| The most scrutinized media in recent North American history have been magazine art and consumer advertising. This thesis examines representations of the male body in Canada's Mayfair magazine in order to determine the nature of contemporary value systems. From its inception in 1927 Mayfair included advertisements, editorials, and visual reportage that affirmed the socio-economic values of the elite of the country through the stimulation of consumer desire and fantasy among those at the upper end of the economic spectrum or those who aspired to the lifestyle depicted. This construct implicitly perpetuated a socio-economic hegemony. Furthermore, this thesis examines how the normative male body functioned as an ideal prototype wherein fashion, athleticism, and travel coalesce to reaffirm capitalist corporate culture in the years following the First World War. The representation of the male body functioned at once as a site of utopian sentimentalism for an era that imagined national identity in terms of stereotypes of male virility while simultaneously being located in an emergent post World War One corporate culture. Moreover, images of alterity, specifically the black male body, were used by the magazine not as a means to create a position of inclusivity, but rather as a means to further highlight and legitimize the white elite male position. Deploying feminist and social theory as a theoretical model and critical point of departure, I interrogate the a priori subjectivity recorded throughout the first decade (1927--1936) of the magazine's history. |
