READERS’ REAL-LIFE NARRATIVES IN SELECTED CONTEMPORARY THAI AND UK WOMEN’S MAGAZINES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

The primary aim of my study is to examine how readers’ real-life narratives in selected women’s magazines from the UK and Thailand construct women in these two different cultural contexts. My research provides an understanding of the social construction of women’s gendered identity in women’s personal stories in particular women’s magazines. This study is based on 84 issues of four magazines covering the period November 2010 – November 2011. Two of the magazines are from the UK and two are from Thailand: Woman; Woman and Home (the UK and Thai editions); and Poo Ying. These magazines were selected because they aim at a similar readership, women in their 30s and over. My analysis shows that the readers’ narratives in these four magazines centre predominantly on the following four topics, presented in terms of how prevalent they were: 1) confidence-building, 2) employment, 3) romantic relationships and marriage, and 4) family. These topics form the core of my analysis chapters. Altogether they reveal that women are constructed somewhat differently in the Thai and UK magazines in question. In the UK magazines, women were constructed as imperfect but improvable. Readers’ narratives had the function to suggest to actual readers of these narratives how they themselves might deal with similar issues. By contrast, women in the Thai magazines were normally constructed as ‘ideal’ in terms of already having achieved success. The readers were thus meant to admire the women whose stories were narrated since the women’s stories were presented as examples of an already achieved ‘ideal’ life. But there was no indication how this ideal was achieved. It thus represented a state rather than a process. The magazines provided testimony to the difference between Thai and British public culture in terms of what could and could not be talked about.