Developing Identities,Developing Text
Although teen magazines may be seen as gross influences on girls'identity development,it is important to theorize the effects of the discourse and to examine how readers of these magazines navigate the text.Reader-response theorist Arthur Applebee links readers'responses to text to development,mainly following Piaget's theorized stages of development.During adolescence the“resources of formal operations have a dramatic effect on the child's response”to literature,theorizes Applebee.Applebee,Arthur N.,The Child's Concept of Story,p.125,Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1978.As readers mature,their ability to relate to and draw conclusions from a text increases in scope and complexity.Applebee claims that,as readers enter the initial stages of formal operations,their ability to analyze a text in terms of their own experiences is developed.This one-to-one relationship between reader,experience,and text is complicated as the reader reaches the later stage of formal operations and begins to see the text as“one of many statements of how life might be understood,rather than simply a presentation of life as it is”Applebee,Arthur N.,The Child's Concept of Story,Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1978..The initial period of text relation begins around age 12 or 13-coincidentally in the continuum of most teen magazines'target markets-and grows in analytic complexity around age 16.Here,we may see the window of time marked by personal relation to text-Piaget's initial stage of formal operations and Applebee's early stage of analytic ability-a unique period of vulnerability to developmental influence through text.
Developmentalists,psychologists,and even reader-response theorists characterize the period of adolescence as a period of shifting paradigms.Erikson writes of the painful self-awareness of the teen years and the struggle to attach to a frame of reference outside the self on which to build identity.Piaget associates adolescence with the increasing ability to perform complex tasks,while Applebee applies this cognitive growth to literacy and the experience of reading.Teen magazines,constructed with this convoluted time of physical and cognitive development in mind,do answer the needs of adolescent readers.By providing a framework for identity growth,supplying images of societal perfection,and taking advantage of the one-to-one relationship that can be forged between reader and text,magazines for teenagers,as well as those for adults,effectively guide identity development.The narrowness of this identity framework,as well as the normalcy promised if the guidelines described in the magazines are followed,is a source of critique identified by Driscoll:“Through a cult of normality and an eroticisation of the adolescent woman's concern with normalizing her body,the feminine adolescent body is constructed in girls'magazines as a range of desires trespassed upon by a variety of physiological imperfections.”Driscoll,Catherine,Girls:Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory,p.94,New York:Columbia University Press,2002..Clearly,Driscoll and others acknowledge the successfulness of these publications in defining the parameters of identity and encouraging the marketing of these identities to teenaged readers.The effectiveness of these magazines to shape the identities of readers is rarely called into question;on the contrary,it is the shape of the identities the publications advocate that is more often argued.
After reading earnest letters from the editors of teen magazines to the thousands of readers who purchase the publication each month,it becomes difficult to situate the friendly and helpful intent of the magazine staff within a greater context of capitalism and accusations of exploitation.Joy Leman reminds us that the“incantations of false intimacy are foregrounded-a discourse of friendliness,reassuring and relocating women in an idea of oppression and a position of exploitation,”are present in every issue Leman Joy,“The Advice of a Real Friend:Codes of Intimacy and Oppression in Women's Magazines,”In Women and Media,edited by H.Baehr,p.65,New York:Pergamon,1979..Indeed,according to Leman,the developmental needs of girls can be manipulated to serve the status quo and to maintain the profit motivations that sustain girls'monthlies.In a power relationship mirroring capitalism,the teen magazine creates its own audience and thus its own sustenance.As ideals are marketed and branded within the glossy pages,advertisers pay to incorporate themselves within the identity for sale.According to Ross Ballaster and colleagues,the use of a“feminine”discourse,the manipulation and creation of gendered needs answered by advertised products,and the construction of the female reader as consumer is intrinsic to the survival of the magazines and the market that supports them.“Defining women as‘not men'...is evidently not a sufficient one for the women's magazine,”reports Ballaster in a 1996 analysis of women's publications.“If women are to buy and to be,they cannot be defined solely in the negative;femininity has to be given a particular content.”Ballaster Ros,Beetham Margaret,Frazer Elizabeth,and Hebron Sandra,“A Critical Analysis of Women's Magazines,”In Turning It on,A Reader in Women and Media,edited by H.Baehr and A.Gray,p.91,New York:Arnold,1996..Here,femininity is advertised as a shifting product,an identity dependent on the consumption of goods or the application of products.More important,this advertising is displayed in a uniquely feminine space(Erikson)where,as Ballaster writes,women are more than just“not men.”