As an undergraduate senior in the Anthropology Department at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, I was offered the chance to work on an individual honors research project. The opportunity seemed like a good one, and I was excited to embark on my own research.

I started out with the intention of researching the effects of globalization on cross-cultural body image. I was interested in how the body often reflects the values and needs of a culture, and how these expressions change over time, and also as a result of other social factors (economics, technology etc). However, while researching this topic, I came across Dawn H. Currie's book Girl Talk:Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers. The title caught my eye, and the ideas covered in the book sparked my interest. As a result, I decided to change my research focus.

My new research was in the area of publications aimed at the adolescent female market. I initially planned to do a comparative analysis of these publications. I planned to compare the more mainstream magazines such as Seventeen, Teen and YM, with the relatively new crop of alternatives such as New Moon and Teen Voices. Most of the literature I found in this area was fairly recent, and could be found in certain journals and a scattering of books.

In much of the literature I came across, the postmodern concepts of resistence and the important role of the reader in textual analysis was discussed. At this point I began to realize that there was a subculture of magazines and e-zines openly resisting the narrow focus of many of the magazines previously available to female adolescents. The editors and readers of these magazines and e-zines were not passive recipients of dominant cultural messages. They were and are creating their own form of resistance.

I soon became interested in the role of the Internet within this resistence movement. The Internet, which requires very little funding, is a resource that can be used to avoid the negative effects of advertising on editorial content. Most publications aimed at female adolescents rely primarily on the advertising industry for funding. As a result, certain content is included in order to help sell certain products(and therefore keep the funding). Alternative print publications such as New Moon rely on subscriptions for their revenue, whereas others use very little or selective advertising. Unfortunately, this lack of, or critical use of advertising makes it difficult to keep these publications going. It is a competitive market. However, it seems that the Internet has the potential to avoid these obstacles in some ways, because outside funding through advertising is not necessary.

My research was going to include a number of interviews with the editors of both print and online publications. However, with the limited time frame provided, I was only able to include one interview with Deb Mylin, the Managing Editor of New Moon Magazine in Duluth, MN. The remainder of my research was going tofocus on a literature review and ideas for further research. I planned to discuss in greater detail the underlying cultural factors involved in the publication of magazines aimed at young women in the United States. In addition, I wanted to expand on the possibility of the Internet as an avenue of postmodern resistence.

Unfortunately, a few days ago, the Saturday before finals week, tragedy struck. My car was broken into and an innocent red backpack was stolen. In that backpack was a brown folder containing almost all of my research: journal articles, magazine clippings, notecards for my final paper, a disc......the list goes on. The result of this incident is that I have whipped together a new site, attempting to present my main research ideas. Since the majority of my paper was going to be a review and compilation of what others before me have studied(due to a lack of funding and time), I am at a bit of a loss. However, I have listed the resources I did manage to save(the books that were in my apartment at the time), a few links that I find interesting, the interview, a poem, and some images for your viewing pleasure. Hopefully I can eventually return to this research and take it further.

My bias is clearly evident on this website. I applaud the many alternative publications that I have discovered through my research, and I hope they only increase in number. I firmly believe that advertising has become too firmly rooted in American culture, and that media awareness is the best way to lessen the impact.

The End.........for now

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