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American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 14.2 (2004) 260-263


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Abstracts from Panels Sponsored by the Research Society for American Periodicals at the American Literature Association Conference, May 2004

Globalism and Twentieth-Century American Periodicals

Chair: Susan Belasco, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

1. "Modernism and the Yellow Journalism," Sarah Wilson, University of Toronto

The "Yellow Journalism," a genre of newspaper journalism best exemplified by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, employed formal devices that we can also trace in Anglo-American literary modernism: self-referentiality and self-conscious narration, the adoption of personas and the "faking" of scenes, the mixing of diverse topics, and the exploitation of layouts drawing attention to the materiality of the text. Through their formal influence on modernism, these American periodicals had a far broader reach than their actual print runs might ever suggest. However, the global reach that modernism achieved through its canonization occurred in tandem with the suppression of the newsprint origins of its formalism; recovering this genealogy allows us to better gauge the significance of form's global reach.

2. From Grassroots to Massroots: Third Wave Feminism, Global Activism, and Marie Claire, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, University of Southern California

Published in over 24 countries worldwide, Marie Claire is a fashion magazine that is global in both scope and in economic configuration. While the Marie Claire brand name dates back to the magazine's inception in France in 1934, the United States version did not surface until 1995, when Glenda Bailey, editor-in-chief of Marie Claire U.K., spearheaded the effort to bring the blend of fashion and international coverage to the American marketplace. 1995 was the perfect year to [End Page 260] launch a magazine that claimed to address women with a global heritage and perspective, as it was both the high water mark of 1990s-style multiculturalism and the year that Third Wave feminism gained momentum and greater visibility in the publishing world. Against this socio-political backdrop, Marie Claire was able to position itself as an older, wiser, and more cosmopolitan glossy, designed to reach Third Wave Girlies as they graduated college and attempted to navigate the career world for the first time. While journalism and the mass media have certainly left a marked imprint on feminist theory and writing, most noticeably in the renewed focus on the first person narrative and in the increase of casual, ironic, and accessible rhetoric, I question whether the converse has been true. Has feminism fundamentally changed the structure and the practice of the women's magazine? Does the appearance of more explicitly political content in mainstream fashion periodicals like Marie Claire signify that feminists have at last arrived in the "master's house"?

This paper interrogates Marie Claire as a feminist text, placing its trajectory alongside that of Third Wave feminism and exploring the contradictions and difficulties that arise as feminism moves from its underground grassroots beginnings to a new formation as a mainstream massroots institution. Which feminist actions are enabled by this new relationship to popular culture? Which possibilities are foreclosed? After a brief discussion of the magazine's history, readership, and appropriations of Third Wave discourse, I analyze representations of feminism and global women's rights' activism within various issues of Marie Claire from 2002-2003, looking at the relationship the magazine constructs between and among "women of the world." By exploring the relationship between Marie Claire and the discourse of Third Wave Feminism, I ultimately argue that the mainstream women's publication utilizes liberal neo-feminist language to sell its upper-middle class American readership an enhanced version of self at the expense of the other "Women of the World." Through appropriations of the activist idiom and exploitations of non-Western iconography and Third World female bodies, Marie Claire's imagery reinscribes the oppressive colonialist mentality under the guise...

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