Identity

Lecture 7 - IDENTITY

- Essentialism suggests we have an inner essence that makes us who we are (biological make-up)

- Therefore you get stereotypes/cliches of what a 'good' or 'bad' person looks like

- Postmodern theorists disagree with this

- Phrenology - Compartmentalise the brain into different areas, the idea is that the different parts of the brain formulate the balance of your personality, such as an oversized animal element might mean criminal tendencies

- Physiognomy - The study of facial characteristics, measuring the face to equate somebodies intelligence, by seeing if their features draw a straight line when measured (almost legitimising racism as someone with black/african routes may not have the straight line)

- Lombroso's positivist criminology - Notion that criminal tendencies are inherited are you can tell by the way people look, such as people who don't fit in with the usual

Racism

- Imbred qualities in facial characteristics - such as in Bosch's 'Christ carrying the cross', portraying that the Jews are evil, as they look gross compared to the christians

- Chris Ofili - painting the virgin mary as a black woman, painted with elephant dung - caused a sensation and uproar as people couldn't get their head around the idea the virgin mary could have been black

- Ofili places his paintings on elephant dung on the floor rather than hanging them

- No woman, no cry - race hate crimes

- Realises there are no black superheros

Three phases of identity

- Pre modern identity - personal identity is stable and defined by long standing roles, such as what your father did you will do...

- Modern identity - society offers a wider range of social roles, people start moving from the country to the city, the rise of the class system, people start to be able to choose their identity, rather than being born in to, and so people begin to worry about who they are.

- Post modern identity - accepts a fragmented self

Pre-Modern Identity 

- institutions within society determine this, such as: marriage, the church, monarchy, government, the state, work

- there are secure identities, with people 'belonging' to some other institution

Modern Identity

- Things are changing

- Leisure class (conspicuous consumption - new things to show your identity) is something to aspire to be, means you have money - see and be seen

- Concern about who you are and how you fit into society

- People going out for leisure 'the flaneur' (Gentleman stroller), above the lower classes

Simmel's trickle down theory

- All the flaneur need to do is walk around the city, they are trying to be someone to be aspired to, the upper classes are seen wearing the newest fashions and gear, and the lower classes want to get that, so they copy the look

- This happens today, with emulation, as catwalk looks come to the high street

- The upper classes don't want to be linked to the lower classes - distinction - so new fashions come in

- Idea of isolation, people with vacant ghost-like faces, as although you might be out and about with other people, you feel incredibly lonely and alienated

- Today there is an expectation that you are social and go out and are with other people

- Simmel suggests that because of the speed of modernity, individuals withdraw themselves to find peace, becoming less conceded with whats going on around them but more bothered about themselves

Foucault 'Discourse Analysis'

- Identity is constructed out of the discourse culturally available to us - recurring statements that become ingrained in the public psyche.

- Examples of discourses - age, class, gender, nationality, race, sexual gender, class, gender, equality

- The idea of otherness with these discourses

- To be white and european you have a race, but that seems to be the focal point, so people who are not are 'the others'

Class

- The current class system emerges with the industrial revolution

- You have to be aware of the other classes to be aware of your own class, where you fit in to the hierarchy

- Such as in terms with fashion the idea of emulation and distinction

- Upper classes don't want lower classes to be a part of them, such as the bourgeoulaese want to keep the prolerati in their place

- North/South divide - Worktown project (Documentary photography approached with a pre-conceived idea of what these peoples lives are like) suggesting that these people are uncultured and rough

- Martin Parr's The Last Resort- he claims to be documenting the world as he sees it, however seems to be looking down on other people lives, but he says he is just taking photographs of what he sees not poking fun

 

- Martin Parr's Ascot - people playing out roles that don't fit them, such as the ladies at the races, who go to wear nice dresses and a hat and don't really care about the actual races

Fashion

- Alexander McQueen - Highland Rape - semi-naked models stagger down the catwalk as if they have been drugged with fake blood on them, caused controversy, drew massive attention to his work, but he claims that its not a misogynist view of women but about the 'rape of scotland' by the english

- Vivienne Westwood - Anglomania - about englishness but yet using tartan, insulting

- Is it a white fashion industry - such as Naomi Campbell used to have to straighten her hair to fit in

- Alexander McQueen - using horns and animal cliches - is this racist? Highlighting how black people may not fit in with the fashion industry

- Notion of national identity - Las Vegas - all these different identities forced into one place, questions: why do americans need to leave america when they have all of this?

- Comparing to disney world to europe - notion of dimming down of society

- Mary magdalene always showing as wearing red or with red hair, notion that she is slightly evil, so maybe the taunts red-heads get go back to this - Emily Bates's dress created using her own hair - making a comment on her own race and ethnicity

Gender and sexuality

- Gender tends to be about women and their under representation rather than men

- Fashion industry traditionally be men for women making them wear horrendous clothes

- Masquerade and the mask of femininity - Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills - trying to emulate and imitate film stills placing herself in different positions

- Women artists breaking in to a field that has been dominated by men for such a long time means that some women might need to do something to respond to this - feminist artists

- Are these women just as much as a problem as the males with the male gaze? Is this why the feminist artists place themselves in their images instead so they are not being misogynist?

- Tracey Emin's everyone I have every slept with - is this societies view that if a man sleeps with a lot of women it is okay but if a women does it she is promiscuous?

- Wonderbra advert - I can't cook. Who cares? - feminist view could be that she shouldn't have to be able to cook anyway, wonder bra said it is empowering to women, that she shouldn't have to fit that stereotype, but then again, why does it have to be a woman with big breasts that can fight this stereotype?

- Can construct even your gender identity with a sex change

The Postmodern Condition: liquid modernity and liquid love

- Identity is constructed through our social experience

- Contemporary life is more like theatre, you can choose what to wear and how to look to create your own counter identity

- Bauman: "identity" is something to be invented rather than discovered - something you can set out to achieve

- Introspection is a disappearing act - faced with a moment alone, keep checking your phone for shreds of evidence that someone somewhere needs you

- We use art etc to shield ourself from the reality of what life is

- Contemporary life is a miserable thing, we need things to improve it

- I think therefore I am - you justify your existence by the thoughts that you have

- I shop therefore I am (Barbara Kruger) - updating it in a cynical way, as if you define yourself by where you go shopping

- Used in the Selfridges sale - exhibition in contemporary society or is she selling out? Are they both (her and Selfridges) mocking the people who rush about in a mad sale to try and get a bargain for peoples non-existent needs, consumption

- Second life divorce story - people constructing their own identities, making themselves look quite different to what they really are

- Cyber life affair story - cheap entertainment at the sake of people making their own identities

- Facebook - can make your own identity, could be fake, just to get others to like you

- Identity is a hopeless ambiguous idea of a double-edged sword

In Comparison... Beauty Adverts

Just to try and help me to make my mind up about Dove's seemingly hypocritical campaign, I've gathered a few examples of the other beauty campaigns out there to help me see the difference. There were so many adverts (at least 26 in Cosmo!) featuring these perfect women in these women's magazines I have looked at (Cosmopolitan, Company, Glamour and Ok), it just proves all the negative things about the use of 'perfect' women in the media that I have written in my essay right. No matter what people think about the Dove real beauty campaign, by comparing it to any of these adverts it seems like it should be commended for its use of the non-standard model.

If I was creating a magazine I would like to follow in the example of Dove and use real models, to show that beauty is accessible to all women, no matter what their shape or size.

Other Stories/ Articles/ Campaigns relating to Real Beauty...

Here are some other stories I have found relating to the issue of Real Beauty. They are things I thought about before deciding to focus on the Dove campaign. If I am to take this subject further for my dissertation, they may be subjects that I look in to again in the future.

This video was made by Girl Guiding UK to highlight the damaging effect airbrushing has on young girls self-esteem, as they think they have to live up to this standard, as sometimes it is unclear what has been airbrushed and what hasn't. The girl guides want adverts that have been airbrushed to be labelled, so young girls know that the images are not the reality.

Girl Guiding Campaign for airbrushing labelling

Coleen's Real Women - In this TV show, Coleen challenges brands (such as super drug, johnsons etc) and model agencies to take on plus sized women through her competition, proving that plus sized women are as a beautiful as thinner ones.

This famous Benetton campaign is a bit different from the others, as the others focus on women's body weight. Where this controversial advert, which doesn't really have anything to do with Benetton clothing, features a man dying of Aids surrounded by his family. This isn't about real beauty, but it is an advert featuring a real person, and not the perfect ideal of a person. The result is that this advert definitely had the shock value, but ended up offending some people.

According to Benetton, “In some countries such as Paraguay this was the very first campaign to talk about AIDS, and in many countries it was the first campaign to go beyond purely preventative measures and touch upon subjects such as solidarity with AIDS patients.”

Benetton Adverts featuring aids victim

This is a bit of a humorous video, advertising Photoshop as if it is a beauty product. It made me laugh but it also highlights the dependence on this software for advertisements to day. 

Fotoshop Mimic Commercial

This documentary followed Katie Piper, a young model whose face was destroyed after a vicious acid attack. Katie shows others who have been effected how they are still beautiful, despite their differences to others. She is inspirational to others and proves that being beautiful is not looking exactly the same as everyone else.

Katie: My Beautiful Face

 

Aimee Mullins was named one of the 50 most beautiful women in the world. She is a model, actress and athlete. And she has done all this with prosthetic legs, again, proving that women don't have to fit a certain mould to be beautiful. Despite disabilities and differences, every woman can be beautiful in her own way.

Aimee Mullins

Primary Research For Essay...

Survey

I have turned some questions I was interested in finding the answer to in to a survey, so that I can get an accurate set of results, rather than just my own opinion, which may have changed while I have been reading up on the campaign, to help me write my essay.

Results

1. 

2.

3.

4. 

5.  Some of the answers ( - some people skipped this question - )

- normal

- indifferent 

- happy that not everyone is a stick

- like the product it is for everyone and usually purse friendly

- it doesn't really make me feel anything, they happen too little to have any affect

- they make me quite angry because they aren't really "real" women at all and create the wrong ideas in young minds

- I think they are a step in the right direction but I think more needs to be done by other companies before any real impact is made

Analysing Results

I was quite surprised to find how mixed peoples views are on real beauty campaigns, with some believing they work, some thinking they have no effect and others thinking the real beauty campaigns are creating the wrong ideas for the viewer. The results do prove that the campaign was a memorable one, that did manage to make people feel better about their body, even if this did not lead them on to being more likely to buy dove products. This would suggest that Dove's intention was genuine, to make women feel better, without just trying to advertise their products.

Research from Library Books

Here are some quotes I have pulled out from library books that I think are relevant to what I am writing about. Often these quotes have lead me on to other thoughts, and to consider my argument in a different light, so reading these books has been very interesting and thought provoking, and has even made me start thinking about ideas for my dissertation, which can hopefully lead on from this. I've included these quotes so it will be easy for me to find them if I want to use them again.

Barbie culture

"A fantastic icon contributes to a culture by exaggerating what is actual, possible or conceivable. Such an icon invites fantasy by taking the as-if or the fictive toward its outer limit. Barbie is such an icon, as are Superman and Playboy centrefolds." pg3.

"Barbie is an icon of the femininity associated with the middle reaches of contemporary Western societies." pg11.

African-american pre-adolescents: "Barbie is nice to look at. When I place her on the shelf, I just look at her because she's so pretty" "I thought she was pretty and wished I looked like her." "Those who see Barbie as a role model would scarcely find these testimonials surprising" "alluring, seductive femininity" pg12.

"Perfect dream-girl image.""Self-assessments and self-deprecation... These terms ensure they can never measure up". pg13

"On each face is the same happy, glazed look.. (Paley 1984)" pg13

"The ideal of unattainable beauty" pg17

"She is, for most intents and purposes, hetrosexual; she is Ivory-Snow white; she is middle-class; she is neither a child nor a senior citizen; she is able-bodied. Except for her gender, then, Barbie belongs to those groupings that have the upper hand or at least command respect in modern society." pg36

"Cultural evidence of white domination." pg47

"Driven by the idea that our bodies can be whatever we like if we devote enough money and attention to them." "Tanning parlours, cosmetic procedures, health clubs etc... as the body increasingly serves as the site of an individuals greatest control." pg112

"Given enough effort and body work, people emphasise the visual, pointing toward a world of gazes and mirrors and spectacles where they eye is the central sense and the body its major focus." "Seeing and being seen took on new significance centring around the 'spectacularisation' of women's bodies." pg113

"Images of successful women are images of youth, beauty, and slimness (Rosalyn Meadow and Lillie Weiss (1992))" pg116

"On MTV and most other commercial television, in popular films and music videos, on fashion runways and concert stages stand... women dedicated to their bodies as the first tool of their trades." pg151

Introducing Feminism

"Young women ... are under enormous pressure to fit in with a perpetual beauty competition - to judge and criticise their own bodies from the outside, as men see them, and to deny how their bodies feel within." pg138

"Almost every woman feels there's something "wrong" with some part of her body." pg139

"We end up in a permanent competition with the spectre of the model... to which we compare our own, ordinary image in the mirror!" pg139.

The Beauty Myth

"We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement: the beauty myth." pg10 "...carry on its work of social control."

"A dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of ageing, and dread of lost control." pg10.
must
"The skin care industries became the new cultural censors of women's intellectual space, and because of their pressure, the gaunt, youthful model supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful womanhood." pg11.

"The beauty myth tells a story. The quality called "beauty" objectively and universally exists. Women must want to embody it and men want to possess women who embody it." pg12

"The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behaviour that the period considers desirable." pg14

"Since the Industrial Revolution, middle-class Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints." pg15

"And the unconscious hallucination grows ever more influential and pervasive because of what is now conscious market manipulation: powerful industries - the $33-billion-a-year diet industry, the $20-bill cosmetics industry, and the $7 billion pornography industry - have arisen from the capital made out of unconscious anxieties." pg17

"Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced "beautiful" images?" pg18

"The contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting us psychologically." pg19

(On beauty magazines): "Women too believe that they transmit the worst aspects of the beauty myth. Readers themselves are often ambivalent about the pleasure mixed up with anxiety they provide."pg62

"In the face of a great social upheaval that was giving women responsibility, autonomy, state-run childcare, and good money, the advertisers needed to ensure that there would be a market left for their products."pg63

"Women need to change too, though; only when we take our own mass media seriously and resist its expectations..." pg82

"Women's magazines ignore older women or pretend they don't exist: magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, 'retouching artists' conspire to 'help' beautiful women look more beautiful; i.e.., less their age."pg82

"Airbrushing age off women's faces has the same political echo that would resound if all positive images of blacks were routinely lightened." pg83

"To airbrush age off a women's face is to erase women's identity, power, and history." pg83

"Imagine a women's magazine that positively featured round models, short models, old models - or no models at all, but real individual women. Let's say that it had a policy of avoiding cruelty to women, as some now have a policy of endorsing products made free of cruelty to animals. And that it left out crash diets, mantras to achieve self-hatred, and promotional articles for the profession that cuts open healthy women's bodies. And let's say that it ran articles in praise of the magnificence of visible age, displayed loving photo essays on the bodies of women of all shapes and proportions, examined with gentle curiosity the body's changes after birth and breast-feeding, offered recipes without punishment or guilt, and ran seductive portraits of men.
It would run aground, losing the support of its advertisers." pg83-84

"The advertisers who make women's mass culture possible depend on making women feel bad enough about their faces and bodies to spend more money on worthless or pain-inducing products than they would if they felt innately beautiful."pg84

"Women are so well schooled in the beauty myth that we often internalize it." pg84

"Advertisers need to sell products in a free-for-all of imagery bombardment intent on lowering women's self-esteem; and, for reasons that are political and not sexual, both men and women now pay attention to images of the Face and the Body." pg84

"The troubled route of her beauty addiction."pg85

"Does a woman's identity count? Must she be made to want to look like someone else?" pg271

"For about 160 years, middle-class, educated Western women have been controlled by various ideals about female perfection; this old and successful tactic has worked by taking the best of female culture and attaching to it the most repressive demands of male-dominated societies." pg271

"Just as the beauty did not really care what what women looked like as long as women felt ugly, we must see that it does not matter in the least what women look like as long as we feel beautiful." pg272

"We can dress up for our pleasure, but we must speak up for our rights." pg274

"It is often said that we must make fashion and advertising images include us, but this is a dangerously optimistic misunderstanding of how the market works. Advertising aimed at women works by lowering our self-esteem. If it flatters our self-esteem, it is not effective." pg276

"When one woman looks at another, she cannot possibly know the self-image within that woman." pg286

Media, Gender & Identity

"In modern societies... people are generally unable to avoid popular culture and advertising." pg2

"The industry's scientists have found even more amazing 'solutions' to previously unidentified skin and hair problems." pg86

"The beauty ideal is often a substantial pressure on women, then. But this obsession with looks affects people, not only women." pg86

"Men are also expected to spend time in the gym, working to develop 'tight, toned' bodies." pg86

"Its a pressure that our culture puts on people these days, but its not just limited to women." pg86

Graphic Design As Communication

"Dominant beliefs, or stereotypes, are dominant because they are produced (in graphic design) on the behalf of dominant cultural groups. In a culture where middle-class white males are dominant, one might reasonably expect... women to be stereotypically devalued." pg72

"The graphic design's cultural function here is to communicate and so reproduce that meaning." pg73

"The role of women in advertisements is more commonly that of the surveyed object than of the active subject." pg74

Ways of Seeing

"A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself... From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually." pg46

"She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life." pg46

"Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at." pg47

"She is offering up her femininity as the surveyed." pg55

The Media and Body Image

"Body obsession [is] more pervasive than ever before in contemporary Western culture" pg2

"Blaming the media for reproducing and extolling representations of unrealistic female bodies that influence young womb to starve themselves has almost become a popular truism." pg3

"In Western societies especially, a general preference for a thin body shape has become established as the norm. Culturally, however, this is not yet a universal phenomenon, nor indeed has it been consistent even within Western nations."pg6

"Women learn to reconstruct themselves. It is second nature to disguise themselves, dress themselves and decorate themselves with a huge range of materials." pg48

"Women are being sold youth... 'age is ugly'" pg48

"Changing ourselves is a big business and much of it is fun." pg51

"We modify ourselves because that is what women do; it is part of femininity, part of the construction of identity, and it is an extraordinary revenue strand for commerce." pg51

"The problem seems to be that so many of the images offered to women in the media are the same - slender, fair, fit, young, sexual - and the goods sold to women are sold to 'help' them achieve that image." pg52

"For girls entering adulthood the discontinuity between their 'real' selves, the representation of women and the range of roles they are shown occupying must present as at best challenging, certainly confusing and possibly confounding." pg52

"All of us are subject to the same pressures and so to some extent all women suffer as subjects of social construction." pg52

"Impossibly women are being asked to be sexual, independent and careerist yet still also childlike, docile and maternal and always young, white, beautiful and thin." pg62

"Beauty can never be achieved; it must always be sought." pg63

"The media more than any other discourse source tells us what to seek to make us beautiful, where to buy it and how wonderful life will be when we have." pg63

Feminist Media Studies

"Fashion, cosmetics and beauty are signs of another central code in adolescent femininity. Clothing and cosmetics themselves are signs that girls are taught to operate to create a particular and recognisable image for themselves." pg26

"The adolescent female body is in need of continuous maintenance and improvement." pg26

"The 'objectification' of women is not exclusive to pornography." pg87

The Look

"With the development of techniques of mechanical reproduction and the technology of visual recording, Western culture has become obsessed with looking and recording images." pg33

"Those women on the billboards, though: they look back. Those fantasy women stare off the walls with a look of urgent availability." pg34

"Women's relation to their own self-image is much more likely to be dominated by discontent." pg37

"Advertisements, health and beauty advice, fashion tips are effective precisely because somewhere, perhaps even subconsciously, an anxiety, rather than a pleasurable identification, is awakened." pg37

"Women's relation to these cultural ideals, and therefore to their own images, is more accurately described as a relation of narcissistic damage. Women's relation to their own mirror image is retrospectively damaged by that critical glance of the cultural ideal. Over the mirror always hangs the image of the socially approved, massively consumed, widely circulated image of the generic Woman. She alone it seems is guaranteed an easy ride through life, guaranteed the approval of all and safe in expecting uncritical love." pg38

"Unless we measure up, we will not be loved." pg38

"Every minute region of the body is now exposed to this scrutiny by the ideal... Each are requires potions, moisturisers, conditioners, night creams, creams to cover up blemishes. Moisturise, display, clean off, rejuvenate - we could well be at it all day, preparing the face to meet the faces that we meet" pg38

"There is then, for women, and ambivalence between fascination and damage in looking at themselves and images of other women." pg39

Walker, N. (2010) Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, 1st Edn, London: Virago Press

Back cover - “Empowerment, liberation, choice. Once the watchwords of feminism, these terms have now been co-opted by a society that sells women an airbrushed, highly sexualised and increasingly narrow vision of feminity. While the opportunities available to women may have expanded, the ambitions of many young girls are in reality limited by a culture that sees women’s sexual allure as their only passport to success.”

From being younger girls are given dolls, pink things, make up and dress up to play with and other ‘girly’ toys to pre-condition them into how they should be.

“The celebrities they read about in fashion and gossip magazines are often women who are well known to have chosen extreme regimes, from punishing diets to plastic surgery, to achieve an airbushed perfection.” pg2.

“Feminists have been criticising the way that artificial images of femine beauty are held up as the ideal to which women should aspire.” pg3.

“In this generation a certain view of female sexuality has become celebrated through advertisements, music, television programmes, films and magazines.” pg3.

“Throughout our culture it is constantly suggested that women’s journey to self-fulfilment will inevitabley lie in perfecting their bodies.” pg66.

“The imperative is to better onself not through any intellectual or emotional growth, but through physical remaking.” pg66.

“What makes these message particularly attractive to young women is that they constantly return to the language of empowerment and opportunity.” pg66.

About dressing up: “There is a huge difference between taking pleasure in such pursuits and believing that the only route to confidence and power for a woman lies through constant physical viligance.” pg67.

“Page after page of expensively dressed and made-up young girls exposing such skinny, airbrushed bodies... Relentlessly encouraging their readers to measure up to a raft of celebrites whose doll-like looks are seen as iconic and whose punishing physical regimes are seen as aspirational.” pg67.

Kindersley, T & Vine, S. (2009), Backwards in High Heels, 1st edn, London: Fourth Estate

“These same emancipated working women also tell you that you certainly should be running about town in shoes with four-inch heels.” pg175

“The psychological impact of clothes is undeniable: you can use them as armour, as flirtation, as an expression of self.” pg176

“The consumer society that is so fashionable just now.” pg181

“And that is what the multi-million-pound beauty industry is based on: the culture-induced insecurity of the ordinary woman.” pg294

“It begins early, this eternal dissatisfaction.” pg299

“Looking good is not, as it should be, an art and a pleasure; it has become an obligation, a duty even, yet another hurdle to jump in the already exhausting race to be a successful modern female. If a man is successful, no one cares if his hair is a mess. If a woman is successful, particularly in the public arena, her appearance will be dissected down to the minutest detail. She will find herself hemmed in by the weight of public expectation.” pg299

“They hold up beauty as an ideal to which all women should aspire, even as they are tearing down the women who do in fact possess it.” pg306