Masculinity and aspiring consumption: A reception study of men’s lifestyle magazines in contemporary China

Men’s lifestyle magazines came to China at the turn of the twenty-first century as a result of the commercialization and globalization of the media. Existing investigations of these publications focus on a new form of masculinity that is associated with middle-class identity and the cult of cosmopolitanism that the magazines promote. However, the consumption of men’s lifestyle magazines remains an uncharted area, leaving unanswered such important questions as who the readers of these magazines are, why they read them, and whether there is any discrepancy between their target and actual readerships. Based on two online questionnaire surveys with magazine readers, this study fills this gap by comparing textual readings of Chinese men’s lifestyle magazines with the findings of reader reception studies. It argues that, on the one hand, men’s lifestyle magazines generate fantasies about and project a ‘cosmopolitan masculinity’, particularly among China’s younger generation, that invites fruitful interpretation in light of the concepts of cultural capital and ‘technology of the self’; on the other, however, there is tension between the ideal masculinity featured in these magazines and the real-life perceptions and situations of their readers, primarily owing to a lack of purchasing power. This tension indicates the limitations of the lifestyle magazine, despite its growing power of influence, in the construction of new identities in present-day China.