Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 25, Issue 2, 2022

Women’s magazines and the gender representations in them have been subject to much investigation. Less attention has been paid to alternative media aimed at women, while these have the potential to create and distribute new, empowered approaches to gender representations and business models. This contribution to mapping the alternative feminist media landscape in Belgium focuses on the case of Charlie Magazine, an independent print and online medium in Belgium that existed from 2014 to 2019. Inspired by feminist theory and cultural studies, we discuss norms and conventions in women’s magazines and investigate how dominant gender and gendered norms are subverted in an alternative women’s magazine. Through a discourse analysis of five bookzines of Charlie and four interviews with its editors, we explore different strategies to subvert these norms and conventions. The findings indicate that Charlie challenged these norms in traditional women’s magazines using irony, humour, and intertextuality [1], subversive gender representations [2], and framing the personal as political [3]. Furthermore, interviews with editors and employees of Charlie provide insights into their business model that contributed to the subversion of dominant magazine norms. By investigating the combination of text and production, this article provides unique insights into the production of alternative media targeted at women.

The Iranian state is notorious for its heteronormativity and policing regime in online and offline spaces. The question of how queer Iranians ‘survive’ this inquisitive and intrusive regime of surveillance and control has attracted scholarly interest across disciplines. The existing studies complicate the picture and show that queer spaces, practices, and performances survive despite the extensive control. Digital spaces have presented an opportunity for Iranians of all genders and sexualities to identify, express, and perform non-mainstream and unruly genders and sexualities. In this research, I explore a Persian-language Telegram channel used as an ‘LGBT [sic]’ dating platform. I use a combination of content analysis and cyberethnography to explore the content of the Telegram channel and the nature of interactions therein. The paper will present findings on how this Telegram channel is used primarily to find dating partners and how implicit forms of LGBTQI+ solidarity manifest themselves through its content. Data shows that, despite the strict control of cyberspace, queer spaces appear online, and implicit activism leaks into public spaces through everyday digital interactions of queer Iranians.

Writing at the end of a century which witnessed the possibility of dramatic social change, Mary Wollstonecraft and writing duo Elizabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken examined the relationship between rights and gender equality through the lens of citizenship, marriage, and education. Through a literary analysis of their novels, respectively Maria (1798) and Sara Burgerhart (1782), the current study shows how representations of and by white, middle-class women emphasised collective female identity in their search for greater gender equality. With their fiction, Wollstonecraft as well as Wolff and Deken argued for improved conditions of female education, thereby invoking the category of ‘woman’ to describe the social group for which they were advocating. Yet whose rights were at stake? While these women’s contributions to feminist thought are well-documented, their analogies of women’s subordination and slavery and their analyses of class-based oppression have remained relatively understudied. Even if their works criticised European gender relations, their analyses of women’s subordination risked (re)producing a false universalism of its own, one that underplayed the oppression of poor (working-class) women and women of colour (in slavery).