Abstract
Critical feminist researchers and others have amply elucidated the perniciousness of contemporary Western beauty ideals and, particularly, the near-ubiquitous idealisations of slenderness. In this context, the advent of media images featuring “plus-size” models has been rightly heralded as a welcome challenge to this hegemony. Yet, little attention has been given to women's interpretations of these images. In this brief report, we outline a preliminary exploration of young women's views about advertising images featuring “plus-size” models in the UK. We used a discourse analytic method to analyse 35 young women's responses to a qualitative questionnaire asking for their views and feelings about three adverts featuring “plus-size” models. Our analysis suggests that, while the models were positively construed, participants also drew on distinctly conservative notions of femininity such that romanticised constructions of a “plus-sized”, traditional and domestic femininity were contrasted with a highly pejorative framing of “stick thin” women as vain, vindictive and self-obsessed. Our analysis thus indicates how representations of women focusing on body weight and shape can, even when reclaiming “fat” or “plus-size” bodies, mobilise derogatory and constricting rather than empowering constructions of femininity.
Highlights
Critical feminist scholars have thoroughly critiqued cultural idealisations of female thinness and notions of gendered beauty (Blood, 2005; Malson, 1998; Orbach, 1993)
Participants were all psychology undergraduates at a British university and were recruited through a participant pool system as part of their course credit requirements. 25 participants self-identified as White British, one as Black British, one as Black Caribbean/White European, four as Chinese, one as Romanian, one as African/Nigerian, one as Portuguese and one as White Other
An email was sent containing a link to an online survey in which participants were shown three Real Beauty advertising images1 and asked nine open-ended questions about the Real Beauty campaign and the images of women featured in the advertisements, for instance: What do you think about the women in these images? How do the images make you feel? What kinds of women are featured in the adverts? Participants’ responses varied considerably in both length and depth with some only a few words long and others engaged in discussions of one or two paragraphs
Summary
Critical feminist scholars have thoroughly critiqued cultural idealisations of female thinness and notions of gendered beauty (Blood, 2005; Malson, 1998; Orbach, 1993). Since 2004, the world-wide campaign has developed to include various studies, films and interventions as well as product promotions aimed, it says, at challenging the ‘narrow’ and ‘unrealistic’ ‘stereotypical norms of beauty’ (Unilever, 2015). It has evolved over the intervening years to include adverts featuring a greater diversity of women and challenging other cultural beauty ideals such as youth
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