Wellbeing and Aging in The Australian Women’s Weekly magazine

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how the wellbeing trend in popular media regulates women’s bodies and their selves through establishing norms around successful aging. We report on an exploratory qualitative content analysis of representations of wellbeing and aging from The Australian Women’s Weekly (AWW) magazine. While some articles emphasized self-care and self-responsibility, many articulated relational and social/structural understandings of wellbeing. Compared with an earlier analysis of the AWW, our study found largely positive views of experiences of aging, associated with new opportunities and increased self-acceptance. These findings demonstrate how magazines both reflect and reinforce subtle processes of social change.

KEYWORDS:

• Wellbeing
• aging
• women’s magazines

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This figure excludes things like recipes, fashion spreads, puzzles, advertisements and book extracts that we did not define as “full-text articles”.

2. For more information, refer to: http://www.foodisfree.com.au/.

3. Gerald Risdale (born 1934) is a former Catholic priest, who has been in prison since 1994 for multiple convictions of child sexual abuse. He was described in The Age newspaper as “Australia’s most prolific paedophile priest” (Cooper, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Wellbeing: Critical Social Perpsectives Research Cluster, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, La Trobe University, under Grant number 4.1166.01.14.