Femininity, Consumption and Journalistic Professional Identity
CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Goldsmiths Research Online 1 News and Shoes: Femininity, Consumption and Journalistic Professional Identity Hatty Oliver Goldsmiths College, University of London PhD Media and Communications, 2011 2 Abstract This thesis explores the professional cultures, capital and occupational identities of a group of women journalists working in contemporary London‐ based women’s magazines and newspaper supplements. I have mapped this journalistic subfield in order to answer questions about the gendering of hierarchies and structures in the wider journalistic field and the opportunities and limitations provided by women’s traditional associations with consumption. Commercial journalism created for, and by women, plays an increasingly important editorial and commercial role within journalism, but has received little academic attention. In this research I demarcate a distinct subfield of print journalism that I term feminine journalism. This female oriented subfield is concerned with lifestyle, fashion, celebrity and the body and extends across women’s magazines and newspapers. My research is based on analysis of qualitative semi‐structured interviews with a cross‐section of forty journalists from across the subfield. I use Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and field to interrogate the gendered journalistic cultures that mediate the production of feminine journalism. Through a detailed consideration of working practices, routines and occupational identities, I document a journalistic domain dominated by consumption, taste and aesthetics and inextricably enmeshed with the adjoining commercial fields of fashion and beauty brands. I explore the way in which the cultural and economic interlink to produce a version of commercial femininity, which helps to constitute subjective identities for both practitioners and readers.
[Show full text]