Page 160 - Decoding Culture

G E N D E R ED SUB E C TS, WOMEN'S TEXTS 153
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female youth culture. In making this move and examining the ways
in which young girls interact to form a distinctive culture, she is at
one level focusing upon the ideology of patriarchy in action, but at
another she also recognizes the possibility of a form of resistance
that turns teenybopper culture 'into a site of active feminine iden­
tity' (ibid: 14).
In pursuit of this aspect of the formation of teenage girls' iden­
tity, McRobbie turned her attention to the typical cultural texts of
teenage femininity, most notably the hugely popular girls' maga­
zine Jackie. In her original discussion - dating from the
mid-1970s - she embarks on what she describes (1991a: 81-82)
as 'a systematic critique ofjackie as a system of messages, a sig­
nifying system and a bearer of a certain ideology, an ideology
which deals with the construction of teenage femininity'. In doing
that, of course, she remains within the theoretical presupposi­
tions of CCCS textual analysis of the time, with its concern to
reveal the ideological mechanisms through which hegemony is
secured. Through the magazines, she argues, 'teenage girls are
subjected to an explicit attempt to win consent to the dominant
order - in terms of femininity, leisure and consumption' (ibid:
87) . The model is one of ideology 'pushing' the girls in specific
directions, operating through the 'codes' that she identifies: those
of romance, personal! domestic life, fashion and beauty, and pop
music. Overall, she concludes, 'Jackie presents "romantic indi­
vidualism" as the ethos par excellence of the teenage girl'
(ibid: 131) .
Typically for the period, most of this analysis revolves around
the texts themselves, on the assumption that their repeated absorp­
tion - McRobbie talks about this 'powerful' discourse being
'absorbed' by its readers - has hegemonic consequences. Only at
the very end of her discussion (ibid: 132) does she note that it is
also important to know 'how girls read Jackie and encounter its

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