| Perhaps no other contemporary entrepreneur has more successfully created a marketing niche all her own than Martha Stewart. In 1997, Stewart instituted her marketing vision: Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO), a multimedia juggernaut devoted to "how-to" content. By the end of 2000, Stewart could boast a successful television career, scores of books bearing her name, a partnership with Kmart to sell her Everyday line of housewares, a syndicated radio show, a column in hundreds of papers nationwide, multiple magazines, a mail order catalogue, and a thriving Internet site.; While Stewart's keen business acumen and vision were instrumental in growing MSLO, they do not fully account for her phenomenal success or her longevity in the marketplace.; Identifying strategies of control inherent in the discursive practices of advertisements, conduct literature, horoscopes, and tabloids can help us to contextualize Stewart's cultural authority and thus analyze the tactics she uses to enforce it so that we might understand how such authority limits, even tyrannizes women, at the same time it promises to empower them. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
