The gender of the audience has always been crucial for the content, form and modes of address in weekly magazines. By using certain modes of address magazines differentiate their audience as either feminine or masculine subjects, hereby producing ideas of what gender is, or should be. The purpose of this study is to examine the production of gender in two weekly magazines, from the sixties until the nineties - one aiming at a female audience (Veckorevyn) and the other a men's magazine (Fib aktuellt) .

Modes of address are analysed by studying the magazines dominant themes, what they talk about, and how, that is the form in which this is done: Which codes are used to establish a preferred "gender reading" during the years? How are different ways of seeing constructed in the magazines according to the reader's presumed gender?

The concept of the gaze is extended to include not only different kinds of looks but also how meaning is produced and represented. The magazines´ construct certain forms of "speech", not only targeted to women or men, but also as "spoken" by women and men. With the use of these gendered voices they embody their readers: in Veckorevyn women are talking to other women and in Fib aktuellt men talk to other men. In analysing these relations the concept homosociality has been used. Homosociality is broadly understood as the bonds between persons of the same sex and is, therefore, closely connected to ideas of community and relationship. The magazines can be seen as homosocial media spaces loaded with ideas about gender and about relations between the sexes.

Veckorevyn takes on an authoritative position in relation to its audience during the years studied here, either delivered as commanding instructions or in the form of amicable counselling. A highly ambivalent view of the audience emerges, at the same time both celebrative and disapproving. On one hand femininity is celebrated as a unique essence that ties women together, on the other hand this female community is constructed through a critical scrutinizing gaze among women. Femininity is presented primarily through visual displays. Here women show other women how to look and what to wear. This visual experience increases during the years studied. Filled with instructions and appealing possibilities, images construct a form of self-mirroring for the audience. One is instructed in how to capture gazes, how to achieve the precious status of being looked at, in a way that clearly defines femininity as the ability to create desire.

Fib aktuellt celebrates its readers by displaying a world of heroic masculinity where men are portrayed as competent and fulfilled subjects. The function of femininity is to create an illusion of intimacy, where their accessibility entails that they are presented as "there" for the reader. The pleasure of looking at women merges with the pleasure of being with them where the illusion of participation follows a pornographic convention. In the visual display women offer a physical place for the spectator to enter. The modes of looking produced when men look at women take the form of a male homosocial project where viewing is a shared experience not only constructed by looking together at women, but also by looking in the same way - with a slightly excited gaze of complicity.

During the sixties and the seventies ideas about gender were constructed as a dialectic with the outside world and its debates. In the nineties the magazines themselves produce ideas of gender. The reader's gaze is turned inward towards a world of bodily desires and attractions. Vision and ways of seeing increase in importance and constitute this narcissistic journalism. In Veckorevyn the narcissistic mode of address is developed through voyeuristic detached self-representation and in Fib aktuellt through the illusive participation in a hardcore scenario.

The study reveals that both women and men are taught to direct their desiring gazes toward the same body, the feminine, but with different implications. For women the feminine body represents an educational map of how to create desire, for men it represents promises of how to achieve sexual fulfilment.

One of the major differences during the years studied is found in the expanded impact gazes have in constructing meaning and addressing readers. The production of a gendered mode of address is thus largely created and maintained in the visual process of representation by determining, through codes and conventions, who can look at whom and in what way.