Representations of femininity in women’s magazines : a comparative study of representations of femininity in the women's magazine Cosmopolitan

Abstract

This study was designed to examine the representation of femininity in two issues of the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan published 21 years apart. The framework for this analysis is Critical Discourse Analysis, which focuses primarily on the hidden meanings and consequences of discourse. The study uses multimodal data, i.e., it considers different modalities such as colour, signs, images and text. A combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis were used to explore the similarities and differences between the representations of femininity in the two magazine issues. Based on the aspects that were considered in this study, including the distribution of themes and the language and different modalities used to represent femininity, the results shows that femininity is represented in a similar way in the two issues despite being published a generation apart.