Fashion pictures and women pictures in French women magazine: normatives parades or strategic masquerade?

Abstract

This article proposes to study the fashion pictures within a representative sample of French women magazines. Based on the method of “sémiologie des indices”, used to analyze a corpus of woman’s body and fashion staged, this paper addresses the issue of new functions granted to the stereotyping process. Starting to the assumption of a contract between audience and media, this analysis shows that the gender stereotype may be prescribed, up to a caricature of the womanhood, to the female readers identified as co-producers of the media discourse. Demonstrating both the co-existence of a plurality of gender representations in its pictures and their variability, this work proposes the concept of strategic masquerade to apprehend the possible new functions for the process of gender stereotyping in media.