Ja, som sagt, min avhandling handlar om 'Body Image in Women's Magazines'. Ämnet är ganska aktuellt. Virtanen skriver om vikt i sin krönika i dagens Aftonbladet. Fast media är ju inte "bara budbärare" Fredrik, media är även skapare av många "bud". Och vikt och modevärlden diskuterades även i ett ganska bra inslag i Aktuellt häromdan. Här är iaf min conclusion till min literature review (first draft):
To summarise: the mind can never be completely detached from the body, our bodies are interlinked with our identities, how we think other people see us and how we see other people. Women have broke free from the domestic sphere and entered the public sphere and the labour market, but not under their own conditions. Women are still expected to care about their looks and strive for perfection. This strive has been called a ‘cult’ and a ‘myth’ and it causes some women to develop eating disorders, and other women to undergo cosmetic surgery to achieve the ideal. Women’s magazines struggle with being part of the consumer culture which tries to exploit women and create ‘false needs’ for beauty products etc., but on the same time they try to encourage women to be happy with the way they are. Even if there are signs of resistance and protest against consumer society, such as in the work of Barbara Kruger where she combines images with lines such as "I shop therefore I am" (1987) and "Buy me I’ll change your life" (1984), we continue to consume the products advertised. Advertisers even ironize over these protests, in the case of the two pieces of art by Kruger described above, they literally did; for their Christmas sale in 2004 Selfridges & Co. had big signs with exacly the same lines used by Kruger. We see these signs, and read the tags on the clothes reading "This is YOU", thinking ‘how silly’, but we still buy them. Women’s magazines embody the contradiction all women struggle with: you should be happy with who you are and how you look, but you are not perfect. We all want to strive for perfection, so how then can we be happy with who we are if we do not change the way we perceive perfection? This is something I believe young women today struggle with. Recent research on the topic seems to agree that women are able, to some extent, to resist these images, but also that women can never really escape the images of perfection and cannot remain completely unaffected by them. What I feel is missing is investigations about to what extent this process is conscious. Since women are free agents and intelligent human beings, as researchers generally insist upon, then this means they are perfectly capable of understanding how the consumer society is trying to exploit them. I want to explore how young women struggle with the fact that they know they should not care about these images, that it is not rational, but that they still do. And I want to find out what implications this has on how they experience themselves and their bodies.
To summarise: the mind can never be completely detached from the body, our bodies are interlinked with our identities, how we think other people see us and how we see other people. Women have broke free from the domestic sphere and entered the public sphere and the labour market, but not under their own conditions. Women are still expected to care about their looks and strive for perfection. This strive has been called a ‘cult’ and a ‘myth’ and it causes some women to develop eating disorders, and other women to undergo cosmetic surgery to achieve the ideal. Women’s magazines struggle with being part of the consumer culture which tries to exploit women and create ‘false needs’ for beauty products etc., but on the same time they try to encourage women to be happy with the way they are. Even if there are signs of resistance and protest against consumer society, such as in the work of Barbara Kruger where she combines images with lines such as "I shop therefore I am" (1987) and "Buy me I’ll change your life" (1984), we continue to consume the products advertised. Advertisers even ironize over these protests, in the case of the two pieces of art by Kruger described above, they literally did; for their Christmas sale in 2004 Selfridges & Co. had big signs with exacly the same lines used by Kruger. We see these signs, and read the tags on the clothes reading "This is YOU", thinking ‘how silly’, but we still buy them. Women’s magazines embody the contradiction all women struggle with: you should be happy with who you are and how you look, but you are not perfect. We all want to strive for perfection, so how then can we be happy with who we are if we do not change the way we perceive perfection? This is something I believe young women today struggle with. Recent research on the topic seems to agree that women are able, to some extent, to resist these images, but also that women can never really escape the images of perfection and cannot remain completely unaffected by them. What I feel is missing is investigations about to what extent this process is conscious. Since women are free agents and intelligent human beings, as researchers generally insist upon, then this means they are perfectly capable of understanding how the consumer society is trying to exploit them. I want to explore how young women struggle with the fact that they know they should not care about these images, that it is not rational, but that they still do. And I want to find out what implications this has on how they experience themselves and their bodies.
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