse also supports a sociological trend of many women wanting to balance competing demands of portraying highly valued but traditionally male traits while still being seen as traditionally feminine.