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Social Memory and American Cosmopolitan Sexuality in South

African Policy and Practice


by Cierra Olivia Thomas-Williams
This project explores the global (re)production of Americanized, racialized, and
sexualized subjectivities through consumer practices, which are traceable
transnationally using, as artifacts, magazine issues of Cosmopolitan South Africa. A
discourse analysis is contextualized by an analysis of U.S. involvement with the
implementation of current African national policies dealing with women’s health and well
being in correlation to how directly or indirectly these issues are dealt with in the
magazine. Further, in order to historically contextualize the South African Cosmo
woman, this research project examines Cosmo U.S. during the period of 1948-1968,
when the U.S. was actively involved with apartheid policy. Taking into consideration
Diaspora theory and social memory, this project will consider where, exactly, South
African women fit into the Diaspora of imagined black subjectivities that make up the
global Cosmo woman.
The Cosmo woman 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. Since the early 1970s Cosmo has
been extending its empire to the far reaches of the earth picking up “developing”
economies along the way; 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. While Cosmo is creating
“imagined” subjectivities, it is literally creating and legitimizing “real” world cities (and by
extension nations) that are able to participate in this lucrative endeavor of publishing
and distributing Cosmopolitan.
It is in this way that 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. This research paper will explore globalization
theory as it relates to consumerism and the sexual practices in advertising and content
in a historically American women’s lifestyle magazine, which now boasts that it is the
world’s largest women’s magazine. This project will also survey of the kinds of cultural
production that occurs through one of the largest transnational media outlets in relation
to South African health and wellness policies.

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