Women's Magazines in Transition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Dear Colleagues,

Women's magazines are a remarkably resilient media form (Duffy, 2013), maintaining popularity across time and space despite significant challenges, particularly the "digital revolution" (Favaro & Gil, 2018). These publications continue to serve as a central site for negotiations over gender identities, cultural representations, and socio-political dynamics, offering fertile ground for academic inquiry.

This Special Issue seeks to expand our understanding of women's magazines by encouraging culturally, theoretically, and methodologically diverse research.

Scope and Definition

We adopt the broadest definition of women's magazines possible, encompassing traditional print publications, digital platforms, mobile applications, social media channels, broadcast formats, and emerging communication platforms. We welcome research on all publication types along the spectrum from commercial to alternative magazines, including hybrid forms that blur traditional boundaries. We seek historical and archival research, contemporary analyses, and diachronic studies, particularly encouraging submissions from varied cultural contexts, cross-national comparative studies, and center-periphery perspectives.

Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

We welcome diverse theoretical frameworks, including cultural approaches to representations and ideological ambivalence, political approaches to public sphere participation, production-based studies of industry dynamics, transnational feminist perspectives, reception research, and intersectional analyses. Methodologically, we are open to quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studies, textual and visual analyses, ethnographic work, historical research, and comparative analyses.

Topics of interest (indicative but not limited to):

Industry and political economy: Business models, production practices, labor conditions, technological transformations, and relationships between editorial and commercial content.

Digital culture and convergence: Platform transitions, social media integration, participatory culture, multimedia formats, and influencer collaborations.

Representations and discourse: Femininity, beauty, fashion, work, domesticity, sexuality, and representations of diverse communities and identities.

Politics and public sphere: Civic engagement, coverage of public issues, popular and brand feminism, activism, social movements, and postcolonial perspectives.

History and memory: Historical and archival analyses, magazines as historical sources, diachronic studies, and cultural memory.

Audiences and reception: Reading practices, communities, reader–editor interactions, and social uses of magazines.

Duffy, B. (2013). Remake, remodel: Women’s magazines in the digital age. University of Illinois Press.

Favaro, L., & Gill, R. (2018). Feminism rebranded: Women’s magazines online and ‘the return of the F-word’. Digitos, 4, 37-65.

Dr. Einat Lachover
Prof. Dr. Kimberly Voss
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journalism and Media is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.