Feminine Subject-positions In A Global Mediascape:An Audience Study Of Chinese Women Fashion Magazine Readers In Shanghai

Departing from cultural studies in representation, I investigated fashion magazine images in China of both Western and Chinese publications to tease out a rhizomic identity construction and negotiation through media representations informing Chinese women audiences in the globalized ’mediascape’ of Shanghai, China. Implicating a discursive post-structuralist approach to explore commercial representations through audience perception, I explored how women position themselves around Western and Chinese media rhetoric utilizing these specifically narrow media representations to articulate self, and to dictate consumer choices. This specifically narrow group of modern, internationally inclined, young Chinese women, engaging international and national media to highlight the shifting powers in discourse formation and appropriation embedded in fashion magazine symbols detailed how they help make and break style trends. Postmodern assumptions on identity as intersections and process enabled me to use self-articulation as a primary interpretive tool to frame my research. In-depth qualitative interviews helped dialogue inductively engage the themes of exploration, including media representations, identity construction, and shifting circuits of power proliferating discourse through media imagery targeting a specific gendered demographic. After transcribing the texts, and sensing themes through recurring patterns and words, I ultimately organized over-arching codes into a thematic network. My findings allowed the emergence of categorical themes branching out of the process of detachment and approximation from representations in Chinese and Western media, informed by a commercial global media discourse.Weaving in and out of media interpretations of sexuality in poses, differentiating "Western" and "Chinese" style, anxieties around age instead of beauty standards, I found this Chinese audience more autonomous and nationalistic than expected. As the women appropriated definitions and representations of both Western and Chinese fashion magazine images, by connecting to their diverse nodes of meaning and content, an active identification process balanced gender values with already definitive notions of self. Through Western exclusion of a pure "Chinese style", many women handled this space of exclusion, by turning away from its demands. Exactly how (its contours) is described in this study.