Abstract
Weekly real-life magazines (RLMs) for women form a genre that has experienced sustained popularity for more than three decades and are constructed from claims to represent their readerships’ lives. Strikingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic where other magazines have witnessed a decline in sales and many closures, real-life titles have experienced continuous success. This article reads RLMs through a psychosocial lens as a symptom of an emerging social melancholia that began to form from the late 1970s in the United Kingdom. Through an analysis of Chat magazine, the article illustrates how the genre was constructed and argues that it resonates with a form of melancholia that has led to the creation of communities bonded through shared collective experiences that have found the semblance of resolution within this genre’s creation.
Weekly real-life magazines (RLMs) for women form a genre that has experienced sustained popularity for more than three decades and are constructed from claims to represent their readerships’ lives. Strikingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic where other magazines have witnessed a decline in sales and many closures, real-life titles have experienced an increase in readership (Print Power, 2020). Yet despite their evident popularity, there has been no scholarship undertaken on this genre. In what follows, I argue that RLMs are important cultural texts that implicitly elucidate the social, economic and political effects of the neoliberal worldview. I read RLMs through a psychosocial lens as a symptom of an emerging social melancholia that began to form from the late 1970s in the United Kingdom (UK), arguing that the upheavals of the period, chief among which were the highest levels of unemployment in any post-war period (Baddeley et al, 1998: 24), produced a classed and gendered form of melancholia birthed from the excess of these experiences.
This article focuses on Chat magazine because of how it established the template for the genre of RLMs during the 1990s. Indeed, it continues to describe itself as ‘the original real-life magazine’ (Sinclair, 2018). A systematic analysis of Chat’s cover stories was undertaken to analyse how the stories have altered throughout its 36-year history and how the monetisation of readers’ stories became increasingly important. Additionally, content analysis from the first six months of each editor was performed to note how each editor moulded the worldview of Chat. This was followed by a random sample and content analysis of Chat’s social media page.
Lauren Berlant (2011) claims that once traumatic experiences occur, there lies the opportunity to gauge how the ‘affective impact takes form, becomes mediated’. I argue that the affect of social losses has found its form within the creation of the magazine genre and can be read as a substitute for what was lost during this period, namely a sense of community and voice within society. Real-life stories place an emphasis on an interviewee’s experience, and are shared through first-person narratives that encourage readers to engage with the narrative. Through an analysis of Chat magazine, its editors and social media page, I illustrate how the genre was constructed and argue that it resonates with a form of melancholia that has led to the creation of communities bonded through shared collective experiences that have found the semblance of resolution (but not necessarily actual resolution) within this genre’s creation.
Methodology
A random sample of 10% of Chat issues each year was taken, from the launch in 1985 through to 2000, any real-life stories that featured were coded as being either ‘traumatic’ or ‘not traumatic’, and their themes were logged and analysed. Issues were grouped into three periods for the analysis – the 1980s, the early to mid-1990s and the mid- to late 1990s – as these mark a shift in editorial policy. The analysis found that for the 1980s subsample (25 issues), the majority of covers (14 of 25) did not contain any real-life stories. Covers typically featured a mixture of celebrity stories/interviews, competitions and advice pieces. All sampled covers for the early to mid-1990s and the mid- to late 1990s (20 and 30 issues, respectively) contained real-life stories on the cover, and the volume of these increased over the two time periods. The average number of real-life stories for the 1980s subsample was 0.44 per sampled issue, compared with 2.55 for the early to mid-1990s subsample, and reaching 4.52 for the mid-to late 1990s subsample. The nature of the stories also changed. Covers in the 1980s mostly did not feature real-life stories and when they did there was only one story that was ‘traumatic’ in nature. In comparison, the majority of the covers in the early to mid-1990s sample (11/20) only featured ‘traumatic’ stories. Among the ‘traumatic’ stories, the most prevalent themes across the whole subsample were adultery, child death and murder. Also common were family breakdown, the loss of a child through removal or abduction, the death of an adult and extreme violence.
The sample showed how covers tended to vie harder for attention in the later periods, with the use of capitals to highlight key words in cover stories emerging from 1995 and a greater use of exclamation marks. For example: ‘We watched our little boy DIE IN VAIN!’ (Chat, 1995b); ‘He RAPED me twice, then I had to face him in court!’ (Chat, 1995a); ‘I want that WHORE out of my flat!’ (Chat, 1995b); ‘Amie’s DAD wanted her DEAD!’ (Chat, 1997). The sample confirmed the link between the consolidation of the real-life genre and the increase in and emphasis on personal stories about harrowing ordeals such as murder, adultery, loss, grief and the abduction and/or death of children. Furthermore, a random sample of Chat’s social media page was taken from 2013 to 2019 to understand how the magazine communicated with its readership, and their responses were recorded.
The data demonstrate how, as the real-life genre was consolidated, traumatic experiences became the focal feature of the magazine and, relatedly, how this is linked to the increasing financial incentives that were offered as the decades progressed.
Women’s weekly magazines in the 1980s and the launch of Chat
While RLMs have not been the focus of critical reflection, the same cannot be said about mass-market women’s magazines, which have been the subject of academic research since Betty Freidan published the Feminine Mystique in 1963 (Friedan, as cited in Holmes, 2007: 510). Janice Winship (1987) documented the shift within the women’s magazine market during the 1980s through her work Inside Women’s Magazines and analysed how the change in society’s material conditions related to magazine production. Winship contended that women’s magazines were a site that ‘offered survival skills in order to collaborate with the dilemmas of femininity relevant to a specific period’ (Winship, as cited in Corbu et al, 2014: 278). During the 1980s, women’s magazines shifted their focus towards featuring emotional ‘success stories’, which emphasised relationships and family above all else (Winship, 1987). Chat was produced from within this contradictory climate and as the real-life genre became consolidated in the 1990s, ‘success’ stories were replaced with an emphasis on the personal and often traumatic experiences of the magazines’ readerships.
Chat magazine
You’ve probably already realised that CHAT is different from the usual run-of-the-mill mags. We’re really a cross between a newspaper and a magazine. Every Tuesday we’ll be giving you all the news that affects women and families, new ideas, money-saving tips and your favourite celebrities – in fact everything about anything that women today CHAT about … And all for just 18p. (Miles, 1985b)
Throughout the 1980s, Chat featured issue-led, newspaper-style articles such as ‘Don’t be fiddled out of Family Income Support (FIS)’, stating that ‘[t]he Government’s low-profile approach to benefits is short-changing thousands of families’ (Miles, 1985a). Chat created content that responded to the lives of its readership. However, the poor paper quality and layout of Chat differed from the glossy front pages of traditional women’s magazines. Winship (1987) linked this to social class, arguing that the ‘working-class are only given the opportunity to enjoy (or is it endure?) what those arbiters of taste would describe as visual disasters’.
That Chat looked ‘tacky’ and was aimed at those considered ‘downmarket’ foregrounds the implicit political agenda behind Chat’s launch. While Winship does not elaboratepon what exactly she means by ‘downmarket’, her observation has clear class resonances, with its implication that the readership was at the cheaper end of the magazine sector. Yet Chat did appropriate some tropes from traditional women’s magazines, such as a friendly subheading (‘Chat, your best friend out every Tuesday’) and its conversational tone, while discarding others like the glossy front cover. The elements included were directed towards different ends, such as news stories, that could directly affect the reader’s life. The magazine’s format and style remained consistent throughout the 1980s, but from 1990 onwards there was a notable shift in Chat’s content, reflecting the broader consolidation of the RLM genre as a whole.
Chat and the consolidation of the RLM genre
Chat magazine’s transformation exemplifies the emergence of the real-life genre of magazines. Real-life stories place an emphasis on an interviewee’s experience having occurred and are shared through first-person narratives that encourage readers to engage. Stories about traumatic experiences, rather than news articles or celebrity interviews, began to become the focal feature of the magazine and the number of these increased from 1990 onwards.
These traumatic narratives form the RLM and while social class may not be explicit within stories, it is implicitly reproduced within the broader discourse of the genre. As former Chat editor, Paul Merrill (2001–04), states about the readership, ‘they don’t need any persuasion to sell their souls and tell us their life stories for a couple of hundred quid. Two hundred quid to them is two weeks’ wage’ (Monkey, 2002). Chat’s readership is women from a lower socioeconomic background (National Readership Survey, 2017) where some will sell their experiences and appear in the magazine. Merrill makes clear that financial hardship is a key incentive for those offering their story to the magazine. He is also in no doubt about the magazine’s demographic: ‘[B]y the time they are 18, most of our readers have three different kids by three different prisoners and have affairs with their stepdads (Monkey, 2002).’ Offering no compassion, however, Merrill suggests that Chat was aware of how its readership was positioned in class and economic terms (Monkey, 2002).
For Merrill, arguably, the reader is exploitable because of her problems and vulnerability. Under his editorship, he relaunches Chat to feature ‘MORE true life’ (Chat, 2001). The repetition of traumatic themes, however, forms a worldview that carries immense power because ‘we make sense of our lives through the narratives our particular time and place have made available to us’ (Crehan, 2016). The narrative readers receive about their lives establishes a strong link between (a lack of) agency and social class while, at the same time, positioning the real-life magazine as the voice available to them. RLMs’ narratives have been filtered through preceding socioeconomic and political structures that typically limit and caricature working-class women as having ‘no taste; are physically excessive (big bottom); immoral; have no shame; are vulgar; fecund and without responsibility’ (Skeggs, 2016), suggesting a classed divide between those whose experiences are exploitable for the magazine’s profit and those outside the readership who albeit may have similar experiences but do not sell them, at least within RLMs.
The socioeconomic and political context for the development of the RLM genre
The arrival to power of the Conservative Party in 1979 initiated the economic transformation of Britain and its orientation to a neoliberal model. Margaret Thatcher was clear that this transformation would be social and cultural as much as economic, and would do nothing less than ‘change the soul’ of Britain (Harvey, 2005). Like other post-war Western economies, Britain had developed a strong welfare state grounded in the principles of social democracy. But in the late 1970s, the Conservative Party introduced neoliberal free-market policies that aimed to dismantle or restructure much of what had gone before. These policies were intended to encourage strong entrepreneurial initiative and roll back much of the existing state intervention. The ensuing economic transformation would also have social consequences as life for millions of people was dramatically altered, unemployment rose from 1.2 million in 1980 to 3.2 million by 1983 and continued to remain high until the mid-1990s (Baddeley et al, 1998). The social disempowerment experienced had the consequence that a large proportion of the traditionally working-class population were no longer able to contribute nor participate within society and led to a society where ‘so much that people depend upon, that had been fought for over generations, even the fragile and previous matter of being alive in a certain way, had been assaulted, uprooted, vicariously and irresponsibly crushed by a violently destructive force’ (Frosh, 2014).
These forces restructured society and replaced discourses of care with individualism and competition, alongside a notable reduction in social provisions. Working-class women were particularly affected because they wield less power politically and socially than their middle-class counterparts and therefore cannot exert influence easily. Their voices are frequently silenced by dominant and historical power structures concerning not only their gender, but also their class. Neoliberalism entails that ‘everything can in principle be treated as a commodity’ (Harvey, 2005). However, not everything or everyone is. While the boundaries might have become blurred since the success of talk shows that have appropriated the second wave of the feminism slogan ‘the personal is political’, this post-feminist appropriation ‘personalises the political’ (Gill, 2007), subsuming and thus restraining the political or social specificities of the experience through individualistic narratives. Alongside an increasing rich/poor divide within Britain, working-class communities similarly became fragmented through the all-encompassing dispersal of a neoliberal worldview. Chat articulates this starkly by offering lucrative financial incentives to the readership for their experiences.
The psyche and the social
Your extraordinary stories never fail to amaze me! Occasionally a mate will say to me that a story is so amazing we must have made it up – no way! I’ve always known that fact is stranger than fiction and reading Chat proves the point. Don’t forget we pay for your true-life stories, so if you want to make a few quid before Christmas, you know what to do! (Sinclair, 2005)
The rhetoric here is directed towards ‘you’, the reader who ‘knows what to do’ if they need money. If this is troubling, it is because only through selling a traumatic experience can the reader earn money; but in doing so, she also generates far more profit for the magazine than the fee she receives.
Being unemployed and a single parent makes you feel very judged with society looking down their nose at you thinking and believing this is how you planned your life to be and how you want to stay forever. Society sees you as a number, a statistic, rather than a person. It’s difficult to handle the rejection of job applications, hard to find a suitable job that fits in with your circumstances when there is so much pressure on you to get back into work it hurts when there is no support or guidance to help you through. (Chat Facebook, 2015)
If some people are denied access to ‘goods’ available to most people because of low pay, unemployment, job insecurity, like the child who is emotionally neglected or abused in the family, they are turned into outsiders with poor self-esteem and few means of participating in culturally accepted means of bolstering identity.
This in turn creates ‘widespread feelings of anxiety, insecurity, disconnection, lack of self-esteem and helplessness’ (Minsky, 1998), something echoed within Chat’s social media page, as we have seen. The discourse between traumatic narratives that feature within the magazine and the daily life experiences of the readership on social media is notable. Therefore, to what extent is the magazine responding to and/or articulating the lives of this vulnerable demographic? Clearly there is a strong awareness of the challenges faced by readers, at least since 2010, when Chat’s social media page was created. However, this does not seem to be reflected within the magazine.
A feature of neoliberal society is that it is characterised by an ‘inward’ or ‘domesticating narcissism’ (Harkins, 2009) where the emphasis on personal narratives comes to saturate the media and also contains the effects of growing social inequalities within a familial and patriarchal narrative. This domesticated narcissism is the valorisation of individual experience within popular culture that emphasises the domestic sphere as the site of containment and resolution for the far-reaching and all-pervasive social affects. Arguably, Chat magazine replaces growing social inequalities with personal experiences and contains the distress caused by those inequalities within a familial narrative. Doing so is another means by which RLMs can be seen to depoliticise and personalise what could be viewed as the effects of an increasingly fragmentary and isolating society.
Melancholia
The periods that witness the downfall of political and religious idols, periods of crisis are particularly favourable to black moods. While it is true that an unemployed worker is less suicidal than a deserted lover, melancholia does assert itself in times of crisis; it is spoken of, establishes its archaeology, generates its representations and its knowledge.
During the Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite period in the UK, losses remoulded and restructured society and, by extension, subjective experience. At the same time, those losses were not granted full expression within the public domain. Instead, repeated was the pervasive neoliberal rhetoric that silenced the effects of the structural changes through placing blame and responsibility on those communities and individuals who failed to secure employment and depended on state support and labelling them as ‘scroungers’.
It is difficult to see what has been lost, so we may rather assume that the patient cannot consciously grasp what he has lost. Indeed, this might also be the case when the loss that is the cause of the melancholia is known to the subject, when he knows who it is, but not what it is about that person that he has lost.
Melancholia then becomes the unconscious acting out of this loss and can not only illuminate the effect of loss on the subject, but also offer a framework to understand how far innumerable social losses have affected subjects within society. This is because losses of a more ideal kind not only affect just an individual but also reverberate throughout society. The attack on dependency also robbed those most vulnerable of a voice within the media. From a psychoanalytic perspective, these losses could resonate with earlier, primordial losses that simultaneously are needed for survival but also denied through the course of subject formation. As Judith Butler (2018) notes: ‘We are all, in the present, born into a condition of radical dependency.’
The care and protection offered through embedded liberalism, often malevolently referred to as the ‘nanny state’, unconsciously meet these early human needs through identification. The removal of systemic support may have been experienced not only socially but also psychically, as these ideals resonate with an infant’s earliest needs.
For Freud, identification is a means to avoid loss and mourning; but at the same time, this failure of separation leads to self-reproach. Indeed, feelings of low self-esteem are reported from the readership on social media, with comments such as: ‘I struggle constantly to think of something good. The bad stuff is easier to believe’ or ‘I find that ive [sic] been told bad things about myself so never see any good in me’ (Chat Facebook, 2014b).
Freud suggests that this is a classic symptom of melancholia: ‘[F]illed with self- reproach, he levels insults against himself and expects ostracism and punishment’ (Freud, 2005). It has clear social resonances with Chat: readers do report experiences of ostracism and punishment within society and have internalised ‘bad things’, Freud continues that the loss of identification in melancholia can activate ‘other repressed material’ (Freud, 2005) and that, through the internalisation of the lost ideal, a battle commences psychically between ‘one part of the ego and the critical agency’ (Freud, 2005). Freud sees two ways in which melancholia can be resolved: either it is played out within the unconscious or its ‘object has been abandoned as worthless’ (Freud, 2005). However, until then there is an ‘insistent talkativeness [that takes] satisfaction from self-exposure’ (Freud, 2005).
Chat exemplifies this trope of talkativeness precisely through the way in which the real-life genre has been created from interviewees who voice their personal, predominately traumatic, experiences. Melancholia is generative through the unknowability of what has been lost to the subject’s consciousness, namely the identification with a benevolent state exposing earlier repressed losses. Freud (2005) states that, in melancholia, losses may have activated ‘other repressed material’. Therefore, if an event has been prohibited from exposure (a requisite for the process of symbolisation to begin) then the psychical effects will persist within the unconscious. This repressed loss will arguably form and structure the symbolic necessity for restaging the event through whatever sublimated means are made available, behaving like ‘an open wound, drawing investment energies to itself from all sides’ (Freud, 2005). In effect, we can see Chat magazine as an important vehicle for the manifestation of an already forming social melancholia. It gave form to the ‘open wound’ needing to be spoken about, repeated and displaced each week, yet never finding (or giving) fulfilment. The readership’s expulsion from society may have led to the internalisation and redirection of that violence against their sense of self-worth, suggestive in readers’ comments. In turn, that made them vulnerable to the seductive rhetoric of RLMs.
Melancholic communities
No sense of community by me everyone’s just out for themselves I get on with one neighbour and make little chit chat hi etc with a couple but I’d rather stay out of their way as there’s always arguments and fights between 2 households and everyone tries to get involved I’d rather keep my kids inside so they’re safe and unaware how these people act. (Chat Facebook, 2017a)
Krista Smith:Crying that this is my last weekend of life with both legs. I’m having my left one amputated because of cancer next Friday. My friends haven’t called, my partner is going to work like any other time. I’ve honestly never wished more for death.Debbi Tanter:So sorry xxEmma Louise Bruice:Sending hugs xxKathryn Cairns:☹☹. Sending you a hug 😍Tania Flint:I am so sorry Krista. Have you got any family near by that could come round. I hope everything goes well for you. Take care. ❤❤Angela Rosan:Sending hugs and kisses ❤❤❤Jean Trana:Bless you, please find someone to talk to, you shouldn’t be feeling like this alone, my heart goes out to you and hope your true friends rally round when you are recovering. (Chat Facebook, 2017b)
This example is suggestive of that need to speak and be heard during periods of emotional pain. It also suggests that the expression of Krista’s upset prompts a reaction from readers and forms a sense of community, online. Through Chat magazine an identification can be forged with the readership that leads to an engagement on their social media counterpart where a community can form online, particularly for those who experience social exclusion and low self-esteem. Facebook can be a means to bolster social capital for those who experience these feelings in their offline life (Antheunis et al, 2015).
The emotions shared through Chat’s social media page suggest that readers engage with the experiences of the interviewee/user in the magazine and this promotes an engagement online with readers’ comments. This can be seen in the affection the readers offer Krista in the virtual ‘hugs’ and ‘kisses’ they send to her. There is once again an element of performativity, characteristic of melancholia, in this exchange. Krista responds from a lack in her life, and she notes this in relation to her friends, her partner and the operation to amputate one of her legs. These losses propel Krista to speak and this creates an emotive response from within readers to reply. This process arguably leads to the creation of social bonds and by extension to a sense of community.
The rhetoric of RLMs constantly asks the reader to identify with an emotional experience. For example, Chat states: ‘How would YOU feel?’ Underneath are three stories ‘My Mum, raped as she lay dying’, ‘My bloke killed by a kid’ and ‘The Murderer slapped on the wrist’ (Chat, 2003). The reader is asked to emotionally identify with the protagonists of these stories and their experiences of loss and injustice. In a similar way, Krista’s impending loss propels her to speak and this creates an urge to respond from the reader. The process arguably leads to the creation of social bonds and by extension to a sense of community. Studies have shown that when an emotional experience is conveyed it prompts social sharing and by emphasising the emotional ordeal of a story over social, economic or political realities, the RLM secures a sense of community within the readership. Emotional experiences tend to be shared more frequently as means to create bonds with others (Rimé, 2009:60) and, arguably, the interviewees’ emotional experiences create the desire to share with people and form connections.
Any bonding that this commodity may prompt needs to be considered in relation to power. This can be seen through the subject position granted to the interviewee within these magazines. The lack of objectivity through the use of first-person narration prevents the necessary grieving (socially) that could result in a more objective analysis of the situation. The magazines’ inability to allow social grieving through Chat magazine’s focus on individualism means that melancholic performances will continue to circulate endlessly within the public sphere. The lack of community and isolation caused by deindustrialisation have exposed the human need to connect. Within late capitalism this now has a price. Feelings can be captured, commodified and adopted as a psychical defence against dependency from an increasingly punitive state. Women who claim welfare have described more often than men that their experience was degrading (Dean and Taylor-Gooby, 1992). If these observations can be applied more generally, then the individual emotion featured within Chat masks the experiences of loss and the sense of social violation that many women may now feel. These women do not have a voice within mainstream media to listen to their experiences, but they can buy a magazine and also connect with other women from their own demographic online. Whereas many may have felt isolated because of neoliberal policies and the rhetoric of individualism, not every person has a story the magazine deems profitable. Chat nurtures community through the emotional engagement it encourages, which leads to social sharing online. The failure publicly to acknowledge the magnitude of these losses has meant that the grieving process necessary for closure could not begin. If there is no public acknowledgement of political and ultimately social losses, then melancholia can manifest itself and become a productive force in the creation of specific group formations (Eng, 2000). We see this dynamic in play on Chat’s social media page.
Melancholia became the socially productive force behind Chat and the real-life genre because lost identifications with an object or ideal can lead to the exposure of other repressed materials that may be more ‘constitutional’ (Freud, 2005). Through the repetition of readers’ traumatic experiences, the genre has been productive in the creation of a melancholic community. What exceeds signification through the story binds reader and interviewee through their shared historical and social experiences otherwise prohibited from exposure within the media.
The losses experienced during the 1980s were not only individual but also had political and social ramifications. The affect produced through social change is both individual and historical (Brennan, 2014) and the experiences of reader/interviewee are determined both socially and historically. How the reader incorporates or responds to the interviewee’s experience is formed from her own perception of the social world. At the same time, experiences of trauma are productive for RLMs’ target demographic not only because these subjects were most affected by the loss of previous social ideals and policies but also because the expression of that loss was prohibited within the public domain. Moreover, such were the radical nature and lasting effects of the social transformations introduced in the late 1970s and early 1980s that RLMs have sustained their popularity and commercial viability across three decades. What exceeds the interviewee’s experience of loss, and because the full extent of the loss is unknown to consciousness, it has become the productive force behind the creation of RLMs. Symbolically RLMs can be seen in many ways as the antidote to what was lost (voice, money, community), or perhaps more accurately, its simulacrum.
Conclusion
RLMs constantly repeat the traumatic and emotional ordeals of their interviewees. The women featured have been identified as belonging to lower socioeconomic categories and therefore how they are represented must be analysed in relation to dominant power structures. The social ideals and identifications lost during the 1980s were quickly replaced with an all-pervasive neoliberal rhetoric making the work of mourning harder to achieve. Melancholia became a psychical model for group formation because the extent of these losses remained unrecognised within the public sphere. As such, it became materially productive as a response to the social and political climate.
Through charting Chat’s history and the consolidation of the real-life genre, it has been argued that initially Chat did respond to its readership and produced content that spoke to their needs, for example by informing them about changes to legislation affecting social security benefits. However, from 1990 onwards, Chat began to transform and started to offer financial incentives for real-life stories, commissioning traumatic experiences that had occurred in the readers’ lives. The magazine incentivised readers by stating how much they could ‘earn’ from appearing in Chat and this was when the real-life genre was created. Through the expression of an interviewee’s story the readership are encouraged to identify with her feelings as speaking to their experiences of life within neoliberal society, suggested in the responses received on Chat’s social media page. Feelings of punishment, hatred and sadness are prevalent in these responses. Instead of these losses being mourned and eventually overcome, melancholia has become manifest as there was no public platform, let alone a language, to account for nor mourn these losses. The experiences and the loss of identification with a benevolent state that supported those who needed it resonate with Freud’s (1917) argument in Mourning and Melancholia. Freud suggests that lost identifications can expose formerly repressed materials that may be more constitutional in nature, such as dependency and care (Freud, 2005). The emphasis on traumatic experiences, constitutive of the genre, encourages social sharing as through emphasising emotional ordeals of a story over social, economic or political realities, a sense of community is forged with the readership who turn to Chat’s social media page and respond to the questions about their lives, commenting, comforting each other and sharing their experiences of life. During the COVID-19 pandemic when many magazines have struggled, the real-life genre continues to be successful, suggesting the psychical demands exceed any immediate use-value. Chat may have maintained its popularity precisely through its transformation in responding to an emerging social melancholia that continues to haunt, incessantly seeks exposure, but fails each time, thereby keeping the psychical wounds alive.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
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