Conclusion

Abstract

The central concern of this book was to pursue the relations between the media-based discourses of femininity and women’s sense of gender self. The processes were approached by exploring how wedding magazines define bridal femininity and how these definitions are negotiated by readers. In this way, the analysis presented in the volume empirically interrogated the questions of the media’s capacity to “[constitute] the given through utterances” (Bourdieu 1991: 170) and to hail individuals into the subject positions which validate it. Both the theoretical and methodological paradigms of this piece of research are based on multiple premises. Synthesizing different theories of discourse and power, this study took the approach of conceptual pragmatism to establish a conceptual framework for the analysis of the specific aspects of discourse that it set out to pursue. Consequently, the analytical toolkit was also complex. The complexity of both the toolkit and its theoretical premises was intended to manage the complexity of the object of the current study. Briefly, this book followed Foucault’s view of the knowledge-based power and considered discourses as productive of the objects of which they speak. Media, as one of the contemporary expert systems (‘knowledge specialists’), have the capacity of constructing and reinforcing the normative definitions of gender.