Kolehmainen, Marjo, PhD student

By Katherine Harrison on 21 May | 0 comments

GEXcel project: Sexual norms in the advice columns of City magazine

The trans-disciplinary study critically examines the production of sexual norms in the advice columns of the Finnish City magazine. Advice columns can be viewed as one of the most visible sites of popular sex education as they participate in the mass-mediated regulation of sexualities and sexual practices. The study focuses especially on the construction of anti-normative and non-normative sexualities in the advice columns by employing cultural studies, feminist media studies and queer theory. The phrasing of the research question is twofold. Firstly, the study asks how anti-normative sexualities (homosexuality, prostitution, BDSM etc.) are represented in the advice columns. Secondly, the study also examines the construction of the disturbances within the normative sexualities (unpleasant odour, height difference, differences in class background etc.) which are referred to as non-normative sexualities. The study examines in particular the articulations and intersections between the different non-normativities or normativities. According to the tentative analysis, the sexual norms in the advice columns are not constructed through the discourse of obscenity and the column continuously employs irony and various ambiguities. Rather, the norms are shaped in nuanced ways, for example connecting anti-normativities and non-normativities to each other or to other forms of cultural ‘otherness’. The empirical research material includes the advice columns which have been published in 2003—2008. The methodological approach of the study could be characterized as ‘close reading’ from the queer theory perspective. The results of the study will be reported as a refereed article.

Biographical notes:

Marjo Kolehmainen works as a researcher at the Department of Social Research (Women’s Studies) at the University of Tampere, Finland. She is also a PhD student in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication (Media Culture) at the University of Tampere. She was a visiting PhD student in CGWS at Lancaster University in 2007. Her ongoing interdisciplinary PhD study focuses on political humour in popular media and is funded by the Kone Foundation. In addition she has researched the construction of one’s relation to porn in the advice columns of young women’s magazines and the role of bodily management in the processes of gendering and sexualizing subjects in the ‘postfeminist’ media culture. Kolehmainen acts as an editorial assistant in the European Journal of Cultural Studies.