How Women 's Identity Is The World Goes Through Constant Economic, Cultural, Technological And Social Changes

2091 Words Apr 27th, 2015 9 Pages
The world goes through constant economic, political, cultural, technological and social changes. Consequently, these changes affect the social subject: their habits, values, 'truths ', and lifestyle. From a social pragmatic perspective of Discourse, this paper aims to observe how women’s identity is (re)constructed by the media. It deals with the concept of identity not as an essence or a fact of nature, but as a social construction compounded by diverse elements or attributes emerging from social interaction between the subject and world. The old identities, which for a long time have been the mainstay of the stability of social organization, are in decline, giving rise to new identities. To observe the social identity of a woman also means to observe how women are seen by society. Changes suffered in the identity of this group are, partly, the result of social and cultural changes. Anthony Fung argues that “[b]y participating in and identifying with this [society], female readers’ self- perceived identity is reinforced.” (329). To understand how a woman is viewed socially, this paper analyzes representations of the female figure on the covers of magazines, specifically. Magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Elle and Marie Claire, were analyzed as a whole in the quest to understand how this phenomenon, composed by several genres, organizes and spreads the hegemonic female representation. First, it will be argued that magazines shape identity by selling the image of the perfect…
Open Document