Visual Representation Of Women Research Articles

Representation and stereotyping of the female image in modern mass media (based on glossy magazines)

In the 21st century, the need for the development of the glossy sector is increasing every day. The main object of the study is the image of female beauty in modern glossy magazines; the subject of the study is the formation of a stereotypical idea of beauty in modern mass media. The purpose of this article is to analyze the linguistic and visual representation of women in modern mass media (based on glossy magazines), as well as the features of the linguistic (linguistic and visual) construction of the image of a woman in modern discursive linguistics. In addition, when conducting this research, not only general scientific methods are used, such as comparison, description, classification, systematization, interpretation, analysis, classification, but also special linguistic methods for analyzing lexical-semantic groups: contextual and stylistic analysis of semantics, the method of psycholinguistic modeling, method of complex analysis. The scientific novelty of the study is due to the subject of the study and the lack of modern comparative studies in the field of the specific representation of the image of beauty in the media (in glossy magazines) for young women. During the study, the features of modern visual culture and mass media products were studied, the standards of beauty and the female image being a sociocultural phenomenon were described, the methods of applying various methodologies to the visual content of glossy magazines and digital analogues were analyzed, axiological pictures of the world in different cultures and social gender stereotypes were partially described, reflected in language, the representation and stereotyping of the beauty of the female image in modern mass media (based on glossy magazines) is analyzed and ways of stereotyping beauty in glossy magazines are identified, including the features of visual design and promotion of content personalization (recommendation technologies) in the modern glossy segment.

Death Becomes Her. Implicit Religion, Relics, Myth-Making and the Witch Complex in Visual Representations of Women in Film Noir. A Case Study

"While cinema and especially the Hollywood Golden Age has constructed a mythology of its own, cinematic storytelling has also recycled heavily on classic mythologies and cultural stereotypes. The female figures have represented during the Hollywood Golden Age and in film noir in particular a special category from this perspective, being both deified and demonized, depicted as goddesses, vampires, fascinating ghosts and, above all, femmes fatales. Classic feminist studies have argued that both this depiction/representation, verbal or visual, and the intended spectator, are male. Based on a comparative case-study, the current paper discusses the manner in which what I call a cinematic witch complex is constructed through either hiding or revealing in order to conclude which is more efficient in the process of gendered myth-making."

Visual representations of women in a Jamaican science textbook: perpetuating an outdated, sexist ideology

ABSTRACT The gender gap in post-compulsory science education remains a key concern for educators in many countries. Over the last two decades significant effort has been placed in a number of initiatives aimed not only at raising the profile of science in schools, but also at widening female participation. Despite these initiatives, the rate of female participation in science has typically remained below that of males. Although many reasons have been advanced to explain this, visual representations in school science textbooks remain under-researched. Against a background of gender disparity in the Jamaican education system, this article examines the extent to which visual representations in a widely used school science textbook reinforce or ameliorate gender stereotypes. The results indicate that the textbook presents implicit support for gender-biased messages, though in ways that are more subtle than might be supposed. There were a number of ways in which the images did not favour males over females but there were also other ways in which males were more likely to be portrayed as powerful and in high-status ‘positions’, while females were more likely to be depicted in inferior situations. Such gender representations may affect how students see themselves in relation to science.

Upgrading <em>The L Word: Generation Q</em>

Upgrading <em>The L Word: Generation Q</em>

EU and gender-security sector reform in Ukraine and Mali: a picture is worth dozens of policies!

ABSTRACT This article is a contribution to critical International Relations scholarship on European Union foreign and security policy and to the debates on “Normative Europe”. It focuses on the ways in which the EU engages with their own gender equality policies in external Security Sector Reform (SSR) missions. By analysing visual materials of the European Union Advisory Mission-Ukraine (EUAM Ukraine) and European Union Capacity Building Mission in Sahel Mali (EUCAP Sahel Mali) missions, this article identifies the discrepancies between the EU’s proclaimed policy goals about gender equality and visual representations of women and men in the missions’ newsletter photos. These representations reflect a lacklustre approach and suggest a lack of commitment to practices of gender equality and positive role modelling in SSR’s day-to-day activities. This article suggests the EU-SSR missions overhaul their public communication strategies to focus first on “how” to communicate gender equality norms and only then on “what” to communicate. This study shows one concrete opportunity and space where this can be achieved.

What’s in a Face? Gender representation of faces in Time, 1940s-1990s

We extracted 327,322 faces from an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues dating from 1923 to 2014, classified the gender of each extracted face, and discovered that the proportion of female faces contained within this archive varied in interesting ways over time. The proportion of female faces first peaked in the mid-to-late 1940s. This was followed by a dip lasting from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. The 1970s saw another peak followed by a dip over the course of the 1980s. Finally, we see a slow and steady rise in the proportion of female faces from the early 1990s onwards. In this paper, we seek to make sense of these variations through an interdisciplinary framework drawing on psychology, visual studies (in particular, photography theory), and history. Through a close reading of our Time archive from the 1940s through the 1990s, we conclude that the visual representation of women in Time magazine correlates with attitudes toward women in both the historical context of the era and the textual content of the magazine.

Fit bodies, strong races, modern nations

ABSTRACTThe Introductory Essay places the articles collected in the dossier within current debates on race, gender and nation. First, it examines the notion of “Latin” eugenics, both as a non-hereditarian approach to race improvement and a form of Fascist cultural diplomacy based on the export of Italian racial knowledge. Second, it explores the way in which the visual representation of women's bodies shaped the “eugenics gaze” of an idealized racial nation, as well as her racial “others”. Third, it analyses the racialization of immigration by looking at how dominant groups established eugenics preferences for certain foreigners based on popular assumptions of moral worth and physical strength.

A Cross-Cultural Study of the Representation of Women in Instagram Cosmetic Advertisements

A Cross-Cultural Study of the Representation of Women in Instagram Cosmetic Advertisements Mennatalla Shalaby, Sharifah Nurulhuda Alkaff Abstract Beauty advertisements have long been the focus of feminists as the promotion of idealised beauty standards is seen as oppressive and even demeaning to women. The overwhelming majority of research in this topic has concluded that traditional advertising tends to represent stereotyped images of women in which they are often portrayed as submissive and vulnerable. However, as there is now a pronounced shift towards online advertising, possible changes in the portrayal of women in a non-traditional medium such as social media are investigated in this study as the portrayal of women in social media is still a relatively unexplored area of investigation. In this study, the visual representation of women on the Instagram posts of two cosmetic companies, a multi-national US-based company (Maybelline) and a Middle-Eastern based independent company (Huda Beauty) are examined. The images of women in sixty posts from the two Instagram accounts of both companies were analyzed using Goffman's (1979) and Kang‟s (1997) frameworks of gender display in advertisements. The results show that despite the popular perception of social media as the „great equalizer‟ in terms of the creation and depiction of content, the vast majority of the images analyzed still depict women in the categories that are associated with disempowerment. Surprisingly, however, the images that depict independence and self-assertiveness by both companies feature women wearing the Muslim veil. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijgws.v7n2p6

Female War Icons: Visual Representations of Women’s Contribution to the First World War in France and Britain in 1914–1918 and 2014–2018

This article compares and contrasts the representation of women’s roles in the First World War in France and Britain during two key moments in which the war’s cultural memory has been constructed: at the end of the war and during its centenary years. In order to do so, it first considers two visual sources dating from 1918: the film “La Femme française pendant la guerre” (The Frenchwoman in Wartime) made by the Section cine´magraphique de l’arme´e (Army cinema unit), and photographs of British women’s war work commissioned by the Photographic Section of the Ministry of Information. It then analyses the representation of women and the First World War in two museum exhibitions that were both launched in anticipation of the public interest that would be generated by the centenary of the conflict: the First World War galleries in the Imperial War Museum in London, which opened in 2014, and the permanent exhibition in the Muse´e de la Grande Guerre (Museum of the Great War) in Meaux, which first opened its doors in 2011.

Introducing Global Issues in A Language Classroom: Knowing Other Cultures by Analysing Multimodal Texts from NGOs

<p>This article shows the importance of teaching with texts from Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in which women from other cultures are represented in order to bring global issues in a language classroom and to deepen in the visual representation of women from other cultures so that students develop their gender perspective. Our main objectives with the research presented in this paper are to introduce students to visual grammar and to work with texts that allow students at tertiary level develop critical thinking and respect for cultural diversity, which will contribute to the introduction of global issues into the classroom. Kress and van Leewen (2006) model of visual grammar was introduced in an English language course at University level so that students could read and analyse multimodal texts. Having done this, students were asked to analyse the texts in groups in order to observe the importance of visuals in the construction of meaning and the way in which the women represented appeared portrayed. The analysis using visual grammar shows that the texts under analysis portray a positive image of African women, which breaks the traditional stereotypes of these women being weak, dependent and marginalised. In addition, this research will show that teaching global issues using multimodal texts from the NGO Intermón Oxfam will help students understand how the discourse used by NGOs creates meaning through different visual and linguistic choices.</p><p> </p>

Presence, Agency and Popularity: Kenyan “Socialites”, Femininities and Digital Media

Representations and self-representations in new digital cultures have complicated readings of gender and sexuality in the media in increasingly interesting ways. This article explores such representations, focusing on two well-known figures in the Kenyan tabloid media, Vera Sidika and Huddah Monroe. These two women are informally referred to as “socialites”, a reference made to their adopted over-the-top lifestyles and choices of self-representation in social media. Reading these platforms as key to popular culture, I introduce the argument for agency, which I argue seeks to complicate the easy reading of these women as representative of neoliberal postfeminist cultures. It also complicates a reading of them as hypersexual women working within an attention economy. I argue that within a highly patriarchal society such as Kenya, agency could be read through the visual representations of women who transgress hegemonic patriarchal logic and offer a nuanced reading of gender and sexuality discourses.

The Progressive Era: How American History Textbooks' Visuals Represent Women

Studies of the representation of women in United States history textbooks, both in number and manner in which they appear, have found women are inequitably represented as compared to their male counterparts and are viewed through a patriarchal lens. This study analyzed a contemporary high school United States history textbook’s representation of women in the Progressive Era compared to an earlier edition textbook. Using their visual representation of women, it was found that the textbooks continued the patriarchal view of women and their roles in society. Although the number of representations of women had slightly increased over time, these additions did not promote a more contemporary view of women's role in history, except in the area of women's rights. Recommendations for future areas of research are made. Some are: monitoring of textbooks for equability, analyzing of textbooks covering U.S. history prior to 1877 for equability in inclusion of women in history, investigating what teachers are doing to compensate for the inequity, determining whether or not state standards are inclusive of women's history, and analyzing how women's history in college level textbooks represent women in history.

Images of Sports Women: A review

Despite the steady increase in volume and quality of women’s sport participation over the last century, female athletes continue to be underrepresented across all platforms of the media. A range of mechanisms have been shown to contribute to media constructions of women’s sport, including the low volume of media attention, narrative focus, prominence of placement or scheduling, linguistic choices and visual representations of women’s sport. This review paper examines scholarly research on the role of print media images in the construction of attitudes towards and perceptions of women’s sport. Beginning with international research, the review thematically summarises selected literature to draw out some of the ways in which images are pressed into service in the sports media. Research from the Australasian region (Australia and New Zealand) is then reviewed and compared with the international research with a view to observing commonalities and differences. The review reveals that internationally and in Australasia, media images of sports women continue to fail to represent the realities of women’s sport performance. Some movement away from sexualisation is noted; however this appears to be occurring in concert with a slight reduction in terms of volume.

Hidden in Public View

This study analyzes the visual representations of women in Bulgaria from the 1950s to the 1980s, as depicted in photographs in the official daily newspaper of the communist party. The study is theoretically informed by feminist theories of media representations and engages specifically with Gaye Tuchman's idea of “symbolic annihilation,” which referred to Western media's condemnation, trivialization, and omission of women in public discourse. However, this analysis adapts Tuchman's theory to the specificities of socialist societies, where women's participation in public life was ideologically mandated. The authors propose the concept of “symbolic glorification” as a correlate to Tuchman's idea, and argue that symbolic glorification was a necessary part of ideological efforts to claim that women's participation in the labor force and political life was a sign of true emancipation. Nevertheless, the visual data reveal that certain aspects of femininity, related to motherhood and sexuality, were symbolically annihilated as a way to make female identities conform to ideological goals. The paper concludes by raising questions about the ways in which the ideologically constructed identities of women during socialism may impact on a feminist agenda after the end of the Cold War.

The Changing Face of Exhibiting Women's Wartime Work at the Imperial War Museum

This article examines the performative narratives present in three historical exhibitions produced by the Imperial War Museum (IWM) on the topic of women's wartime work. The focus is in particular on the visual representation of women through the display of uniforms, as well as how methods of presenting this material culture have, at various points in the near century-long history of the institution, taken on different roles within exhibition spaces. The display techniques used in early exhibitions will be compared to more recent permanent and temporary spaces at two branches of the IWM located in London and Manchester, in order to determine whether the performative nature of early exhibitions has extended to recent developments.

‘We Make a Big Effort to Bring Out the Ladies’: Visual Representations of Women in the Modern American Stadium

Modern stadiums were constructed across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, usually to replace old baseball parks that were run-down, inaccessible by automobile, and located near African American neighbourhoods. Sports promoters coveted affluent, white, consumption-oriented customers who had recently moved to the suburbs. To attract these customers, promoters attempted to imaginatively reconstitute stadium space – from urban, old, dirty, rambunctious, masculine places to suburban, new, clean, orderly, female-friendly spaces. The attraction of women – as signifiers of an affluent and domesticated postwar social order – was central to this strategy. Visual representations of women in new stadium spaces were essential to the imaginative reconfiguration and modernisation of stadium space. This essay examines their use, particularly in the Houston Astrodome. Stadium publications and local newspapers used photographs and illustrations of women to conceptually reinvent the stadium, extending a distinctively post-war, modern ideology privileging comfort, consumption and respectable behaviour into stadium space.

Portraits of the Lady: Imagining Women in Nineteenth-Century America

Harvard University Press, 1989 The three books under review here deal with images generated by the idea of woman from the mid-nineteenth century into the early years of the twentieth century, not only in literature, but within the wider popular imagination and the scientific community. Martha Banta looks at all levels of the visual representation of women, from elite portraiture through popular magazine illustrations to cartoons and advertisements. Cynthia Eagle Russett investigates scientific accounts of women's physiological and intellectual nature. And Frances B. Cogan looks at didactic literature and popular fiction. These studies deal variously with the idea of woman as distinguished from the fact of woman. Although the investigations are disparate, one note sounds through all three: those who define the nature and role of women in our culture represent them prescriptively rather than descriptively. To this end, images of women in the predominating discourse present themselves in distinct and purposeful imaginative constellations, rather than as the variegated tapestry one would find in mimetic representation. These texts taken together provide fascinating evidence--across the social and intellectual spectrum--of the intersections of cultural politics and the American dream-life.