Mass Media Images Research Articles

Obesity and Body Ideals in the Media: Health and Fitness Practices of Young African-American Women

This study explores the female body ideal and its implications for health and fitness practices in African-American culture. Employing Patricia Hill Collins's (1986) notion of the “outsider-within,” we analyze a focus group discussion on women's body ideals, exercise, and fitness. Our group comprises 9 young, college-educated African-American women who reject the White-American ideal of thinness, yet recognize that the “thick” (full-figured) African-American ideal is problematic, especially when considered in the context of the dominant culture's biomedical model. Prompted by their examination of popular mass media images selected by the coauthors, the women discursively negotiate between two contrasting cultural standards: an unrealistically slender body ideal and a heavier body weight and shape that may lend itself to the kinds of diseases associated with obesity.

Parallel Discourses and “Appropriate” Bodies: Media Constructions of Anorexia and Obesity in the Cases of Tracey Gold and Carnie Wilson

Mass media images of gender, beauty, and women have been at the heart of many feminist arguments about the need for change in our understanding of gender and the role it plays in our day-to-day existence. The role of a body, much like the role of a woman, is also negotiated between the pages and airwaves of a popular culture that precariously favors particular excessive behaviors and norms. A textual analysis of the popular press discourse surrounding two bodies, prominently defined in popular culture, demonstrates specific rhetorical strategies at work in the construction of the “appropriate” cultural body. This article explores how these two bodies are positioned at the border of cultural intelligibility and how these bodies, acting as discourse themselves, speak to culture and reify their positions on the margins.

Beauty and society.

Beauty is an abstract construct. We all have our own ideas about what is and is not beautiful--a particular song or painting, a man or woman. Accurately describing what exactly "it" is that makes the song, painting or person beautiful, however, is a daunting task. In this article, we attempt to make the case that beauty and physical attractiveness is a serious matter. We begin with a discussion of the role of beauty in evolutionary theory. Next, we turn to theories of the physiology of beauty, which focus on physical characteristics such as pathogen resistance, averageness, physical symmetry, body ratios, and youthfulness. We then describe changes in the societal standards of beauty through a discussion of the relatively recent history of mass media images of beauty. We then use the psychological construct of body image to begin to understand the nature of beauty on an individual level. The article concludes with a discussion of the things that we do to make ourselves more beautiful.

The Wages of Syncretism: Folkloric New Russians and Post–Soviet Popular Culture

The Wages of Syncretism: Folkloric New Russians and Post–Soviet Popular Culture

Is It Me or My Brain? Depression and Neuroscientific Facts

This article considers the roles played by brain images (e.g., from PET scans) in mass media as experienced by people suffering from mental illness, and as used by scientists and activist groups in demonstrating a biological basis for mental illness. Examining the rhetorical presentation of images in magazines and books, the article describes the persuasive power that brain images have in altering the understanding people have of their own body—their “objective self.” Analyzing first-person accounts of encounters with brain images, it argues that people come to understand themselves as having neurotransmitter imbalances that are the cause of their illnesses via received facts and images of the brain, but that this understanding is incomplete and in tension with the sense that they are their brain. The article concludes by querying the emergence of a “pharmaceutical self,” in which one experiences one's brain as if on drugs, as a new form of objective self-fashioning.

The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media

From the Gibson Girl to the flapper, from the vamp to the New Woman, Carolyn Kitch traces mass media images of women to their historical roots on magazine covers, unveiling the origins of gender stereotypes in early-20th-century American culture. Kitch examines the years from 1895 to 1930 as a time when the first wave of feminism intersected with the rise of new technologies and media for the reproduction and dissemination of visual images. Access to suffrage, higher education, the professions, and contraception broadened women's opportunities, but the images found on magazine covers emphasized the role of women as consumers: suffrage was reduced to spending, sexuality to sexiness, and a collective women's movement to individual choices of personal style. In the 1920s, Kitch argues, the political prominence of the New Woman dissipated, but her visual image pervaded print media. With 75 photographs of cover art by the era's most popular illustrators, The Girl on the Magazine Cover shows how these images created a visual vocabulary for understanding femininity and masculinity, as well as class status. Through this iconic process, magazines helped set cultural norms for women, for men and for what it meant to be an American, Kitch contends.

The effect of experimental presentation of thin media images on body satisfaction: a meta-analytic review.

The effect of experimental manipulations of the thin beauty ideal, as portrayed in the mass media, on female body image was evaluated using meta-analysis. Data from 25 studies (43 effect sizes) were used to examine the main effect of mass media images of the slender ideal, as well as the moderating effects of pre-existing body image problems, the age of the participants, the number of stimulus presentations, and the type of research design. Body image was significantly more negative after viewing thin media images than after viewing images of either average size models, plus size models, or inanimate objects. This effect was stronger for between-subjects designs, participants less than 19 years of age, and for participants who are vulnerable to activation of a thinness schema. Results support the sociocultural perspective that mass media promulgate a slender ideal that elicits body dissatisfaction. Implications for prevention and research on social comparison processes are considered.

Utopian Enterprise: Articulating the Meanings ofStar Trek's Culture of Consumption : Figure 1

In this article, I examine the cultural and subcultural construction of consumption meanings and practices as they are negotiated from mass media images and objects. Field notes and artifacts from 20 months of fieldwork at Star Trek fan clubs, at conventions, and in Internet groups, and 67 interviews with Star Trek fans are used as data. Star Trek's subculture of consumption is found to be constructed as a powerful utopian refuge. Stigma, social situation, and the need for legitimacy shape the diverse subcultures' consumption meanings and practices. Legitimizing articulations of Star Trek as a religion or myth underscore fans' heavy investment of self in the text. These sacralizing articulations are used to distance the text from its superficial status as a commercial product. The findings emphasize and describe how consumption often fulfills the contemporary hunger for a conceptual space in which to construct a sense of self and what matters in life. They also reveal broader cultural tensions between the affective investments people make in consumption objects and the encroachment of commercialization.

Inclusion of Disability Issues in News Reporting Textbooks

Although mass media images hardly reflect this reality, one in six Americans - about 50 million people - have some type of disability. Every year, about 750,000 Americans join the ranks of the disabled (often through accidents), making disability the open door (Edwards, 1992). People with disabilities are a significant minority group that fits any definition of diversity or multiculturalism, especially in light of their status as a group (such as racial minorities or gays and lesbians) that resides outside the dominant mainstream culture (Johnson, 1993; Dickson, 1994). The numbers of those directly affected by how this minority group fares is significant-nearly 120 million (Edwards, 1992). Yet, journalists have generally resisted considering people with disabilities as a minority group, ignoring routinely covered in regard to other groups, such as those on employment, housing, transportation, and discrimination. In many ways, journalists have not afforded people with disabilities nearly the same amount of attention that they have for other minorities; Edwards (1992) reports that even after announcement of the ADA in 1990, less than one percent of in major daily newspapers covered disability issues. One journalist reported that he was told by his editor to hold disability-related to one a year (Johnson, 1993). This sparse coverage of people with disabilities and disability issues allows the worst stereotypes to persist (Strothers, 1992). Those stereotypes have generally allowed disabled individuals to be framed as either dangerous or pathetic; disabled people are either tragic cases constantly bemoaning their fate, or courageous supercrips, somehow overcoming their natural condition (Yoshida, Wasilewski, & Friedman, 1990; Johnson, 1993). These are framed in terms of tragedy, charity, pity, or struggle and accomplishment (Biklen, 1987). Cripple at either end of the spectrum have been the primary glimpse media consumers have gotten of those with disabilities. Critics argue that these types of great human interest stories are nothing more than backhanded slaps at people with disabilities (Johnson, 1993). Overall, coverage of the disabled community has been deemed negative (Antrim, 1997; Yoshida, 1990). One example of the media's reliance on stereotypical images is coverage of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Reporters used the gee-whiz tone common to articles on issues that aren't clearly understood ... The lead of [a] Los Angeles Times article came straight from the How Amazing! school of disability reporting (Johnson, 1993, p. 107). These types of depictions, based on lack of sensitivity by reporters, have the power to influence the way media consumers think about and treat individuals with disabilities, potentially promoting intolerance (Antrim, 1997; Yoshida, 1990; Creno, 1992; Starck, 1990). Ultimately, it could be argued that these depictions affect development of public policy, the allocation of social resources and the common understanding of civil rights (Berube, 1997). Conversely, inclusive coverage and the routinization of coverage can alert the public and policymakers of the needs and contributions of people with disabilities; it can also promote a more inclusive social environment (Manning-- Miller, 1993). Journalists - and journalism students - need to be better informed and sensitized about how to report on people with disabilities and disability issues (Martindale, 1993). Without the same type of awareness that journalists have developed in regard to coverage of other minority groups, their own personal misunderstandings and prejudice will continue to bias coverage of the disabled community (Starck, 1990; Stocking & Gross, 1989). Journalism educators have made efforts to help future reporters and editors become more aware of the issues surrounding coverage of the disability community (Burd, 1988; Dickson, 1994). …

Teenage sexuality and media practice: Factoring in the influences of family, friends, and school

This multi‐method, qualitative study addresses the question: How do mass media images and messages about love, sex and relationships interact with what teens learn about sexuality at home, in school, and from their friends? Using the Adolescents’ Media Practice Model introduced by Steele & Brown (1995) as a starting point, this study seeks to extend our understanding of the media's role in shaping adolescents’ values, attitudes, and beliefs about sex by factoring in some of the contexts that intersect with media practice. Data generated through focus groups, media journals, room tours, and in‐depth interviews with middle school and high school teens suggest that ethnicity, gender, class status, and developmental stage influence media practices in important ways. Identity—teens’ sense of themselves and others—affects the media they like best, how they interact with that media, and how they apply media matter in their everyday lives.

A Case for an Art Education of Everyday Aesthetic Experiences

According to Featherstone (1991), the aestheticization of everyday life refers to the rapid flow of signs and images which saturate the fabric of everyday life in contemporary society (p. 67). A concern for everyday aesthetics arises from the societal turn towards the cultural and the simultaneous turn of the cultural towards the visual. These simultaneous shifts lie at the heart of cultural postmodernism (Harvey, 1989; Jencks, 1995). Postmodern theory draws attention to the idea that we live in society where the once separate discourses of money making and aesthetic experience constantly implode as part of our normal daily life (Lash & Urry, 1994). Characteristic sites of everyday aesthetics include environments such as theme parks, shopping malls, city streetscapes, and tourist attractions, as well as mass media images especially on television and now on computer screens. The focus of the aesthetics of the everyday are objects, events, places, and experiences that for most of us, children and adults alike, form part of ordinary, daily life. They are neither especially refined, nor are they exotic in the sense that they belong to someone else's culture. In high-tech societies, despite unequal access, at least some sites of everyday aesthetics are part of most people's daily experience. They are mainstream. Everyday aesthetic experience has been variously described. This partly reflects the very different sites of everyday culture and partly the diverse attitudes towards their experience. Condemned by some for being superficial and self-referential (Baudrillard, 1987; Jameson, 1991), it is applauded by others for offering both immense pleasure and rich resources for the construction of identity (Johnson, 1997; Lemke, 1998). Drawing especially on theme parks, shopping malls and television, Featherstone (1991) writes of the sense of intoxication, sensory overload, disorientation, and the intensities of experience to be had where there is playful mixing up of codes and numerous unchained signifiers. He describes everyday aesthetic experience as calculated hedonism (p. 59). McRobbie (1994) compares the single, richly coded image to one's experience of busy everyday life where a slow, even languid examination is out of tempo with the times (p. 13). The aesthetics of the everyday deflect attention away from the singular scrutinizing gaze ... and asks that this be replaced by multiplicity of fragmented, and frequently interrupted looks (p. 13). Everyday aesthetics involves immediacy, participation, and desire (Lash & Urry, 1994). Where fine art aesthetics stresses the cultivation of distance, everyday aesthetics emphasizes involvement. Where the former delays gratification and cultivates refinement, immersion in dreamlike states and reveling in immediate pleasure characterize the latter. The purpose of this paper is to make case for incorporating everyday cultural sites into art education. The case is twofold. First, I argue that ordinary, everyday aesthetic experiences are more significant than experiences of high art in forming and informing one's identity and view of the world beyond personal experience. Secondly, I argue that there exists powerful synergy of technological, economic, and social dynamics driving the proliferation of everyday aesthetic experiences and, moreover, the significance of this synergy to cultural life is set to increase. I make the assumption that art education cannot ignore these driving dynamics because they are delivering revolution in cultural experience that sidelines, even further than today, the role of the fine arts in the lives of our students. They are inaugurating, even now, conditions that make marginal an art education that takes its reason for being the visual arts as defined by the artworld. The Ascendancy of the Everyday over the Special Fine art is said to focus feelings, beliefs and values, in particularly intense, concise and multilayered way (Dobbs, 1998). …

Talking back: images of Jewish women in American popular culture

Fourteen provocative essays challenge traditional notions of Jewish female identity presented in mass media images, films, narrative, and stories by portraying the American Jewish woman not only as subject but as shaper of American popular culture. Sometimes internalizing negative presentations but more often talking back to them, Jewish women created alternative images that became tools of rebellion, subverting and dismantling such stereotypes as the Yiddishe Mama, the Jewish Mother, and the Jewish American Princess. Over the course of the century -- and particularly as a consequence of feminism -- Jewish female novelists, screenwriters, dramatists, entertainers, and grass-roots feminists were able to create new possibilities for the expression of Jewish women's voices.

The True Witness of a False Event: Photography and Wright Morris’s Fiction of the 1950s

“T h e t r u e w it n e s s o f a f a l s e EVENT” : P h o t o g r a p h y a n d Wr ig h t Mo r r i s ’s F ic t io n o f t h e 1950s L a u r a B a r r e t t The photographer’s power lies in his ability to re-create his subject in terms of its basic reality, and present this re­ creation in such a form that the spectator feels that he is seeing not just a symbol for the object, but the thing itself revealed for the first time. Guided by the photographer’s selective understanding, the penetrating power of the camera-eye can be used to produce a heightened sense of reality— a kind of super realism that reveals the vital essences of things. — Edward Weston, “W hat Is Photographic Beauty?” In 1939, photographer Edward Weston envisioned a future in which images would surpass reality by capturing its essence rather than its surface. Instead of Weston’s superrealism, however, we live in a world of hyperreality, defined by Jean Baudrillard as “the disappear­ ance of objects in their very representations” (45). Postmodernists argue that a profusion of images precludes our ability to experience reality directly: the sign has replaced the referent, and the model has supplanted the real. Wright Morris, who has straddled the eras of modernism and postmodernism, evoked by the Weston and Baudrillard quotations, has long recognized that who we are and what we see are predetermined by previous images.1 Indeed, describing his emotional response to a funeral procession that he witnessed in Mexico in 1958, Morris writes: At the somber beat of the drums the procession ap­ proached the farther corner, where, in the shadow of a build­ ing, a truck had parked, the platform crowded with a film crew and whirring cameras. The director, wearing a beret, shouted at the mourners through a megaphone. This was a funeral, not W A L 3 3 (1 ) SPRING 1 9 9 8 at the mourners through a megaphone. This was a funeral, not a fiesta, did they understand?. . . In my role as a gullible tourist, I had been the true witness of a false event. (Time Pieces 3) Ironically, a respectful Morris refrained from photographing the ostensibly sorrowful occasion only to discover that the event existed merely for its filmic value. His encounter with the pseudofuneral reflects a feeling pervasive in his novels of the fifties— that reality is waging a losing battle with its own representations. The Works of Love, The Huge Season, and The Field of Vision are rife with fictional photographs that symbolize the dangerous potential of images to reduce and replace reality, particu­ larly as sentimental souvenirs of the past or illusive depictions of par­ adise.2 With their tendency to frame space and remove episodes from time, photographs engender the illusion of perfection, stability, and permanence, an illusion so desirable in a complicated and fast-paced society that viewers are eager to acquire it by imitating the image, regardless of the fact that perfection, stability, and permanence equal death. It’s not surprising that many of Morris’s characters are caught between the material and immaterial worlds, between dreams and reality, between immortality and mortality, between falsity and truth, because they have been deceived by images.3 On the other hand, Morris, himself a photographer, refuses to deprecate the medium of photography which, as seen in his photo-texts, has the power to reveal by resisting platitudes, by refusing to reduce its subjects to a predictable framed space, and, in that respect, his photo-texts are similar to postmodern photographs that deliberately challenge the reader’s expectations. Literally, reusing space— Sherrie Levine’s appropriations of famous photographs, including 1979 Untitled (After Edward Weston), a copy print from a reproduction of Weston’s Torso of Neil, Richard Prince’s recycling of magazine and other mass media images in his self-entitled “rephotography,” and Barbara Kruger’s montages of reused images in dialogue with epigrammatic statements, such as “I shop therefore...

Art Education and the Aesthetics of Health in the Age of AIDS

Introduction In a recent radio address from the Oval Office, President Clinton (1995) informed the nation that out of moral obligation, he was going direct the Food and Drug Administration to propose stiff restrictions on the advertising, marketing, and sales of cigarettes Invoking a 14-month study by the FDA, his message was aimed at the way in which cigarettes are advertised manipulative visual images-seducing young people smoke in complete disregard for their health (Clinton, p. 1). Clinton's declaration testifies the importance of art education at a time in history when visual culture dominates the way in which values, attitudes and beliefs about the body's health and welfare are disseminated. Visual culture is all inclusive and is appropriate content for art education in a cultural democracy. It represents that have been traditionally excluded from the of great works, images produced for film or television, for example, are now capable of receiving the same careful consideration that was once lavished upon works that made up the canon (Bryson, Holly, & Moxey, 1994, p. xvi). Today, technology has progressed the point that a vast quantity of images and text are transmitted via the Internet, CD ROM, the World Wide Web, and other electronic delivery systems. The result: visual culture has increased exponentially. In the Age of AIDS, Ebola, and other diseases, mass media images of the body deluge the late 20th century post-industrial landscape. The Age of these diseases ironically parallels the Age of Information. Visually provocative, they instill fear and confusion on the hand, and the desire for glamour and survival on the other. The White House address clearly indicates the impact of visual culture on the human body and the body politic, what Mitchell (1994) refers as the pictorial turn (p. 9). The President responded with evangelical zeal the smoking crisis among young children. By censuring the corporate tobacco producers as evil-doers and sympathizing with young consumers as sacrificial lambs, he polarized the discourse on health. What the radio message ignores, however, are educational strategies for understanding the implications of health-related images. Art educators can contribute a curriculum reform that includes visual culture and its effect upon students' physical, emotional, and social well-being. Such programs would value students' ability interpret the ideological content of visual images that affect the health of both their human and cultural bodies (Mitchell, p. 16). Fear of disease invading the body, marginalization of those who are afflicted, the search for cures, taking political action, and terminality and deathrepresent some of the conditions from which visual metaphors about illness and health originate. What are the aesthetic assumptions that inform the production of visual metaphors regarding illness and health? How have the visual arts contributed historically the fear of illness and prejudice toward those who are afflicted? What impact can art education theory and practice have on health consciousness today? These and other questions will be the focus of this paper, the purpose of which will not be suggest the abolition of health stereotypes, but influence art educational practices that will make school children aware of the inherent patterns in visual images that represent illness and health. Illness Metaphors and Stereotypes Sontag (1978) dissuades the use of metaphors because they mystify illness; they usurp the power of the afflicted deal effectively with their affliction. Her first-hand experience with cancer convinced her that nothing is more punitive than give a disease a meaning-that meaning being invariably a moralistic one (p. 58). Ironically, illness and disease metaphors are semiotically contagious through a pathogenic process of signification (Feldman, 1990, p. …

Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934

In this account of mass media images, David Ruth looks at Al Capone and other invented gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s. The subject of innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, novels and Hollywood movies, the gangster was a compelling figure for Americans preoccupied with crime and the social turmoil it symbolized. Ruth shows that the media gangster was less a reflection of reality than a projection created from Americans' values, concerns and ideas about what would sell. We see efficient criminal executives demonstrating the multifarious uses of organization; dapper, big-spending gangsters highlighting the promises and perils of the emerging consumer society; and gunmen and molls guiding an uncertain public through the shifting terrain of modern gender roles. In this study, Ruth reveals how the public enemy provides a far-ranging critique of modern culture.

A “curious blend”: The successful farmer in American farm magazines, 1984–1991

Mass media images offer audiences models for how to perform the social roles they depict. Opinions and other attributes of credible media models may likewise be embraced by audience members seeking to identify with those models. Thus farm magazine narratives about “successful” farmers may encourage readers to model or aspire to featured farmers' production and management techniques and ascribe legitimacy to models' responses to current agricultural issues. However, production of agrarian images in the mass media — including images of farms, farmers, and farmers' values — are inevitably biased such that media representations of successful farmers selectively present objective characteristics in terms of the media's own ideological frameworks, which in turn reflect the dominant ideology of the social relations in which the media are engaged. As a first step in identifying farm magazines' role in creating social models for farmers, this study analyzes articles featuring “successful,” “leading,” or “innovative” farmers in leading agricultural magazines. The featured farmers are categorized according to enterprise characteristics and characterizations of them and their management philosophies. Findings show that farmers in farm magazines have larger than average operations and are portrayed in a way that blends a “farming as business” orientation with more conventional agrarian values but that generally omits non-business aspects of farm life.

Advertising, alcohol consumption, and abuse: a worldwide survey

Preface Introduction The Theoretical Basis for Advertising Effects Exposure to Alcohol Images in Mass Media The Experimental Evidence for Media Effects The Macroeconomic Relationship Between Advertising and Consumption Summary and Conclusions Notes References Index

Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for History and Identity in the Horn of Africa

In Imagining Ethiopia, Sorenson examines Western mass media images of Ethiopia, placing them in the context of a larger discourse on the Third World. Sorenson shows how our image of Ethiopia has been developed by reporters and photographers who blamed the famine on African backwardness and ignored its historical and political causes, which include a colonial history, militarization, and the circumstances of Africa's integration into the world market.

Mass media images and impact on health: a sourcebook

Preface The World of Television Health and the Media Physical Disabilities, Impairment and Safety, Mental Illness, and Death Television Doctors and Nurses Sex and Sexuality AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases Smoking Alcohol Use and the Media Drugs and the Media Food and Nutrition Environmental Risk and the Media Where We Stand References Author Index Subject Index

Mass media images of mental illness: A review of the literature

Studies that address the frequency, accuracy, and impact of mass media portrayals of mental illness are reviewed. Numerous studies of frequency and content of media depictions support clinical observations that mental illness is frequently depicted in the mass media, particularly the entertainment media, and that these depictions tend to be inaccurate and unfavorable. Limitations, such as age of the studies and mixed attention to psychiatry, psychology, and mental illness, however, leave a need for further such studies. Investigations of the specific impact of media images of mental illness support the belief that media presentations about mental illness, including those in entertainment form, can have significant effects on attitudes toward mental illness and treatment. These studies, however, are few in number and have demonstrated only short-term effects of specific portrayals. Further research is needed to demonstrate longlasting effects and the overall impact of multiple, repeated, media depictions.