'Excessive' bodies: Popular representations of women and the rise and fall of 'Mode' magazine

This project seeks to engage feminist theory in a conversation with contemporary cultural questions of the material body. Central to this research is the question of the excessive material form—that body which exceeds cultural norms and/or protocols and is marked as abject. In order to isolate a particular material form for discussion, I have located this project within the discursive field of Mode magazine. A women's fashion magazine of the late 1990s, Mode's audience and chief editorial focus was the plus-size female form. Typically relegated to the margins of culture, the plus-size form serves as an example of cultural excessiveness and is the space of investigation for this project.; To investigate the transgressive potential of the plus-size body in culture, I employ Tamsin Wilton's (1999) understanding of the body as capable of acting in dialog with culture, continually reshaping and redefining itself under the pressure of cultural construction. It is through such a lens that the plus-size form, represented here as the bodies and readers of Mode magazine, can respond to the culture that created it and generate a productive, transgressive power to resist.; This project is a textual analysis and Sonja Foss' model of ideological criticism serves as the basic template for organizing a triangulation of qualitative reading strategies, including encoding and decoding practices, reading the body as a relation of ruling in culture and recognizing the relationship between the photograph and the text as addressed by Erving Goffman (1979) and Roland Barthes (1977). This multi-layered model allows for recognition of the ideological forces at play in the market-driven field of women's magazines and the inherent links between advertising and editorial material.; This research reveals that the women's fashion magazine can cultivate an interactive relationship that allows readers to become both producers of the text and evidence of its effects. Mode served as a primer to plus-size women on how to engage, critique and redefine the culture that marked their excessive bodies in the highly structured realm of commodity capitalism.