The Construction of Career Women in Cleo: Critical Discourse Analysis

This study looked at the discursive construction of career women in Malaysia edition of Cleo,, a women's magazine which is also published in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Singapore. This study used the framework of Fairclough (1995, 2001), widely known as the three-dimensional framework, that analyses a text as well as the context ‘engaged’ in a dialectical relation (Fairclough, 2009). 12 articles from Cleo about career women, published between August 2007 and August 2008, were analysed. The articles titled ‘Career Coach’ addressed divergent issues on career women (e.g., workplace problems, personality problems, and acquisition of workplace skills and ethics). The analysis shows how the identities of career women in Malaysia are constructed according to the modern and globalised system of management discourses, by means of ‘empowering’ them in terms of job skills, knowledge, actions and personalities. The analysis further shows that popular media is consistently trying to shape the preferred identity(s) for women, in this case through the means of a female magazine.