Communication and Culture seeks to understand important and often disregarded aspects of our society. It addresses topics like institutional racism, colonialism, gender roles, misrepresentation, etc. I am particularly interested in the portrayal of women particularly in media and advertisements. After analyzing an ad in the light of commodity feminism I began to think about the ways women are represented in media. They are hyper sexualized, objectified, and often times reaffirm gender roles. I hope my research will help me understand this phenomena and why even after the post modern feminist movement women are still reduced in advertising and media to nothing more than a prop. Responsibly researching this topic will allow me to uncover the
…show more content…
I prefer this approach over the other approaches because it does not aim to capture and describe observations as reality or “status quo.” Critical theories focus on the relationship between power, privilege, and oppression. It addresses ideas in relation to ideology, acknowledging that nothing is value free and bias must be articulated. Critical theorists highlight the importance of language and the fact that our society is constructed through it. Language both informs and restricts the process of observation. There is a shared reality that is created by the perceived reliability of language. This relates to the sexualization of women in media because if language has constructed our society then it has furthered the normalization of the gender binary and the stereotypes attributed to women. Additionally, this paradigm argues that the controversy of subjective and objective is controversial itself. The critical theories paradigm values subjective data and objective data equally because emotion is important to consider during research. This is crucial to my research because in order to understand the reasons why the portrayal of women in media is so distorted, I must understand the thoughts, motivations, and feelings of not only the creators of these advertisements but also the women who are affected by …show more content…
Because of magazines being a major media outlet for young girls it is understandable that there body image is generated by their perception of a “good” body. For this reason, many girls have serious body image problems because of the way that media portrays women as having perfectly thin, toned, and primarily white bodies. This article introduces an important side of analyzing sexualization and objectification of women in media because its focus on youth groups and the ways they are affected by it. The article desirable how, “exposure to sexually objectified media leads to self-objectification; which in turn can lead to body shame, potentially resulting in eating disordered attitudes and behaviors, depression, and sexual dysfunction” (pg. 572). The messages encoded within these advertisements and articles limit the ways girls perceive themselves causing them to value a sexualized ideal over other forms of self
I prefer this approach over the other approaches because it does not aim to capture and describe observations as reality or “status quo.” Critical theories focus on the relationship between power, privilege, and oppression. It addresses ideas in relation to ideology, acknowledging that nothing is value free and bias must be articulated. Critical theorists highlight the importance of language and the fact that our society is constructed through it. Language both informs and restricts the process of observation. There is a shared reality that is created by the perceived reliability of language. This relates to the sexualization of women in media because if language has constructed our society then it has furthered the normalization of the gender binary and the stereotypes attributed to women. Additionally, this paradigm argues that the controversy of subjective and objective is controversial itself. The critical theories paradigm values subjective data and objective data equally because emotion is important to consider during research. This is crucial to my research because in order to understand the reasons why the portrayal of women in media is so distorted, I must understand the thoughts, motivations, and feelings of not only the creators of these advertisements but also the women who are affected by …show more content…
Because of magazines being a major media outlet for young girls it is understandable that there body image is generated by their perception of a “good” body. For this reason, many girls have serious body image problems because of the way that media portrays women as having perfectly thin, toned, and primarily white bodies. This article introduces an important side of analyzing sexualization and objectification of women in media because its focus on youth groups and the ways they are affected by it. The article desirable how, “exposure to sexually objectified media leads to self-objectification; which in turn can lead to body shame, potentially resulting in eating disordered attitudes and behaviors, depression, and sexual dysfunction” (pg. 572). The messages encoded within these advertisements and articles limit the ways girls perceive themselves causing them to value a sexualized ideal over other forms of self