‘Jackie Collins hidden behind Wuthering Heights’?: Sex, drama and overstepping boundaries in 1980s teenage girls’ magazines
The fourth lecture in the five-part Bonkbusters series, curated by Jo Parsons.
In 1983 the teenage magazine Just Seventeen ran a feature on differences between the sexes which declared that girls ‘keep a Jackie Collins book hidden behind Wuthering Heights’. This talk will examine the role of Just Seventeen and other teenage girls’ magazines in acknowledging the increasing level of interest in ‘anything with kissing on the cover’ but also on reading and other media that depicted sexual adventurousness well beyond kissing. The landscape of early-mid 80s is marked by the emergence of sometimes glamorous, always strong women in narratives across media platforms, including bestselling novels by Judith Krantz and Shirley Conran, soaps like Dallas and Dynasty, and the increasing presence of bold women as role models in the pop scene.
Jo will explore 1980s Just Seventeen’s representation of sex, success and women’s roles in an increasingly multi-media world, where prominent women, from Alexis Carrington to Madonna, were held up as daring, morally dubious, yet also inspiring role models. Just Seventeen played a critical role in framing narratives about the tempestuous lives of adult women for a teenage audience, while also maintaining its status as a trusted provider of advice on how actual teenagers should manage their personal lives.
This talk draws on the Femorabilia archive of women’s and girls’ magazines at Liverpool John Moores University.
Biography
Joanne Knowles is a senior lecturer in Media, Culture, Communication at Liverpool John Moores University. She’s written about a range of popular media including Jackie magazine, The Snowman and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. Jo is a big fan of 1980s pop culture, which allows her to mix business with pleasure.
Image held by Jo’s University’s archives
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SERIES OVERVIEW
Join us as we enter the glamourous and ruthless world of the Bonkbuster, a phenomenon in mid-late 20th century popular women’s writing, which showed us that sex and excess really does sell, and taught women they could come out on top in both bedroom and boardroom.
