Fashion magazines have long been objects of debate within feminist theory. This article examines the growing links between Third Wave feminism, social activism, and identity construction via pop culture consumerism. This essay especially focuses on the global magazine Marie Claire, which has positioned itself as an advocate of women’s rights worldwide. I contend that this mainstream women’s publication utilizes liberal neo- feminist language to sell its privileged American readership an enhanced version of self at the expense of other ‘‘Women of the World.’’ By appropriating the idiom of progressive activism and linking it with exoticized and fantasy-oriented fashion spreads that depict First World women globetrotting in the Third, Marie Claire actually reinscribes the oppressive colonialist mentality under the guise of modern feminism.

Introduction

They purvey guilty, self-indulgent pleasures. They discipline female bodies. They

preserve heteronormative gender roles. They deliver ads that stoke the flames of

insatiable consumer desire. In the copious feminist literature on the subject, fashion

magazines have been considered anything but a friend to the vast numbers of

American women who read them. So when a mainstream, model-stocked, glossy

magazine like Marie Claire begins to market itself as a multicultural haven ‘For

Women of the World’ and an advocate for women’s rights’ activism around the globe,

it is truly a moment to reflect.1 Does the appearance of a magazine like Marie Claire

mark a sincere opportunity to fight sexual and racial oppression from within the belly

of the beast? Or is the franchise merely a savvier economic wolf in size-2 sheeps’

clothing?

Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Program in American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1350-4630 (print)/ISSN 1363-0296 (online) # 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13504630600920340

Social Identities Vol. 12, No. 5, September 2006, pp. 595!613

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In the discourse of Third Wave feminism, publications like Marie Claire have largely been contextualized as tangible representations of a renegotiated relationship to the popular media for younger American feminists. Where women’s magazines like Marie Claire were formerly censured as the bane of a liberated woman’s existence (Friedan, 1963; Warren, 1978; Wolf, 1990) they are often hailed within Third Wave writing as conduits that allow feminist ideas to reach a mass audience (Rabine, 1994; Kaminski, 1997; Kirca, 1999; Baumgardner & Richards, 2000) and as reflections of new and more complex notions of feminine subjectivity and gendered identities (Bennet & Carrington 1996; McRobbie, 1999). In one of the most-cited texts of the Third Wave, Manifesta (2000), co-authors Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner*who have written for Marie Claire among many other women’s publications*acknowledge that women’s magazines continue to exhibit ‘little resistance to sexism*either in their pages or payscales’, but go on to contend that Third Wavers should

revis[e] the common feminist position on Elle and the gang. Let’s stop thinking these magazines are lame. They have the ability to bring crucial information to women and are being wasted if we deem them too inane and fluffy to bother with . . . women’s magazines can be our friends. (quoted in Dicker & Piepmeyer, 2003, p. 5)

However, even a furtive glance at the imagery of Marie Claire’s editorial pages suggests that celebrating this new friendship may be premature. Such a simple embrace of popular culture as a vehicle for relaying feminist messages to the masses ignores the powerful, far-reaching networks of global capitalism within which magazines like Marie Claire are firmly ensconced. This essay explores the relationship between Marie Claire and Third Wave

Feminism, arguing that this mainstream women’s publication utilizes liberal neo- feminist language to sell its privileged American readership an enhanced version of self at the expense of other ‘Women of the World’. By appropriating the idiom of progressive activism and linking it with exoticized and fantasy-orientated fashion spreads that depict First World women globetrotting in the Third, Marie Claire actually reinscribes the oppressive colonialist mentality under the guise of modern feminism. The Orientalist representations of Third World violence, sexuality, and decadence that fill the pages of Marie Claire have less to do with the realities of women’s lives in countries like Afghanistan and much more with how the First World represents, reads, and consumes itself. Feminist-orientated activism in the pages of Marie Claire makes it possible for North American women to see themselves as individual political agents, in contrast to representations of passive, desolate women in the Third World plagued by a monotonous array of gender, economic, and political injustices. Strikingly, as this identity formation is forged from the ‘free- market’ ideology of the supreme individualist consumer with endless choices and freedoms, this enhanced First World subjectivity is equally at home as a consumer in the fashion marketplace and as a spectator of horrific depictions of human rights

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abuses against women in developing countries. Although it represents itself as a transparent window to the struggles of the Third World, Marie Claire is in fact a mirror that reflects the power, privilege, and materialism of the First.2

‘Ready to Spend’: The Readership of Marie Claire

The Marie Claire franchise is an especially interesting case study, due to its convoluted history and the fact that the US edition is a relative latecomer to its international markets. It was first founded by Jean Prouvost as a weekly publication in France in 1937, and according to its official web site (2005), was ‘the first magazine aimed at women encouraging them to consider their own autonomy, charm, and personal development’. The German invasion in 1942 halted production, which was not resumed until 1954, when Marie Claire returned as a monthly. International expansion began in 1982*the era of Reaganomics and the rise of our current global economic configuration*and today there are 25 affiliated international editions, each either licensed or in joint venture. The US version began publishing a little over 10 years ago, when Glenda Bailey,

editor-in-chief of Marie Claire UK (slogan: ‘The Only Glossy With Brains’) spearheaded the effort to bring the blend of fashion and international coverage to the American marketplace. 1994 was the perfect year to launch a magazine that claimed to address women with ‘a global heritage and perspective’, as it was both a high water mark of 1990s-style ‘multiculturalism’*which utilized spectacular displays of difference and discourses of racial tolerance*and a point of rapid increase in the mechanism of US-driven globalization. NAFTA went into effect shortly after Marie Claire hit news stands, ironically supplying the magazine with a decade’s worth of investigative reports on the Third World.3 In the United States of this era, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘globalization’ were at once demographic facts and economic theories, theoretical ends to racial and economic inequality and devastating new euphemisms for it. Feeding on the momentum of progressive political movements and taking full advantage of the increase in artistic representations of/by people of colour, American capitalists and media outlets appropriated both terms as marketing buzzwords, using their ideological currency to promote every- thing from Beastie Boys records to, of course, fashion magazines. Against this socio-political backdrop, Marie Claire was able to position itself as an

older, wiser, and more socially responsible fashion magazine, designed to reach newly minted Third Wave Feminists as they graduated college and attempted to navigate the career world for the first time. Typically characterized as a ‘young woman’s feminism’, the Third Wave describes the generation of women who have grown up with the ability to take advantage of political gains already earned by the Civil Rights and ‘second wave’ feminist movements*however tenuous. Today, 60 per cent of Marie Claire’s readership remains firmly in the Third Wave marketing niche, between the ages of 18 and 34, with a median age of 30.3. The average household income (HHI) of a Marie Claire reader is $71,819, a figure slightly higher than Cosmopolitan, Glamour,

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Vogue, Allure, and Elle, and substantially higher than the median HHI of the US, which was recorded at $41,994 in the 2000 census (US Census Bureau, 2005). In addition, over 72 per cent of Marie Claire’s readers are employed outside the home, which is consistent with the 2000 census figures placing 70.1 per cent of females between 25!54 in the labour force. However, the type of labour they engage in is far from average: 33 per cent are college graduates (much higher than the 22 per cent of females with a Bachelor’s degree nationwide) and 30 per cent have professional/ managerial positions, which is very close to the national number of 33 per cent, which includes men. Combining such high levels of salary, employment, and education with the fact that

‘half of our readers are single or married with no children’, Marie Claire assures advertisers that its readers are affluent, middle to upper class women with ‘a lot of disposable income just waiting to be spent!’ This is significant for two key reasons. First, as the ‘primary subjects and objects of consumerism’ within Western capitalism, Marie Claire’sreadershipchiefly representsthemiddleclasswomenwhoMariaMiesarguesare ‘constantly mobilized to follow all the fashion and fads’ in order to perform important (yet often undervalued) ‘consumptionwork’that keeps the gears of the capitalist system grinding away at a rapid pace and profits flowing toward the First World (1998, p. 207). MarieClaire furthersthisprojectbyusingtargetededitorial contenttohailthesewomen as a readership and then sell their time and attention to the highest advertising bidder. Feminist efforts to obtain freedom, autonomy, and equality within exploitative structures of power and economics are re-routed back into the marketplace; in the pages of Marie Claire purchasing power defines female independence and individuality comes not through struggle but rather the economic ability to buy desired self-defining goods at the expense of the women who produce them. Second, Marie Claire’s readers are important not only as a market, but as a socially,

educationally, and economically empowered group that potentially poses a threat to imperial patriarchy, capitalism, and nationalism. However, we must question whether Marie Claire’s brand of ‘activism’ actually enables their empowerment or works to short-circuit it instead. Often, the representations of ‘everyday’ First World women in Marie Claire function primarily to put a feminine face on capitalist success and put the American woman forward as the pinnacle of world progress. Within the glossy magazine, the global inequities of the corporate world are silently erased and the need for feminism is somehow nullified because many female readers have ‘made it’ according to dominant US standards and have surplus cash in hand. By normalizing this level of income and affluence as the default model of successful American citizenship and womanhood, the manipulation of this group as (en)forced consumers goes unrecognized, as does their potential for revolutionary change.

‘Designed Specially for Marie Claire Readers’: Trickle Down Activism

Interestingly, Marie Claire takes on its female-orientated activist projects while deftly avoiding the overtly politicized language of what editor-in-chief Lesley Jane Seymour

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calls ‘old-style feminism’ (quoted in Sandler, 2002, E-1). While such a stance used to

be considered ambivalent at best and anti-feminist at worst, Marie Claire has been

rewarded with consistently rising sales and a reputation as a leading outlet for

feminist discourse among readers and feminists alike.4 While its covers show little

difference from the typical fashion magazine (Figure 1)*predominantly white celebrities, enlarged headlines promising ‘1216 Beauty and Fashion Ideas’*Lauren Sandler recently declared in the Los Angeles Times that ‘Marie Claire is the title that

women’s rights activists often mention when they talk about what publication has

Figure 1 # Matthew Rolston.

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done the most to interest women in feminist causes over the past few years’ (2002a,

E-1). Within 2004 alone, organizations like Amnesty International and the Step Up

Women’s Network have found representation in the 4 per cent of the magazine’s

editorial content that is devoted to ‘world issues’ (this number is actually down from

a reported 7 per cent in 2002). Opposing the conventional wisdom of the industry

which maintains that controversy doesn’t jibe with lipstick and clothing shills, the ad

pages accompanying these ‘feminist’ stories now fetch top dollar, as the majority of

readers polled place this section consistently among the most read. Products

advertised here vary widely, from luxury items like Gottleib and Sons Diamonds to

companies attempting their own socially-conscious marketing, like M.A.C., which

donates 100 per cent of the proceeds from its Viva Glam lip gloss to AIDS/HIV

research. On the surface it would seem that this newfound relationship between high

fashion, corporate charity, and activism is a working example of capitalist reform.

Multinational corporations like Avon and Ford gain tax write-offs and improved

reputations by sponsoring campaigns against breast cancer and violence against

women, emblazoning their logos on T-shirts, scarves, and bracelets sold in fashion-

conscious fundraising. Activist organizations gain new access to the 946,971 ‘socially-

active and socially-conscious readers’ who purchase Marie Claire monthly, leading to

increases in new membership and large influxes of donations. These same readers,

described by Marie Claire’s marketing team as ‘smart, affluent . . . and ready to spend!’ are drawn in by such representations of themselves within the magazine and

then sold to potential media buyers as the ‘must-have readers for all your advertising

messages’. Marie Claire turns a hefty advertising profit while appearing feminist-

friendly and gaining the patina of cultural difference that separates it*however slightly*from the glossy herd of Cosmo, InStyle, and Vogue. In spite of the 67 per cent of each issue that remains devoted to the traditional topics of fashion and

beauty, the ‘young single urban sophisticates with lots of disposable income’ that

peruse Marie Claire can do so with less feminist angst, as they are assured small doses

of education and global awareness alongside the pictures of ultra-slim models and the

usual promises to ‘Burn Fat Faster!’ (January 2005). Activism becomes as simple as

dashing off a check or e-mailing a congressperson. In the flurry of all this capitalist

exchange, new and needed funds theoretically trickle down to the suffering

smorgasbord of Third World women showcased in Marie Claire: unemployed

Guatemalan weavers, impoverished Vietnamese email order brides, and the suffering

mothers of murdered maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juárez. While it is certainly true that these women desperately need any and all funds that

are floated their way, it is equally true that this celebratory circle of feel-good

capitalist activism is rife with contradictions, dangers, and paradoxes that may

ultimately undermine any gains Marie Claire claims to make for both feminist issues

and ‘For Women of the World’. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty asserts in

‘Cartographies of Struggle’,

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the mere proliferation of Third World women’s texts, in the West at least, owes as much to the relations of the marketplace as to the conviction to ‘testify’ or ‘bear witness’ . . . the existence of Third World women’s narratives in itself is not evidence of decentering hegemonic histories and subjectivities’. (2003a, p. 77)

We must not forget that the primary goal of Marie Claire (and its multinational parent Hearst Publishing) is not in fact to encourage altruism, but to sell magazines and consistently (re)produce its readership. As a capitalist venture first and foremost, Marie Claire must constantly work to reconstitute conditions favourable to its existence, which means it needs to facilitate and promote consumer consumption (Budgeon & Currie 1993, p. 3). If the magazine’s marketing pitch is indeed correct, Marie Claire in fact depends upon the strife and poverty of the Third World to lure potential readers. Not only does the opportunity to witness the violent and seemingly inexhaustible experiences of these select Third World women become a commodity that is sold alongside the luxury items hawked in the advertisements and editorial content, but the affluent readership is able to purchase the magazine’s construction of themselves as progressive, socially concerned, liberated women. With relatively few exceptions, Marie Claire constructs a vision of ‘global activism’

that is dependent upon capitalism and harmonious with current US configurations of the international free market. The editors encourage their readers to ‘shop the magazine for fashion, beauty and meaning’ (emphasis mine), placing the sensational experiences of Third World women up for sale and positing activism as a commodity transaction. Through the recurrent ‘charity offer’ feature following Marie Claire’s investigative reports, readers are encouraged to ‘Stop Violence Against Women around the World’ (April 2004, p. 26) by purchasing a ‘handmade beaded necklace’ ($16.95 with ‘approximately 30 per cent’ going to ‘help Afghan women create independent lives’). This practice epitomizes the growing link between money, consumption, and democratic participation that Mohanty dubs ‘capitalist citizen- ship’, in which collective civic responsibility and notions of freedom and justice are ‘privatized and crafted into commodities to be exchanged via the market’ (2003a, p. 184). More than simply charity, the bracelets and baubles purchased by Marie Claire readers are also visible markers of the privileges of monetary citizenship and the perceived power of the private Western consumer in the global free market; this exemplifies the dangerous slippage between public activism and personal indulgence and positions the market as the solution to the problems of the Third World rather than their cause. Marie Claire’s charity offers allow First World women to consider themselves social activists simply by performing their everyday consumer activities. Activism is a fashion accessory to be purchased through the same economic channels that continue to devastate and impoverish the Third World. The daily living circumstances of both groups of women largely remain unchanged. Not only do these ‘charity offers’ construct activism as a practice where discerning

consumers gain commodity compensation and enhanced capitalist citizenship in return for their surplus dollars, but they also greatly underrepresent the complexity of the issues these activist-orientated articles raise. Activism is shown primarily as a

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reactive response to glaring problems; its solutions*easy, tangible actions that do little to nothing to disrupt the daily lives and local consumptive practices of Marie Claire’s readers*are directed at the sufferers of these human-rights violations rather than their structural causes. William Ryan describes this practice as ‘Blaming the Victim’, and argues that it allows well-intentioned liberals to feel like they are helping those in need while avoiding self-reflexivity concerning their continued complicity in oppressive social structures. Torn between fashion-forward consumerism and the glaring poverty of the Third World, the upper-middle class readers of Marie Claire exhibit a kind of schizophrenia in which

they cannot bring themselves to attack the system that has been so good to them, but they want so badly to be helpful to the victims of racism and economic injustice. (Ryan, 1971, p. 27)

Dashing off a cheque to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan or purchasing a basket handwoven by Pakastani housewives becomes a form of consumer tithing that allows American middle class women to ease their guilt by ‘acting globally’ without having to do the more messy and painful work of ‘thinking locally’ about their role in the world economy. Part of what makes this form of activism so easy*and self-reflection so difficult*

is the fact that Marie Claire facilitates the disconnect between the daily lives of First and Third World women by rarely implicating the economic, cultural, and military imperialism of the US in any of its activist-orientated articles. For example, in the April 2004 Marie Claire, Lauren Sandler’s feature places the ubiquitous image of a veiled Muslim woman next to the question ‘If Iraq’s been liberated, why is this woman living in fear?’ However, rather than connecting US trade embargoes and military aggression*the obvious point being that Iraqis are still living in a warzone*with the instability that forces women in Iraq to ‘hide in their homes, afraid of being kidnapped, raped, or even sold into sexual slavery’, the piece insinuates that US forces are not doing enough to combat the ‘culture of rape’ that Sandler argues was cultivated under the regime of Saddam Hussein (2004, pp. 146!47). Adding insult to injury, Marie Claire ran a fashion spread less than 30 pages later entitled ‘Making Waves’, which depicts a tall blonde woman posing in various stages of undress with men in Naval uniform (Kirk, 2004, pp. 171!81). Although I do not wish to downplay the very real struggles that are undoubtedly faced by women around the world, I wholeheartedly object to the simplified representations and messages continually broadcast by Marie Claire: namely that Western military forces protect and respect US female freedom*symbolized by plunging necklines and rising hemlines*while victimized and oppressed brown women continue to need rescuing from brown men by white (wo)men (Spivak, 1999). As Ryan argues, the ideology of ‘Blaming the Victim’ constructed by articles like ‘If

Iraq’s Been Liberated . . .’ depends upon cataloguing divergent cultural traditions and cementing perceived differences, which are then identified as the roots of the problem. The locus of these women’s suffering stems therefore from their difference

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from the ‘women on their path to freedom’ who read Marie Claire (Marie Claire

Online, 2005). Those that do partake of Western practices are marginalized, either by

a lack of representation or by descriptions of them as fundamentally misunderstand-

ing the elementary codes of beauty, freedom, progress, and profit. Through the continued reinforcement of what Mohanty dubs the ‘Third World

Difference’ (2003b), Marie Claire’s readers, constructed as the default models of

feminist empowerment by favourable comparison, can easily perform mail-order

missionary work that channels funds to help modernize and liberate their Third

World sisters who*outside of a larger political and economic context*are depicted as drowning under the weight of their oppressive and archaic cultural traditions.

This not only continues to support the world systems that dominate and oppress

the Third World, but also creates a binary geopolitics that falsely posits the Third

World as somehow separable and completely distinct from the First. The activist

model in Marie Claire potentially blinds Western women to their own struggles

in those same structures: both the racist, classist, sexist, and heteronormative

power dynamics in their own societies and the economic inequities faced by the

members of ‘the third world in the first’ (Friere, 1985) who labour in sweatshops,

fields, kitchens, and construction sites across the United States and other

industrialized nations. Tellingly, aside from the campaigns against domestic violence waged yearly since

2001, the overwhelming majority of activist-orientated articles in Marie Claire focus

on the oppression of women on foreign soil, depicting American women as free,

enlightened ‘postfeminist’ subjects and positioning global women as the victimized

objects they must save, largely from their own cultures, traditions, and familial

relationships. Paralleling what Mohanty describes in ‘Under Western Eyes’ (2003b),

Third World women are systematically described as universal victims of male violence

and desperately under male control. Feminist activism is represented as an absolute

necessity in places like Afghanistan, where heavily veiled ‘women have endured

decades of oppression and abuse’ (‘Stop Violence’, 2004, p. 26) in search of ‘Western-

style freedoms and rights’ (Sevcik, 2004, p. 60) while the mission seems largely

accomplished in the United States, where readers are free to worry about ‘the 7 sneaky

reasons [they’re] still stressed’ (Cover, 2004). Such dichotomous representation in the

Western media has flattened the veil, a complex and often contradictory religious and

cultural symbol, into the universal marker of sexual segregation and control of

women (Mohanty, 2003b, p. 33). The frequent photos of veiled women in Marie

Claire, coupled with the magazine’s neoliberal discourse of rights and freedoms, is

frighteningly similar to the ‘feminism’ recently used by US President George W. Bush

to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the American people. It was not

coincidental that

as US leaders were selling the nation on war against the Taliban, there were a lot of pictures of shrouded Afghan women in the news. (Flanders, 2001, p. 36)

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The suffering of these women under the oppressive patriarchy of their fundamentalist government is made hypervisible in order to justify US imperialist practices. The women themselves are silenced. On the rare opportunity that women’s rights questions are raised in a US context,

the treatment differs in both degree and kind; such issues appear predominately in sidebars rather than full-length articles or are embedded in larger, more graphic depictions of abuse in other countries.5 When similar ‘feminist’ issues like cosmetic surgery are explored cross-culturally, they are visually represented in dramatically different lights. For example, the ‘Body Special’ section of the April 2003 Marie Claire is devoted to exposing the painful and ‘tragic consequences’ of ‘leg-lengthening’ surgery in China in a lurid article entitled ‘The Height of Vanity’ (pp. 92!98). Accompanying the work are gritty, gory photographs that are devoid of the magic of transformation that is such a dominant theme in beauty magazines. Even though these women are obviously wealthy enough to afford such medical procedures, the selective visual imagery neutralizes their economic status and keeps the dominant stereotype of Third World women as poverty-stricken victims intact. In several large glossy snapshots, Chinese women who have undergone the surgery lie forlornly in hospital beds, their legs pinned into metal racks that distinctly resemble medieval torture devices. Other graphic photos show needles piercing flesh and doctors cutting a hole in one woman’s knee with a bone saw. The colour scheme of the layout is largely black and white, with the occasional phrase highlighted in blood red. These editorial choices work together to present this practice as a painful, barbaric, and unnecessary risk undertaken by women who still know no better and have little choice to avoid such practices even if they did. Although this article shows that some Third World women do have the opportunity to attain some of the luxuries of the ‘progressive’ West, they are portrayed as continually haunted by backward notions of beauty and limited by archaic gender roles that Marie Claire readers would have long overcome. In stark contrast, ‘The Plastic Wives Club’, Marie Claire’s November 2002

discussion of US cosmetic surgery practices, is naturalized through its location under the ‘Real Lives’ banner in the magazine. Despite the article’s focus on painful surgeries such as liposuction, breast augmentation, and rhinoplasty, the editors selected a soft pink and lavender colour palette to accompany it. There are no lurid photo spreads of the operating room to be found here, rather readers are shown ‘before and after’ snapshots that highlight improvement and are captioned by testimonials that heighten the miraculous metamorphosis. Underneath photographs of a breast enlargement it reads, ‘‘‘He won’t admit it, but he’s more attracted to me now’’*Hayley’ (quoted in Rones, 2002, p. 162). In fact, the largest photo is a colourful, cartoonish close-up of a wedding cake topper that has been altered to show plastic surgeon’s blueprints upon the bride’s face, giving the article a light and somewhat surreal tone. Through such stark visual dissimilarity, Marie Claire brands the cosmetic surgery practices in China as horrific butchery that readers ought to disdain, but the American forms represent progressive beauty ‘perks’ that readers

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should consider (Rones, 2002, p. 160). Of course, Marie Claire does not draw any connection between the two practices and never makes the observation that what is deemed beautifying by one culture can be considered mutilation in another. Body altering in the First World is an elective benefit of technological progress; in the Third it is strictly enforced barbarism. These articles are symptomatic of the magazine’s depiction of Third World female bodies as scarred, fragmented, broken and destroyed, which functions to emphasize the wholeness, health, and beauty of the women of the First World.

‘What Would Your Life Be Like if You Lived in Another Country?’: Marie Claire and the Paradox of Identification

Thick and provocative depictions of brutality are a staple of all international women’s rights pieces in Marie Claire. In the span of a single year, the magazine’s readers are treated to dozens of horrific accounts of baby rape, infant genocide, genital surgeries, rape, executions, forced prostitution, starvation, torture, domestic abuse, murder, and sex slavery, all taking place in Third World locations. These stories are indeed treats, allowing American women to feel superior both by their cultural customs and their willingness to save these women from their predestined fates. The proliferation of such gory revelation, along with this ‘Editor’s Note’ from February 2003, suggests that Marie Claire deems this reporting style absolutely fundamental to its activist efforts:

THIS STORY CONTAINS SHOCKING AND GRAPHIC MATERIAL. Despite the sensitive nature of this story, we resolved to publish the facts, in line with Marie Claire’s commitment to women’s rights around the world. Join us in aiding those who suffer from these atrocities. (Power, 2003, p. 88)

Such constant attention to graphic detail and the self-glorifying pride taken in ‘telling it like it is’, implies that fashion outlets like Marie Claire are ‘not a proving ground for new ideas, but for shocking narratives’, as Sandler rightly points out in The Nation (2002b, p. 28). In utilizing this method, the magazine is participating in a long liberal tradition of ‘bearing witness’ by employing violent and ‘realistic’ testimony to effect social change. Graphic sensory description urges rights-bearing readers to empathize with the suffering of the subjugated, the logic being that such horrors will emotionally move a complacent Western subject to action when nothing else will. Pain is posited as the common language of humanity, extending compassion to the oppressed and remedying the callous indifference of the free subject with one broad stroke (Hartman, 1997, p. 18). This simple and direct resolution, however, represents only one possible response to voyeuristic and eroticized representations of violence and ignores the often complex mixtures of terror and pleasure that can result from placing oneself in another’s shoes. Although the arguments presented in Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection:

Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America refer predominantly

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to abolitionist narratives from the antebellum United States, they are highly relevant to Marie Claire’s reportage, which closely resembles the ‘shocking accounts of whipping, rape, mutilation, and suicide’ Hartman deconstructs (1997, p. 18). Hartman’s work discusses the more dubious side of empathy and explicitly exposes ‘the thin line between witness and spectator’ that is often crossed while reading graphic eyewitness accounts (1997, p. 19). Through the sensory identification inherent in empathy, readers inject themselves directly into the narrative, layering themselves over the victims and attempting to absorb the pain as if it were their own. This substitution works to efface the actual experience and humanity of the oppressed being depicted; their physicality and agency vanishes as the reader begins to feel sympathy for herself in the brutal situation rather than for the women of the article. In fact, despite the most altruistic intentions of activists, writers, and editors, such vivid scenes can often be counterproductive, because

if this violence can become palpable only through the masochistic fantasy, then it becomes clear that empathy is always double-edged, for in making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration. (Hartman, 1997, p. 18)

While the article purports to persuade readers to think beyond themselves, this reaction is accessed primarily through a heightened form of narcissism, an even more pronounced looking inward that reduces the other to self (Wyatt, 2004, p. 171). The powerful position of the wealthy First World reader is therefore enhanced by

the violent Third World spectacles rendered in Marie Claire. The experience of empathy is simultaneously identificatory and imperialist. After all,

the specularization of difference is always reassuring [Western Women] of their own unshakeable privileged position within a racial [and, I would add, economic] binary. (Wyatt, 2004, p. 115)

Not only does the suffering of the dark body only become visible and tangible when the white body is imagined in its harrowing circumstances, but there is an essential pleasure and relief in the termination of the experience. It is the Third World body that is fixed in the position of suffering; First World women can travel simply by turning the page. Often, advertising depicting the First World subject in particularly liberating and joyful situations are positioned at the end of the ‘Women of the World’ articles, both calling attention to and exploiting this feeling of release. For instance, the ‘Complete Relief, Complete Nirvana’ ad for Midol ran directly opposite the final page of an article detailing Khafia Mohammed’s torture at the hands of Iraqi soldiers in the June 2003 issue. The bright blue shock of sky contrasts markedly with the pictures accompanying ‘I Was Imprisoned by Saddam’, which are all interior shots or photos of women posing in burned out shells of Iraqi buildings (Mohammed & Griswold 2003, pp. 139!40). Sombre Iraqi victims in heavy black burquas are two worlds away from Midol’s smiling, carefree, bikini-clad women. When placed adjacent to the raw suffering expressed in the preceding article, the message of the

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Midol ad is even more powerful. While the Iraqi women are in desperate need of even the most basic human rights, Midol lets the Western woman know that ‘All You Need is Midol’ to be fully and completely free. In addition, Hartman’s work asserts that grotesque depictions like those in ‘I Was

Imprisoned and Tortured by Saddam’ run the risk of ‘fixing and naturalizing this state of pained embodiment’, permanently associating the Third World woman with debasement and victimization (1997, p. 20). The practice of identification is further encouraged and facilitated by recurring ‘Women of the World’ columns that employ second-person perspective and enable readers to imagine ‘What Would Your Life Be Like if You Were 30 and Lived in Australia? South Africa? Russia? Japan?’ (Savacool, 2003). These articles feed the desire and ability of First World women to ‘become’ the Other while paradoxically strengthening her own self-image; she, after all, is free to globe-trot and ‘check out the dossiers of these potential ‘‘yous’’’ with complete impunity and virtual invisibility (p. 84). It is the right of Marie Claire readers to be various, to incorporate the desired features of ‘Others’ into themselves without marring or losing their (white) Western privilege (Dyer, 1997, p. 49). Interestingly, when the magazine’s editorial content encourages this type of direct comparison, the women selected are not the poverty-stricken women of the international campaigns but rather Third World women who are more similar in career path and economic status: Malaysian PR consultants, Brazilian filmmakers, and Honduran health care workers. While this appears contradictory, it actually furthers the hierarchical logic of the magazine. Within the pages of Marie Claire, if Third World women are not impoverished victims of violence perpetually trapped in their traditions, then they are aspiring to be exactly like their progressive American sisters: stuck in traffic, breastfeeding on the go, and working out in the gym until the wee hours of the night. These stories do not threaten the superiority of the Western woman, but continue to augment it, because they are designed to evoke relief that American women do not have to endure their work commute trapped like a sardine in a Tokyo subway or eat rice porridge for breakfast in Thailand (Savacool, 2003). Similar to the article about the Chinese leg-lengtheners, when Marie Claire does represent the Third World woman emulating the idealized lifestyle of the West, she just cannot seem to get it quite right. Whereas the wealthy, educated American reader constructed by Marie Claire is free

to slide in and out of identification with the Other and is frequently encouraged to discover and explore her multiple roles, selves, and identities, the Third World woman appears almost exclusively in the discretely bounded space of the ‘activist’ articles. Whereas she is over-represented in the human-rights section, she is largely invisible in the last half of each magazine, the fantasy photo spreads. The most prominent exception to this rule is a small photo of actress Heather Graham dancing with three Indian women in traditional dress at the India-Pakistan Border. The piece fits, however, with the overall hierarchies represented throughout Marie Claire, right down to the imperialist title ‘Heather Graham’s Passage to India’, an allusion to British author E.M. Forester’s colonial novel. Despite being posed as travel writing,

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the article functions to romanticize the limited and solipsistic imaginings of Indian culture Graham was able to obtain through her study of yoga in Los Angeles while working to de-romanticize the lived space of India, which is described as ‘the kind of Third World mayhem that would cause many Western tourists to arrive heavily armed’ (Wenger, 2003, p. 48). Her white American privilege and the mobility it entails are clear throughout the piece, as she is able to go within 50 miles of the tense India-Pakistan border, where, according to Marie Claire, over 30,000 people have been killed and rape of local women is rampant (Goodwin, 2002, p. 100). Not surprisingly, Graham’s ultimate revelation is that she never ‘needed to go to India to find some kind of spiritual enlightenment . . . Maybe it was inside [her] all along’ (Wenger, 2003, p. 52). Once again, Marie Claire uses Third World travel to draw readers further inside of themselves and to call attention to the benefits of white power in the liberal West.

Conclusions on ‘Politics and Prada’: Marie Claire and the Schizophrenic Capitalist Subject

So this is the point in the article where I am supposed to make the necessary concession that, yes, Marie Claire tackles some very important issues and certainly, any activism is better than none. However, while I do not begrudge even one of the millions of dollars the magazine has brought to deserving organizations, I am troubled by the fact that, in allowing a magazine like Marie Claire to position itself as the mainstream standard of women’s rights activism, Third Wave feminism does not engage in the self-critique necessary to demystify the central fact that

the enslavement and exploitation of one set of women is the foundation of a qualitatively different type of enslavement of another set of women. (Meis, 1998, p. 121)

By employing activist discourse and appropriating ‘multicultural’ iconography, Marie Claire effectively furthers the domineering neo-colonialist project under the guise of modern feminism, defining the liberated Western woman against the victimized, oppressed, and commodified Third World woman. Both classes of women are being used by capitalism*although from decidedly different positionalities*but natur- alizing the role of American women on top of the capitalist system decidedly obscures this concrete link. By all rights, this form of imperialist dominance should be considered old news,

especially within feminist theory, where critics such as bell hooks (1984), Gloria Anzaldúa (1983), and Mohanty (2003b), have described the process by which US mainstream reform feminists have co-opted and diluted the political potency of Third World feminism and feminisms of colour, masquerading as radicals without examining their own privilege and the ‘atomistic and competitive individualism of liberalism’ (hooks 1984, p. 7). Activism in Marie Claire is in fact inextricable from a relentless focus on the individual and her entitlement to freedom and choice.

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Whether it be deciding which of 12 black skirts would best express the reader’s new Fall look or whether or not to undertake body-altering operations, the publication addresses its female readers as atomistic individuals striving to construct and refine their personal identities through commodity purchase. Marie Claire articles like ‘What Kind of Men Does Your Look Attract?’ (2003, p. 127) serve dual purposes: they reinforce existing heterosexual standards of beauty while simultaneously exposing the constructed nature of identity. The same woman may house various and contra- dictory selves within a single psyche. In the pages of Marie Claire, a complete identity can be put on or taken off with the ease of a pair of glasses, and the ‘successful’ woman is able to bridge all of these contradictory selves with an alluring smile and a closet chock full of the appropriate accessories. The ultimate feminist project of this magazine is not truly the Third World but rather the reader, who must strive to exhibit the particular brand of complexity and multiplicity deemed desirable by the editors and advertisers, a type of capitalist schizophrenia ripe for niche marketing. As Manifesta co-author Baumgardner remarks,

a willing reader can handle reading about women in Afghanistan and still have the quick tips for firming up before the bathing suit season. (quoted in Sandler, 2002a, p. E-1)

The locus of critique has shifted dramatically here; readers are not invited to criticize the magazine for requiring that they sculpt their bodies (this has been normalized), instead they must interrogate themselves for not being ‘willing’ or able to absorb both messages. Attempting to strike that desirable, contradictory, and impossible Third Wave

balance between what Manifesta describes as ‘politics and Prada’ (Baumgardner & Richards, 2000, p. 124), Marie Claire’s shiny pages construct the consumer world of American femininity not as a guilty paradise where women step down into objectification, but rather a pleasurable world of individual freedom and choice, where one steps up to both global power and consciousness. While Marie Claire readers likely enter the magazine with the desire to become more socially active, globally literate, and aware of political inequities, they may very well leave convinced that the mission is already accomplished. Simply becoming the type of person who would read Marie Claire instead of Cosmo can potentially gratify this profound desire for activism. The magazine’s visual imagery, rhetorical style, and consumer- orientated women’s rights’ campaigns further support this self-deception by attempting to convince American feminists not only that they can have and/or purchase it all, but that it is right, natural, and progressive for them to do so. The glossy window to the world that Marie Claire promises truly functions as a mirror reflecting a bifurcated subjectivity that both recognizes and utterly disavows her First World power and privilege. The magazine’s recent slogan shift in March 2006 from the global, Other-focused ‘For Women of the World’ to the local, self-centred ‘More than Just a Pretty Face’ blurs the line between self-discovery and self-absorption even more profoundly.

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Such ‘a culture of narcissism’ (McRobbie, 1991) and fracturing of selves (Douglas,

1994) has always been a fixture of the fashion magazine and has been heavily

documented. What is novel is that, rather than coalescing to critique these elements,

Third Wave feminists articulate similar visions of identity. In To Be Real, Rebecca

Walker claims that

[Third Wavers] find ourselves seeking to create identities that accommodate ambiguity and our multiple personalities: including more than excluding. (1995, p. xxxiii)

In the same volume, Danzy Senna argues that the Third Wave is

a feminism no longer on the defensive, with a fun, playful aesthetic that acknowledges the erotic and narcissistic pleasure women receive from beautifying themselves, a pleasure not to be denied. (Senna, 1995, p. 6)

While Third Wave feminism makes a case for the potential of women’s magazines like

Marie Claire to provide a direct line to larger numbers of American women, the

glossy’s neo-feminist facelift has yet to mobilize readers to move beyond consumer

pleasure and mail-order activism. Third Wave discourse encourages women to

experience and revel in their pleasures, but it virtually removes the tools necessary to

interrogate them, allowing women to consider themselves socially-conscious

feminists and activists without questioning why their fantasies so closely resemble

cultural and economic imperialism. Ripe for more exploration are the very real dangers of the fractured*and

profitable*schizophrenic capitalist female subjectivity. In striving to feel good and explore the pleasures of consumerism, Third Wave feminists can very well think one

way and buy another, feeling comfortable living by the very values*atomistic individualism, capitalism, liberalism*that their theorizing largely rejects (Darraj, 2003, p. 195). Furthermore, while this rhetoric of inclusion and difference has its

radical roots in the struggles of feminists of colour and queer feminists for

meaningful membership and political agency in the larger feminist movement, the

trajectory of the Third Wave pushes this postmodern discourse of difference and

pleasure toward the personal and the celebratory. Taken to its extreme, the personal is

not just political; it risks becoming the politics in its entirety.

Acknowledgements

I thank the participants of the UK and Ireland Women’s Studies Association Annual

Conference (10 July 2004), for their insightful commentary, especially Marguerite

Waller, Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Cara Cardinale Fidler, and reina alejandra prado. My

advisor Carla Kaplan, my mentor Sarah Banet-Weiser, and my colleagues Bridget

Hoida Mulholland at the University of Southern California and Beth Buggenhagen at

the University of Rochester also gave thoughtful, incisive feedback.

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Notes

[1] ‘For Woman of the World’ is the slogan that was located on the spine of the magazine every month until March 2006, when it was changed to ‘More than Just a Pretty Face’.

[2] While this essay focuses specifically on Marie Claire, it is important to contextualize the magazine as part of a larger trend of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ (CSR) that has been on the rise in the last decade. CSR refers to the expansion of a corporation’s concern beyond the profit margin to include environmental and social matters. While the concept of CSR sounds inherently progressive and benevolent, it is actually quite elastic in practice; CSR has been used to describe a wide spectrum of corporate activity that stretches from bare minimum legal compliance to completely renewable, sustainable business models. My concern here is with companies that fall in the middle of this range, enacting forms of social responsibility precisely to increase profits, as they conveniently act as promotional mechanisms. As David Goodman notes in ‘Culture Change’ (2003),

big business has learned to embrace social responsibility for one simple reason: it sells . . . 30 percent of adult American consumers, or 63 million people, make purchasing decisions based on issues of the environment, social justice, personal development, and sustainable living.

Sustainable collectives like Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) have become ‘green- washing’ clearinghouses for some of the most egregious social and environmental offenders like Exxon Mobil and Walmart. Companies like McDonald’s earn membership to the BSR for relatively small shifts in business practices*like changing to recycled napkins*that do not touch the overall corporate mission: (www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/01/ ma_209_01.html). United Colors of Benetton has infamously used multiethnic and multiracial imagery and issues like AIDS, world hunger, and the plight of refugees of the war in Kosovo as part of its advertising campaigns since the late 1980s (for more detailed analysis of Benetton see Giroux, 1993!94 and Tinic, 1997). In terms of CSR and publishing, the 2000 partnership between clothing company J.Jill and Real Simple, a women’s lifestyle magazine that pushes organic products, comes to mind. While relatively innocuous*the union mainly involved extra advertising and the sharing of e-mail lists by J.Jill*it saved Real Simple from extinction and provided J.Jill with an environmentally friendly patina with little effort. A sure sign that CSR is currently in vogue is when it appears in the pages of Vogue magazine itself. Vogue, a publication of media giant Condé Nast, has included articles on women’s issues in Afghanistan since the United States’ invasion in 2001, culminating in an active and well-publicized partnership with the ‘Body and Soul Wellness Program’, run by PARSA, a non-governmental organization based in New York. PARSA, in league with Vogue editor Anna Wintour, Clairol, M.A.C. and other beauty industry corporations, has funded the opening of beauty schools and salons in Afghanistan since 2003, a high profile move covered in Liz Mermin’s 2006 documentary The Beauty Academy of Kabul. I find Marie Claire to be an especially exemplary case, as it has been an innovator in the CSR movement in the women’s publishing industry since 1995 and has consistently shown the advertising industry that social activism can be profitable as well as fashionable. Unlike Vogue *a relative latecomer to CSR whose mission statement does not reference social activism even once*Marie Claire claims to be founded in part to cover international women’s rights stories for its young, educated, and well-heeled female audience. The magazine’s self- positioning at the tangled historical and political nexus of feminism, multiculturalism, and consumer capitalism is worth extended meditation.

[3] Following Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s important criticism in ‘Under Western Eyes’, I realize the limitations and the racism inherent in the terms ‘Third World’ and ‘Third World

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Woman’; however, I continue to use them self-consciously throughout the essay precisely to underscore the homogenizing colonial structures referenced, replicated, and systematized by Marie Claire.

[4] Since 1995, Marie Claire’s circulation has grown steadily, a rare feat in an industry that has reported flagging sales overall. In 2001, Marie Claire gained 3 per cent while its primary competitors Glamour, Jane, and Vogue, lost 11 per cent, 19 per cent, and 11 per cent, respectively. In 2004, its readership numbered 946,971, more than double its debut figures, http://www.marieclairemk.com/r4/home.cgi.

[5] Even this is a fairly new practice, added when Lesley Jane Seymour assumed the editor-in- chief role in 2001 (Sandler, 2002a, p. E-1).

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