Masculinity and Aspiring Consumption: A Reception Study of Men’s Lifestyle Magazines in Contemporary China

Abstract

Men’s lifestyle magazines came to China at the turn of the 21st century as a result of the commercialization and globalization of the media. Inspired by Western scholarship on men’s lifestyle magazines, many investigations of Chinese titles focused on a new form of masculinity that is associated with middle-class identity and the cult of cosmopolitanism that the magazines promote. However, as most existing studies employ content analysis and textual readings as their research methods, the consumption of men’s lifestyle magazines remains an uncharted area, leaving unanswered such important questions as who the readers of these magazines are, why they read them, and whether there is any discrepancy between their target and actual readerships. This study fills this gap by comparing textual readings of Chinese men’s lifestyle magazines with the findings of reader reception studies. It thus tests and enriches the hypotheses and arguments put forward by existing studies of these magazines and their role in masculinity construction in China. On the one hand, men’s lifestyle magazines generate fantasies about and project a “cosmopolitan masculinity,” particularly among China’s younger generation, with the internationally popular titles promoting an elite lifestyle that closely represents the “transnational business masculinity” of the Western world. On the other hand, our survey results reveal tension between the ideal masculinity featured in these magazines and the reallife perceptions and situations of their readers. This tension indicates the limitations of lifestyle magazines in the construction of new identities in present-day China