Women among themselves. A discourse analysis of relationship advice in two popular Flemish women’s magazines.

Women's magazines address their women readers as one monolithic community by making use of synthetic sisterhood. In this study, we want to investigate how women are being positioned within this female community. More in particular, we want to examine how two popular Flemish women's magazines, Het Rijk der Vrouw and Flair, try to enforce their ideas about women and their relationships with their partners to their women readers. We focus on relationship advice in the problem pages of the magazines, since these pages are a perfect instance of synthetic sisterhood. The research focus is diachronic: we will compare Het Rijk der Vrouw of the 1958 volume with Flair of the 2008 volume.
In the analysis itself, we use the notion 'interpretative repertoire' (Gill 2009) to identify patterns across and between texts, and to connect these to wider contexts and social formations. We have identified three broad interpretative repertoires: the 'intimate entrepreneurship' repertoire, 'men-ology', and 'transforming the self'.
Furthermore, we make use of the CDA methods of naming analysis and transitivity analysis.
Naming analysis examines the different names that are used to refer to (social) actors or events within a (con)text. Transitivity analysis is used to examine how men are represented in relation to other actors and to the circumstances under which they are acting. This analysis is based on Halliday's ideational component in Systemic-Functional Grammar.