A Space of One's Own: Women's Magazine Consumption Within Family Life

This is a study of women's magazine consumption in the home. It explores issues of time and space, and addresses the importance the women who took part in the study place on magazine consumption in their lives, given the 'juggling' lifestyles experiences by most of them. The study reveals family life to be a landscape within which these women carve out what they perceive as valuable and rare time and space for themselves. The authors argue that in contemporary life women's magazines play a key part in the quest for me-time and time away from others, in both a tangible and experiential sense.

Exploring the Shopping Imaginary: The Dreamworld of Women's Magazines

This paper focuses on the consumer imagination and, more specifically, on the imaginary shopping spaces which women's magazines create. It addresses the anticipatory, imaginary and experiential consumption which this medium invites. The paper explores how women's magazines function as ‘dreamworlds’ of shopping; and how contemporary readers consume these imaginary shopping spaces. In order to illustrate what the authors term the ‘shopping imaginary’, they draw on findings from a study of women's experiential consumption of magazines, which show the multifaceted ways around which imaginary consumption is explored and enjoyed by women. The study suggests that women's magazines, like department stores, are spaces that facilitate and celebrate just looking and browsing, and, above all, they are shopping spaces that address the power of the imagination within them. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.