Women’s magazines in the 21 century: still a discursive practice of consolidating or of renovating ideas?

Abstract

Women’s magazines (WMs), as a multimodal semiotic system, composed of several genres, incorporate dualities and/or contradictions which are interdiscursively amalgamated and serve as guides for the solution of women’s problems. In this paper, based on critical discourse analysis, systemic-functional linguistics and research on WMs, I present recent studies on WMs from several countries. Then I discuss local and global issues in WMs and carry out a brief textual and multimodal analysis of two articles from two different countries about the Brazilian top model Gisele Bündchen, who is multimodally represented in the capitalist international circuit as a symbol of femininity in contemporary society.