The Story of the 'lip-Market Reader Gandhi and Jayalalitha, one finds here the names of publisher Urvashi Butalia, ecologist Vandana Shiva, lawyer Flavia Agnes and Manushi editor Madhu Kishwar, women who are, in some senses, part of a 'feminist' universe that most of us in the women's movement would recognize. What, one wonders, does a commercial glossy like Femina have in common with 62 feminism? What one often finds troubling are the points of intersection between our own location as feminists and the 'feminism' of Femina. However, such a phenomenon, of a commercial women's magazine attempting to coopt feminism, is not unique to our context alone. In fact, the British critic Janice Winship, pointing to the 'feminism' of many contemporary women's magazines in the United Kingdom, says: In the absence of 'the women's movement' and clear-cut arguments on any given topic, the space is opened up for feminism becoming whatever you, the individual, make of it. This is all very well, perhaps, so long as those feminisms are not reduced to so many forms of... individualism... (1987:150). Winship suggests that while commercial women's magazines published in the United Kingdom such as Woman's Own and Cosmopolitan 'tolerate and support' some forms of feminism (1987:21), they do not support the 'combination of feminism and socialism' that alternative magazines such as Spare Rib represent (1987:21). The sub-text in the work of critics like Winship is: Do we read the intersections between feminism and the commercial women's magazine as a dangerous co-option of feminism by the mainstream or as the opening up of energizing new spaces for feminism? Posing the question in such a way means asking essentially whether this phenomenon is a good thing or a bad thing. It might be more productive to ask for instance how a magazine like Femina invokes feminism. What does its engagement with feminism mean for the women's movement? How do we respond to the fact that Femina does not take an uncompromisingly anti-feminist stance in the way that Woman's Era does, for instance? How do we theorize the new subjectivity constituted by it? As a magazine whose intended audience is the upper-middle class urban woman, Femina was among the first women's magazines in India to be in the genre of the 'leisure and life-style' magazine rather than in the genre of the advice magazine. Today, we have a host of such magazines beginning with Hema Malini's New Woman (which is priced, like Femina, at Rs. 25) and the much more expensive Verve (costing Rs.75). Woman's Era's upmarket riv^l, Femina, which first hit the stands in 1959, has a total readership of eight lakhs sixty thousand. The fortnightly, which is published from Bombay by Pradeep Guha and is part of the Bennett and Coleman's Times of India group, was edited by Vimala Patil until 1993. Since then, it has been edited by Sathya Saran. Edited by Vishwa Nath and published by Delhi Press Patra Prakashan, Woman's Era has a total readership cf eight lakhs twenty six thousand, out of which three lakhs twenty five thousand are men (National Readership Survey, 1995) .2 Most of its readers belong to the age group 25-34. The Patra Prakashan, which has cornered the women's magazine market in the Journal of Arts 6' Ideas