Social Memory and American Cosmopolitan

Sexuality in South African Policy and Practice

This paper examines the Cosmopolitan woman, who represents the “fun, fearless,

female” brand womanhood. This is a case study developed from a larger project that

examines Cosmo issues from several regions in its global readership. The imagined

Cosmo woman of South Africa—produced by the largest globalized women’s magazine

publisher and communications corporation—is symbolic of a transnationally mass

produced ideal of womanhood whose sexual behaviors and racialized subjectivities are

mediated through popular culture.

The standard tagline on :

Cosmopolitan is the lifestylist for millions of “fun, fearless females” who
want to be the best they can be in every area of their lives. Cosmopolitan
inspires with information on relationships and romance, the best in fashion
and beauty, the latest on women’s health and well-being, as well as what
is happening in pop culture and entertainment…and just about everything
else fun, fearless females want to know.
Since the early 1970s Cosmopolitan Magazine has been extending its empire to the far

reaches of the earth picking up “developing” economies along the way; Cosmopolitan

enjoys a monthly readership in excess of 10 million people in 100 countries and 36

languages. Hearst Magazines International could be romanticized as an American

success story if the magazine’s global success did not reflect the insidious reality of

empire building—corporate mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, and monopoly—resulting

in the globalization of a distinct class of womanhood.

In the time we have today, I want to connect the representation of globalized

womanhood in the process of democratic and capitalistic nation building to the

development of a (post)feminist female subjectivity, and I want to explore what the this

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means for rebuilding a national narrative or “social memory” in the South African

democracy.1

Cosmo’s International Subjectivity

The U.S. Cosmo woman is upheld to certain beauty standards that follow a rigid

white hyper-hetero(sexual) middle class upwardly mobile metropolitan womanhood.

What is interesting and useful about identity, despite that it has been highly critiqued by

postmodern scholars as an empty category, is that it provides an interpretive framework

for cultural practices that help people make sense of social conduct and expressive

culture. Hyper (hetero)sexuality,2 is the primary way in each of the international Cosmo

women are constructed. The Cosmo woman is particularly located in her role as a

feminine gender and this generic form of “womanhood” is always attached to normative

“Fun, Fearless, Female,” bodies, which is the catch phrase for the international brand

Cosmopolitan.3 The fun expressed by the Cosmo brand “female” is attained through

the pursuit and manipulation of heterosexuality, desire, and consumption.

Cosmo South Africa

South Africa is a unique case study due to its recent 1994 inauguration as the

“first democratic government” in South African history. 4 “The Union of South Africa was

initially established in 1910, [and] its political, economic, and cultural metropole was

Great Britain” (130). South Africa now can be considered to be in a post-colonial stage,

with one of the most egalitarian constitutions of any democracy today; however, as

1
the free and equal right of every person to participate in a system of government, often practiced by
electing representatives of the people by the majority of the people.
2
Sexuality is meant to indicate sexual desire and the partner choices of people in sexual relationships.
3
“Fun, Fearless, Female” is used to promote the magazine globally; Hearst Corporate Site, 2007.
Accessed at the world wide web on April 13, 2007 at: http://www.hearstcorp.com/
4
Cheryl McEwan, “Building a Postcolonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in Post-
apartheid South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies, (Volume 29, Number 3, September
2003):742.

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Grant Farred and many other scholars note, looking beyond race (and I argue gender)

is an impossibility: race racism, (and gender and sexism) are “not only dialectical but

epistemologically foundational” to what South Africa is today. 5 Inderpal Grewal adds

that globalized relationships between nations is part and parcel to the process of the

development of a “national imaginary” or collective social memory of the people of a

region/nation/state.6 The first two black presidents, Mandela and Mbeki, had the task of

rescuing what they termed, according to Farred, the “foundational element” of society,

which he claims is race, and re-scripting it into an “incorporative commonality of national

identity” through rhetoric. 7 Enter the Cosmo “fun, fearless, female,” an imaginary

“woman” schooled in helping along the image of burgeoning democracies—like America

once was, and like South Africa is today.

Cosmopolitan is intimately bound up in the national narrative, or social memory,

of the great American Dream. George Hearst’s earliest fortunes came from mining and

politics and with his son William Randolph Hearst’s 1887 foray into magazine

publishing, Cosmopolitan magazine helped to build the Hearst Corporation’s global

media empire. Cosmopolitan magazine entered into the national conscience as one of

the first mass produced magazines delivering the latest news, fiction, and

advertisements to privileged Americans helping to script the collective memories about

what it meant to be a good white married, or soon to be, Cosmo reader. As I stated

before, Cosmo now buy’s in at the ground level of developing capitalistic marketplaces,

5
Grant Farred, “Shooting the White Girl First: Race in Post-apartheid South Africa.” In Clarke, Kamari
Maxine and Deborah Thomas (Eds). Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production
of Blackness, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); 227-8.
6
Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, (Durham: Duke University
Press):11.
7
Ibid.

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helping to script a new national narrative, or social memory, about what it means to be a

woman.

In her Journal of Southern African Studies article, Cheryl McEwan argues that

building the official post-colonial archives of South Africa is an effort that must include

black women, not only to locate black women in the shared memory of the traumatic

events of the past, but also to allow women the access to the process of healing; Bantu

oral traditions, colonialism, and apartheid, has historically prevented black women from

being included in any “dominant accounts of history.” 8 In fact, McEwen reports that four

tons of “highly incriminating records” governmental documents were destroyed in South

Africa fourteen years ago during the transition to democracy. 9 Material artifacts of the

collective national memory are important, because as McEwen argues “memory

represents more than individual experience and stands for a collective social and

economic experience, particularly as it relates to class.” 10 Building inclusive material

memories resists “amnesia” about a traumatic past and promotes a “shared sense of

national and communal belonging,” which leads to healing.

“The Effects of Apartheid on the Status of Women in South Africa,” an official

document of the African National Congress reveals the lasting effects of the “triple

oppression” of South African women: “triple oppression” is characterized by the

“restrictive and repressive” experiences of South African black women under apartheid

law because of their race, class, and gender.11 In fact, the legacy of apartheid still

8
McEwan, 740.
9
Ibid., 742
10
Ibid., 747
11
“The Effects of Apartheid on the Status of Women in South Africa” is excerpted from a paper by the
Secretariat for the World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women, in Copenhagen, July
1980. Available June 16, 2008 on the World Wide Web:
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/women/effects.html

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characterizes income distribution in SA: while black South Africans make up 79.4% of

the population, they have 41.2% of income (in the form of work, social grants, interest

and dividends). White South Africans, comprising 9.2% of the population, account for

45.3% of income. http://www.fin24.com/articles/default/display_article.aspx?

ArticleId=1518-25_2281918

What we can see from these studies is that although the policies are in place,

black women’s, marginalized people’s lived experiences based upon sexism, poverty,

and racism indicates that constitutional equality for marginalized populations is slow to

come.

Back to Cosmo: My primary resources materials and comparative and critical content
analysis of five issues of Cosmo South Africa from December 2007 through May 2008.
 Images and content added to Cosmo template were surprisingly refreshing (as
compared to the other 5 international issues I have researched), while the
advertisements are largely white women the other materials were much more
diverse representations of Asian women, black women, Indian women.
 The December 07 issue discusses poverty, abstinence, AIDS, black, condoms,
and is critical of American celebrity.
 January 2008 discusses the phenomenon of the emergent black middle class.
 The March 2008 contains features about how to identify sexual harassment in
the workplace and a story about HIV positive twins. And contains a 56-page
special devoted to getting “hitched.”
 The April 2008 issue contains an article “I was bullied for being different,” which
is an interview with Jessica Alba, which examines her experiences at the hand of
racism and sexism. As a child she was forced to eat inside the nurses station
due to physical attacks from white classmates.
 The May 2008 issue features a story “What Makes Us Different from Other
Guys?” about two transmen, Jay McNeil and Lee Gale. (119). The feature is
describes how the two transmen dealt with their “Gender Identity Disorder.” The
article features the names of local transsexual organizations, including clinics in
the area, and resources about gay and lesbian community and health centers.
The feature quotes American scholar Patrick Califia, author of Sex Changes: The
Politics of Transgenderism, who discusses the difficulty of being recognized as a
man by society, but the article also acknowledges male privilege. What might be
most radical about this piece aside from the informative information about clinics
and hormones is the information about McNeil and Gales embodiment. Both
men had top surgery only, keeping their “female” organs intact. South Africa and

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 Spain are the only two countries in the world that allow legal gender identity
change without surgery. Transsexual subjects of South Africa, who, the feature
reports, are characterized by a majority of black and Indian people of the region,
describe the pleasures and dangers of an enlarged clitoris and an enjoyment of
sexuality—a full sexual citizenship. American transsexuals are required to obtain
sex change surgery to become legal citizens of the “opposite” sex, which can
reduce sexual nerve endings causing some loss of feeling in the genitals, thus
effectively denying Americans full sexual citizenship.

Overall, Cosmo South Africa is writing a very liberal national narrative to aid the shared
the social memory of the state, but lets review those features once more with a critical
eye:
 The December 07 issue that explores black rage frames it as a disorder treatable
with anti-depressant medication.
 The March 2008 features about how to identify sexual harassment in the
workplace (carries with it its own set of assumptions about the Cosmo reader’s
place in the economy—and amnesia about being locked out of cities during
apartheid.), and the about HIV positive twins were U.S. citizens.
 Jessica Alba’s answer to her experiences at the hand of racism and sexism is to
get tough, and learn how to physically defend herself.
 Although the May 2008 issue covered important issues in the lives of transmen,
and despite the fact that the article reveals that the majority of the SA population
are people of color, Jay McNeil and Lee Gale, the fun fearless men are white
men from UK.
Further research revealed that
 Because Cosmo South Africa is an English language magazine (only
0.5% of people in SA speak English)
 6 of the last 8 cover stars were white or light skinned women.
 Femininity is expressed through heterosexuality.
 Content is driven by American celebrity.
 The content is more than 45% -50% advertising. Advertisements for
American or Brittish products with very little representations of black
women or men.

“Colonizing Femininities”

There is a disjunctive between the imagined “fun, fearless, female”—the Cosmo

brand woman—and the fact that black women in Africa suffer from triple oppression.

Cosmo South Africa should be read as an example of colonizing Western forms of

feminisms that that Mohanty identifies in Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing

Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Mohanty argues homogenous representations of women

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of color effaces individual women’s experiences in favor of a globalized or universal

womanhood, which perpetuates a “First World” versus “Third World” relationship

between the U.S. and women of color. While the gendered rhetoric in Cosmo cannot be

attached to a particular feminist, but a female, Cosmo co-opts rhetoric emerging from

the “Westernized” feminist movement elevating Western feminism above the “Third

World” woman and her cultural practices. 12 This cooptation of the language of the

feminist movement is an act which scholars, such as Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra,

label as “post-feminism.” Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra in their edited collection

Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture argue that

Postfeminist culture works in part to incorporate, assume, or naturalize

aspects of feminism; crucially, it also works to commodify feminism via

the figure of woman as empowered consumer. . . . It is also a strategy by

which other kinds of social difference are glossed over. 13

This incorporation of messages about empowered female subjects, women who are not

feminists, into popular culture creates a form of “silent visibility,” which then posits

certain forms of feminism as “extreme, difficult, and unpleasurable.” 14 Tasker and

Negra’s argue that “silent visibility” is characterized by using women essentially as

pinups, “enduring lynchpin[s] of commercial beauty culture,” which then carries with it an

“erasure of feminist politics.”15 The imagined woman represented on the pages of

12
Mohanty, 6-7, 235, 258.
13
Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (eds), Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular
Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007): 2.
14
Ibid., 4.
15
Tasker and Negra, 3.

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Cosmo South Africa thus enjoys a postfeminist sexual citizenship 16 that is not

commensurable to the experiences of women living in South Africa. AND in a

postfeminist world, this could be construed as the fallout of a failed feminist movement.

Tasker and Negra argue that post-feminism, which is “white and middle class by

default,” assumes that women now live in a “pastness of feminism” where “postfeminist

culture works in part to incorporate, assume, or naturalize aspects of feminism” through

“consumption as a strategy . . . for the production of the self.” 17 Through the discursive

and actual production and deployment of patriarchal power, Cosmo positions sexually

free black African women as “the face” of the new democratic nation-state. These

forms of “colonizing femininities” thus differ from the whiteness subsumed in post

feminism. Using gender as form of development rhetoric, like Cosmo South Africa

does, is a form of “colonizing femininities” in which the Cosmo editors purposefully

circumscribe the behavior of African women by promoting traditional American family

values, through “partnerships” to promote “sexual health.” 18 Even the transmen in the

May 2008 issue were in long term heterosexual partnerships. In the case of South

Africa, Cosmo is a colonialist effort that capitalizes on the work of the feminist arm of the

civil rights movement covertly promoting white American supremacist hegemonic

norms. Gendering women in Africa through Americanized Cosmopolitan sexuality is

16
Sexual citizenship here is meant to point to the ambiguous slippery nature of sex. Sex as a concept
biologically adheres to bodies creating the dimorphic categories of male, female, man, woman. These
sexed bodies are at once entered into a system that also genders bodies according to socially
constructed norms. Sexual citizenship is based upon the sexual practices of these normative sexed and
gendered bodies.
17
Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (eds), Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular
Culture, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); 1-2.

18
Stacy Leigh Pigg and Vincanne Adams (Eds). Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global
Perspective, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 13.

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discursive violence, a form of “colonizing femininities,” strategically executed by the

most powerful nation against Africa.

I will leave you with but one critical questions for the archive:

 What does it mean to be a “fun, fearless, female” in a nation-state where 380,000

rape cases are reported in South Africa every year? The majority of the victims
are black children below the age of 15 and forty per cent of these are young
children including toddlers. (African National Congress)
 Remember what Patricia Hill Collins said, that to be fearless is to have nothing to
lose.
 This is a scary revelation.

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