Malay Muslim religious ideology: Representations of gendered beauty ideals in women’s magazines

Juliana French, Christina Kwai Choi Lee, Jan Brace-Govan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Responding to Drenten and McManus (2016) call on the lack of scholarship on the intersections of macromarketing and religion, this article uses magazines to demonstrate how beauty discourses reinforce or contest religious ideology in Malaysia. We draw from institutional logics to show how magazine discourses present macrolevel belief systems that can both shape and constrain the micro level behaviour of women. We identify three dialectical tensions of gendered beauty ideals as firstly both something that is embraced and something that is imposed; secondly it is collectively and individually displayed in fashion and thirdly offers contradictory discourses over blending-in versus standing-out in physical appearance. This study supplements the very limited literature on how the media as an institutional and social structure injects religious ideology to gendered representations of beauty ideals.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)459-474
Number of pages16
JournalJournal of Macromarketing
Volume40
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2020

Keywords

  • beauty discourses
  • gendered beauty ideals
  • Malaysia
  • religious ideology
  • women’s magazines

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