The ‘New’ Men's Magazines and the Performance of Masculinity

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Abstract
In Australia in the 1990s, following on from the phenomenon of the ‘new woman's magazine', a new market in lifestyle magazines for men has emerged, distinct from magazines such as Penthouse, Playboy and Picture. This paper examines the phenomenon of the ‘new’ men's magazines, and argues that these magazines are a site in which contemporary performances of masculinities can be analysed, just as feminist and other analyses have examined and critiqued the production of feminine subjectivities through women's magazines. We introduce the market positioning and profile of these magazines, then analyse shifts in the available discourses for constructing masculine subjectivities as they are exemplified in one of the most successful of these magazines, Ralph. Making use of Judith Butler's concept of performance and her critique of Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, toe analyse a story in Ralph, concluding that Ralph's performances of ‘stereotypical’ masculinity are self-conscious ‘over-performances’ of a set of discourses and subjectivities which it recognises are already in a sense obsolete.

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