1.

Cover Page
a. Student’s name, mailing address, E-mail, and phone:

Cierra Olivia Thomas-Williams

Memorial Hall West, M06
1021 East Third Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405
cthomasw@indiana.edu
812-679-9385

b. Faculty member’s name, mailing address, E-mail and phone:

Lessie Jo Frazier,
Assistant Professor of Gender Studies
Memorial Hall East 130
1021 East Third Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405
frazierl@indiana.edu
812-856-0402

c. Student’s academic department, degree program, and major:

Gender Studies Department

Doctoral Program
Gender Studies
(African American and African Diaspora Studies PhD minor)

d. Proposal title:

The Cosmopolitan Effect:

Constructing Transnational Sexual Citizenship through the
Globalization of American Womanhood

e. Funds requested (not to exceed $500.00): $500

f. A signed statement by the faculty member acknowledging their agreement

to oversee the distribution of funds awarded.

I, Dr. Lessie Jo Frazier, agree to oversee the distribution of funds awarded.

Dr. Lessie Jo Frazier (DATE)

2. Proposal Narrative
a. Background and study rationale
The generous funding from the Friends of the Kinsey Institute Collaborative
Research Grant Program will allow for further exploration of inquiries initially made in
a Spring 2007 “Transnational Feminisms and the Politics of Globalization” seminar
paper for Dr. Lessie Jo Frazier. Funding from the Friends of the Kinsey Institute will
serve two purposes. The immediate objective is to expand the findings of the seminar
paper with the goal of presenting a paper at the March 2008 National Women’s
Studies Association conference “Resisting Hegemonies: Race and Sexual Politics in
Nation, Region, Empire” in Ohio where we will solicit feedback in anticipation of the
development of a collaborative article for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society. This explorative research is also at the core of Ms. Thomas-Williams’
emergent dissertation project, which examines the production and consumption of
sexualities, desires, race and racisms through the genre of women’s magazines;
therefore, munificent funding from the Friends of the Kinsey Institute will usher both
immediate results based upon findings, and will also allow for a sustained analysis of
primary resources that are key to this emergent dissertation project.
The larger research project is a survey of the kinds of cultural production that
occur through one of the largest transnational diversified media outlets, Cosmopolitan
Magazine, which is the world’s largest globalized women’s magazine. The
Cosmopolitan began in 1905 as a fiction magazine and was the first publication of
Hearst Corporation founded in 1886 by U.S. Senator George Hearst (Hearst Corp.
website, 2007). By the mid twentieth century it was a failing endeavor, but in 1965
Helen Gurley Brown (author of Sex and the Single Girl) became the editor and turned
Cosmo into a sexy “lifestyle” magazine for young women, which to some extent now
rivals Playboy for men. Through acquisitions and mergers—characteristic of the
growth of Hearst Corporation since its beginnings—the magazine joined the
international market in the UK in 1971; today the “Fun Fearless Female,” the Cosmo
woman, is a transnationally recognized brand and a lifestyle in more than “34
languages and distributed in more than 100 countries” (Hearst Corp. Website, 2007).
The research on the globalization of sexuality and femininity carried out during
Dr. Frazier’s seminar was an important development in the research agenda of Ms.
Thomas-Williams who had only investigated “local” representations of race in
Cosmopolitan. The seminar paper explored the fact that the globalization of media
collapses local cultures into one recognizable image of womanhood by examining the
production of gendered subjectivities through the world’s largest women’s magazine.
Today, the United States is the leading spender of advertising dollars with an annual
expenditure in the multibillions representing more money spent on the industry of
advertising than every other country in the world combined (Berger, 2000: 81).
Magazines are a primary means of creating and targeting consumer groups whose
“lifestyles” are “routinized” through the dissemination of ideas and advertising into
the mass market. Because America is at the forefront of the ad industry spending the
most money on it globally the simulation of reality into advertising via magazines
must be investigated. The “logical” next step, therefore, was for Ms. Thomas-Williams
to broaden her examinations of Cosmo beyond the U.S. borders to include the politics
and production of transnational womanhood.
In the spring 2007 seminar Ms. Thomas-Williams examined four single
transnational editions of Cosmo: French, British, American, and Russian (international
issues acquired through ebay.com). While Ms. Thomas-Williams’ prior research has
indicated that “whiteness” is constructed against the “racialized” bodies of African
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American women in Cosmo U.S., transnational issues of Cosmo construct womanhood
based upon hyper sexuality rather than race. The bodies represented in each of the
four editions of Cosmo are sexualized through imagery and text that depicts men and
women in romantic or sexualized poses and includes articles and quizzes on how to
maintain (hetero)sexual relationships. Heterosexuality, then, is naturalized and
reinforced through what prominent gender theorist Judith Butler calls the
“heterosexual matrix”: this regulatory scheme, or matrix, instantiates a “compulsory
and naturalized heterosexuality [that] requires and regulates gender as a binary
relation” differentiating masculinity from femininity, where ideas about the
appropriateness of gendered behavior are, then, reified “through the practices of
heterosexual desire” (1990, 23). Each of the magazines regulates gendered behavior
in expected ways, but surprisingly international issues of Cosmo politicize queer desire
in interesting and disjunctive ways.
Michele Foucault argues that there is a specific way in which we talk about and
manage sex through science, policy, clinical medicine, and photos; these management
systems can be considered disciplinary mechanisms, which operate in transnational
women’s magazines through the production of gendered bodies “as a mode of
specification of individuals” (1978: 47). Thus, while Cosmo encourages heterosexual
sex—“How Long Should You Wait to Sleep With a Guy? Finally, a Straight Answer”
(Cosmo U.S. March 2007)—it subjugates hyper sexuality by using “real” stories about
women who have fallen in love with homosexual men: creating the “perfect”
unrequited (safe) desire. For example, Cosmo France September 2000 issue
contained a four page article entitled “Elles aiment les homes qui aiment les homes,”
or “women who love men who love men,” which claims that American films introduced
female desire for “feminine” or “sensitive” man into French popular culture; the article
then discusses French parity—bureaucratically enforced gender equity in the French
government—and moves into the deeply felt frustration of French women who fall in
love with gay men.
The curious connection of the origins of male homosexual behavior in France
through American cinema is an interesting tactic that creates a comfortable distance
from the implication that homosexuality existed in France before the infiltration of
American cinema. This phenomenon also occurs in the October 2007 Cosmo en
Espanol (distributed to all Spanish speaking countries), which clearly outlines a crisis
in masculinity—“Sera gay tu hombre?” discusses how to tell if “your man is gay” and
what to do if he is. Thus, we can argue that Cosmo is authorizing hyper sexuality on
one hand, while working to undermining that same message by reporting that the
“real” women who read Cosmo desire gay men (and thus are really non sexual). This
phenomenon (the production of heterosexual bodies and desire) is evident in the
performance of “acceptable” hyper sexual identity for Cosmo women, which is then
quelled through Lacanian desire: a desire which always remains “other.” Access to a
subscription to international issues of Cosmo will allow us to determine whether these
tensions are sustained between feminine hyper sexuality on the one hand and the
“perfect” Lacanian desire for homosexual men on the other.
Based upon Ms. Thomas-Williams’ content and discourse analysis of four
international editions of Cosmo in spring 2007, it is evident that there is an interesting
disarticulation between what is actually going on in the U.S. versus its global
reputation as “the leader” in all things. Cosmopolitan U.S. is behind the times
sexually speaking in that it avoids discussing homosexuality, abortion, and sexually
transmitted diseases, while its international counterparts engage openly with these
issues. All international issues of Cosmo are produced by the same American
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corporation, Hearst Magazines, International, however. Thus an investigation into
these numerous (more than were mentioned here) disarticulations will yield
interesting results worthy of further examination.
Furthermore, this project is unique in that it seeks to expand and politicize what
is currently considered as “evidence” for research through creatively utilizing primary
resources that may otherwise not be considered useful or even scholarly. Cosmo is
important, though, because the Cosmo woman has a sexual agency not available to
“just any” woman. The ways in which this womanhood is actively constructed and
perceived in newly developing democratic nations, such as South Africa, India, Russia,
Portugal and Puerto Rico (although it is a U.S. territory) to name a few, are drastically
different from the womanhood shaped by U.S. development policies in these same
regions. These development projects circumscribe the sexual behavior of Cosmo’s
global readership; therefore, it is important to examine the ways in which sexual
agency is framed through advertising and other imagery and through the text of the
magazine itself. Access to transnational issues of Cosmo is, thus, tantamount to this
research.
While Cosmo is creating “imagined” subjectivities, it is literally creating and
legitimizing “real” world cities and by extension (democratically sexual) nations that
are able to participate in this lucrative endeavor of publishing and distributing
Cosmopolitan. Cosmo has become a globalized brand and a lifestyle for metropolitan
women whose ideas, ideals, and identities circulate in global cities making the Cosmo
woman a citizen of the world. Cosmo participates in the globalization of desire
deployed through hyper-femininity earning certain women citizenship in the world’s
marketplace based upon their hyper-(hetero)sexuality and consumerism. Ultimately
this research seeks to further explore contemporary globalized representations of
nationalized and sexualized subjectivities through consumer practices, which are
traceable transnationally using, as artifacts, international magazine issues of
Cosmopolitan.
b. Research Questions requiring access to international issues of Cosmo:
Gender/Sexuality/Race
• How are the bodies of “different” women depicted cross culturally?
• How is sexuality constructed for women? Is it a moral decision or a choice?
• How is sexuality constructed for men? (In the spring 2007 seminar in a review
of issues of Cosmo France and Cosmo Espanola, I found that male
homosexuality was openly discussed in relation to female sexual attraction to
these “effeminate” male subjectivities.)
• How does gender/sexuality get deployed through imagery?
• How is desire expressed through transnational branded urban-style
womanhood?
• In what ways does desire become "Americanized"/remain localized?
• How is “sexuality,” "whiteness" or "race" marketed in transnational issues of
Cosmo? I am especially interested in investigating the Cosmo woman from the
U.S. colony of Puerto Rico where the U.S. engaged directly in a eugenics
movement on the bodies of underprivileged P.R. women not long ago.
• How are racial lines demarcated in Cosmo South Africa?
• In what ways can Cosmo woman from insert county here practice her “fun,
fearless female” self through her sexuality?
Economics/Citizenship

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 • What is the imperial/colonial relationship of America to the other countries in
the Cosmo 58 country, 100 language line up?
• In what ways is the global Cosmo woman "political"? (Is it through products?
I.e., giving daughter the HPV vaccination.
• What does the image of the Cosmo woman say about women as citizens in the
publication country?
• What is the costs to produce the magazine in relation to the countries GNP?
• Which cities are these marketed in globally (I have US locales)?
• What is the competition? Has HMI (Hearst Magazines International) bought out
the competition?
Individual Consumers
• What are women doing with Cosmo?
• What do they take/leave from the magazine?
• What sexual advice do they take from Cosmo?
c. Description of proposed participants
At this time, we will perform a critical comparison of the content in transnational
issues of Cosmo magazine, therefore, the only participant in the research at this stage
are the researchers. We will look for general commonalities in the international issues
of Cosmo, such as advice and articles about sexuality, but will also note differences in
the ways in which women are presented visually. For her dissertation research in the
future, Ms. Thomas-Williams will extend this research to human subjects.
d. Description of study design and research methods
This research project utilizes archival research of primary resources materials
and sociological methods (comparative and content analysis and eventually
interviews) to access then discuss findings. The primary resource considered are
archived issues of Cosmopolitan U.S. and acquired international issues of
Cosmopolitan. Using the insights of Media Studies theorist Andre Bazin in the
“Ontology of the Photographic Image,” this research aims to examine the
“preservation of life by the representation of life[style]” in the globally disseminated
imagery found in Cosmopolitan magazine. Using statistical analysis software acquired
through this grant, we will use the methodology of content analysis similar to the work
of Collins and Lutz (1997: 209) in “The Color of Sex: Postwar Photographic Histories of
Race and Gender in National Geographic Magazine.” The imagery and content of the
magazines will be tracked systematically using SPSS software assuring the
duplicability of the study and the generalizability of the knowledge gleaned from the
study.
e. Description of study measures
The study will produce a general production profile for the premier transnational
women’s magazine, which will allow for a cross cultural analysis of the production of
the globalised representation of sexualized womanhood. This grant will allow for
access to a one year license for use of SPSS (statistical software available free through
IUware). This software helps to makes data retrieval from the content analysis
systematic and statistical. This software is ideal for recording data from content and
discourse analyses such as the one proposed herein.
f. Plans for data analyses
Data on the content of international issues of Cosmo will be recorded using the
SRSS software in a general, systematic, and duplicable manner. The variables for the
imagery will include gender, sexuality, age, and race, but will also include the
relationship of the images to each other (layout) and the spatial haptics of the bodies

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within the images. Access to this program and the use of statistical methods as a
“language” in general is integral to Ms. Thomas-Williams’ doctoral program in gender
studies.
g. Plans for dissemination:
We will submit an abstract to the National Women’s Studies Association 30th
Annual conference in Cincinnati, Ohio in March 2008. This year’s theme is “Resisting
Hegemonies: Race and Sexual Politics in Nation, Region, Empire.” Ms. Thomas-
Williams’ will also use the magazine findings in relation to racial subjectivities for a
seminar project in a yearlong AAADS (African and African American Diaspora) course.
She has submitted an abstract to the University of Illinois at Chicago, April 2008,
whose theme is “Race, Sex, Power: New Movements in Black and Latina/o Sexualities.”
(The selection committee will inform her whether the proposal was accepted by
December 2007). Additionally, we will use the research gleaned from this project to
co-author an article for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
h. Proposed budget: $500 (details below)
One-year subscriptions to the following transnational editions of Cosmopolitan
ordered from Magazineline.com and Amazon.com. (These are available online for
shipping to the US.)
$19.00 Cosmopolitan En Espanol Magazine (Puerto Rico)
$131.25 Cosmopolitan South Africa Magazine (South Africa)
$133.74 Cosmopolitan UK Edition Magazine (British/UK)
Pursuant to a conversation with Carrie Donavan, the Gender Studies Librarian,
the library is not interested in adding international editions of Cosmopolitan to their
holdings, although the holdings do contain archival issues of Cosmo U.S. Back issues
of transnational versions of the magazine are not available locally and subscriptions to
transnational versions of the magazine are apparently only available in the countries
that publish them or online (if the websites can be located) and are prohibitively
costly. These magazines in particular are important due to their intrinsic value to the
emergent dissertation project with will specifically address racialized subjectivities.
Representations of African American womanhood take on a special meaning in the
geographical areas which define the African and African American Diaspora (including
South Africa, UK, Puerto Rico, and the U.S.) due to the historic events of imperialism
and colonialism. Having access to international issues of Cosmo is necessary in order
to investigate the representation of blackness and womanhood in these historically
significant geographic regions: South Africa, UK, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. (U.S.
available at the Wells Library).

$35 One years licensing fee for SPSS (statistical software available through IUware).
SPSS performs data manipulation and various statistical analyses such as
ANOVA, factor analysis, and linear regression. It is ideal for content
analysis such as these, which trace details in imagery.
$49 4GB USB Flashdrive by SanDisk (this research involves the collection of visual
data, which can be stored and easily transported with a large capacity
USM flashdrive) available through amazon.com.
$131 Partial travel and registration funds to National Women’s Studies Association
(NWSA) conference in Ohio:
The National Women’s Studies Association March 2008 “Resisting
Hegemonies: Race and Sexual Politics in Nation, Region, Empire”
conference in Ohio ( $50 registration, $40 NWSA membership, $ 124 for
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 gas mileage paid at State of Indiana institutional rate of $0.40 per mile @
310 miles, and food ); and (funding for University of Illinois at Chicago
April 2008 “Race, Sex, Power: New Movements in Black and Latina/o
Sexualities” conference will come from the Gender Studies Department).
i. Statement regarding Institutional Review Board approval. If approval is
necessary, please indicate whether it has been obtained or describe your
timeline for securing such approval.
At this stage in the research we are engaging with archival materials, and thus
do not need IRB approval. Although, Ms. Thomas-Williams has passed the Indiana
University Protection of Human Research Participants Certification Test and is
designing a research plan to submit to the IRB for approval so that she may extend
the research beyond visual artifacts to include human subjects. By the end of the
Spring semester 2008, Ms. Thomas-Williams should have IRB approval for this project
so that she can begin phone interviews with Hearst International corporate employees
in Summer and Fall 2009. She will be in a position to take her qualifying exams by
spring 2010 with hopes for international travel in the summer of 2010 for dissertation
research on desire and consumption patterns in the Diaspora.
3. Biographical Sketches
a. Provide a brief (one-paragraph) overview of the faculty member’s
qualifications and current
research agenda.
Professor Lessie Jo Frazier’s work focuses on political culture in the Americas. She is
particularly interested in the intersection of cultural studies theories of power,
subjectivity, and ideology with questions of political economy. She has published on
gender, nation-state formation, human rights, mental health policies, memory,
poetics, activism, and feminist ethnography. She is currently writing a book on gender,
sexuality, and political culture in Chile; a co-edited volume on gender and sexuality in
a global 1968; as well as articles on Cold War POWs and masculinity (using film and
oral history), and amnesia as a paradoxical form of agency (using queer theory).
Professor Frazier’s teaching includes courses on transnational feminisms; gender, race
and the erotics of imperialism; gender and sexuality in Latin America; theories of
gender and sexuality; feminist perspectives on warfare and militarism; methodology;
and gender and human rights.
b. Provide a brief (one paragraph) overview of the student’s academic and
professional background and a summary of research experiences and
interests.
Cierra Olivia Thomas-Williams is in her second year of the Gender Studies doctoral
program at Indiana University. Her emphasis is in Cultural Representations and Media
Practices and she is pursuing a PhD minor in African American and African Diaspora
studies. Very broadly, her research interests include the representation of women of
color and sexuality in popular print media. She has published an article through the
Association of American Colleges and Universities that traces feminist activism and its
effects on GLBTQ student leadership and is the Spring 2008 associate instructor for
G201 Sexual Politics.
Not included in page count.

Resources:
Berger, A. A. Ads, Fad, and Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Impact on American
Culture. Cumnor Hill, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2000.

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Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, 1990.
Cosmopolitan, American Edition, March 2007.
Cosmopolitan, British Edition, August 2000.
Cosmopolitan, En Espanol Edition, October 2007.
Cosmopolitan, French Edition, September 2000.
Cosmopolitan, Russian Edition, May 2007.
Hearst Corporate Site, 2007. Accessed at the world wide web on April 13, 2007 at:
http://www.hearstcorp.com/magazines/property/mag_prop_cosmo.html
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York:
Vintage Books, 1978.
Khanna, Ranjana (2003). Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Lutz, Catherine A. and Collins, Jane L. “The Color of Sex: Postwar Photographic
Histories of Race and Gender in National Geographic Magazine,” in Lancaster,
Roger N. and Leonardo Mcaela di (eds) The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture,
History, Political Economy. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Peiss, Kathy. “American Women and the Making of the Modern Consumer Culture,”
The Journal for MultiMedia History, Volume 1 Number 1, Fall 1998, (1998 March
26) [10 pages, 33 paragraphs], Retrieved February 27, 2007 from the World
Wide Web :http://www.albany.edu/jmmmh/vol1no1/press-text.html: 204.
PEFAR, The United States President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (2007). Accessed
on the World Wide Web on March 17, 2007: http://www.pepfar.gov/

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