Although women's magazines are a prominent part of the linguistic landscape, we know comparatively little about how they are read, and what role they play in forming gender ideologies. How do readers negotiate their own gender identities in relation to the subject positions constructed for them by the texts? What strategies do they employ to discursively construct themselves into or out of the target readership?
This paper is based on data from interviews with eighteen readers of magazines that moves towards answers to some of these questions. It examines how readers discursively construct their own identities in relation to the perceived target readers of the magazines, with a specific focus on how social class interacts with and mediates these processes and strategies. It looks at how readers index class in their discourse, and how they use class as a means of "talking themselves out" of the target readership. By doing this it provides insight into the bottom-up processes by which this type of advice literature is made sense of by its consumers and transformed into something meaningful. This gives a clearer picture of the extent to which gender ideologies are produced and reproduced at both the personal and social levels.