Girl Talk: Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers by Dawn H. Currie (review)

486 letters in canada 1999 to `show a different view of Italian Americans,' as Stanley Tucci states in the final interview of the collection, The Great Dictators: Interviews with Filmmakers of Italian Descent is an invaluable tool for anyone interested in film in general, or, more specifically, in cinema studies. (ANTHONY JULIAN TAMBURRI) Dawn H. Currie. Girl Talk: Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers University of Toronto Press. x, 362. $60.00, $24.95 In Girl Talk: Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers, Dawn H. Currie presents the findings of her research into the readership of teenzines like Seventeen, YM, Sassy (now defunct), and Teen. Girl Talk surveys and analyses the patriarchal gender mandates such magazines construct for their young readers, but importantly, it considers the magazines' text only in conjunction with the habits, interpretations, and experiences of their readers. (Her `subjects' were predominantly girls aged thirteen to seventeen from Vancouver and outlying areas.) This look at reader reception raises all sorts of fascinating questions. Why do the columns that enumerate `embarrassing moments' endured and survived by teens hold such a powerful appeal? (Almost always the first column turned to, they prove that there are some who have been `worse off' than the reader, Currie suggests.) Which sort of ads naturalize consumption most effectively for readers? (One ad for Calvin Klein's Eternity comes close.) Do teens read magazines in isolation? (No, they often read and discuss the 'zines with friends.) Currie positions her study at the crux of several key debates. She argues that the historical materialism of Marxist feminism can be invigorated and deepened by acknowledging that social subjects are in part constituted by the popular discourses that `hail' or `interpellate' them (to evoke Althusser). At the same time, poststructuralism badly needs the corrective provided by ethnographies of reception; these can lift theory off the printed page and towards analysis of the interplay between text and`embodied Subjects.' She wants to draw a distinction between the cultural and the social; by this she means a distinction between `text as specimen and text as process,' between the world of the text and the world of its readers. Finding things out about, say, fissures or contradictions in the narrative itself, while interesting, does not automatically prove anything about the narrative's readership, Currie argues. On the other hand, girls' subjectivity is in part constituted through their taking up and internalizing of these messages, and especially since these magazines provide a muchneeded frame of intelligibility for them, teenzines' prescriptions and proscriptions for their young feminine readers have a significant impact. Currie agrees with scholars like those of Birmingham's Center for humanities 487 Contemporary Cultural Studies that the audiences of mass culture are not simply blank `sheep' ready to soak up ideological messages as literal dictates (and the lively quotations from the teens in her study illustrate this amply); that said, she insists that cultural studies enthusiasts go too far when they argue that all pleasure taken by the reader is a subversion of the status quo, that all use of cultural product along unexpected lines is somehow analogous to a politicized resistance. Perhaps the most insistent and valuable point she makes across the span of her discussion is that teenage girls seek `realism' in these magazines, they feel they have things they `need to know,' and they think an advice column or a feature article or a layout meets these standards, they are ready to accept its representation of gender dynamics as ontological. The danger here is clear: the definition and suggested solutions of `problems' in these magazines carefully fend off political queries into the difficulties young women face. Currie's book suffers most from a scholarly apparatus that is very unwieldy; this could be much leaner with no detriment to her argument. The magazines' content doesn't come front and center until chapter 4, and we don't hear much from the teens at the heart of her study until the fifth chapter. Many of her interpretive moments are abandoned too quickly to be thoroughly convincing, and I suspect that the `target' studies routinely conducted by market researchers are probably more exhaustive (and far better funded!) than the study carried out...