Is #Woke a Lifestyle? Examining “Woke Culture” in Three Magazines, 2015–2020

The African American Language word “woke,” which means being awake to social injustices, is an important part of the discourse surrounding the evolving Movement for Black Lives. While the concept has a long history in the Black freedom struggle, its recent uses have been politicized and at times polarized. Between 2015 and 2020, a “woke” vocabulary emerged in lifestyle magazines that typically avoid politically charged topics and discourses. Informed by Raymond Williams’s keywords on culture and society, my analysis reveals that a “woke culture” evolves from a corpus defined by “a shared body of words and meanings.” Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model and critical discourse analysis illustrate how the publishers, editors, and writers of three magazines invoke the concept of “woke” in a commodified cultural product.