Women’s magazines and their readers: The relationship between textual features and practices of reading

Abstract

Research on women’s magazines has provided important insights about magazine texts as possible purveyors of ideology and pleasure, and about magazine reading as a social practice situated in everyday life. While the methodological focus has shifted from textual analysis to ethnography, very few studies actually combine audience studies with the textual analysis of magazines as they appear to readers. This article explores the possible connections between magazine reading as a social practice, investigated through a qualitative questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews with magazine readers, and magazines as texts with certain characteristics, investigated through reader-guided textual analysis. The aim of this approach is to gain a more profound understanding of the relationship between practices of reading and textual features.