READING MEN’S MAGAZINES: A STUDY ON CONTENT, IDEOLOGY and READERS OF MAGAZINES / ERKEK DERGİLERİNİ OKUMAK: DERGİLERİN İÇERİĞİ, İDEOLOJİSİ ve OKURLARI ÜZERİNE BİR DEĞERLENDİRME

The increasing global popularity of men’s magazines offers a unique opportunity to study how magazines construct and represent masculinity and men, and academic literature that use this opportunity primarily focuses on men’s magazines as a cultural text and as a cultural phenomenon. The study particularly focuses upon content, ideology and readers of the men’s magazines as a cultural text and as a cultural phenomenon. However, it presents views in relation to men’s magazines as a popular media site or type which builds and represents both masculinity, and behaviors, attitudes and pleasures peculiar to men. Also, it seeks whether they are simply mainstream tools or whether they are offering models of (new) masculinity or male identity to modern men. The objective of the study is to determine how masculinity, men, gender, male identity and heterosexuality are built and represented in men’s magazines and to present a typology of men’s magazines, focusing upon content, ideology and readers of the magazines. But, this study isn’t an individual fieldwork, it’s a literature evaluation. To this end, a literature review has been conducted on men’s magazines that have been published by the global media groups and put on the international men’s magazine market. In this context, the study examines what role men’s magazines play in modern society as a cultural text and a cultural phenomenon, and reveals how gender, male identity and heterosexuality are legitimated through sexist discourse(s) produced in men’s magazines which eschew femininity and homosexuality