Performing Beauty: Dove's “Real Beauty” Campaign

Millard, Jennifer E.

doi:10.1525/si.2009.32.2.146

Cited by 35 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Vannini and McCright (2004) explore the social semiotics of the tanned body and argue that a dominant “seduction frame” aligns an individual's tanned appearance with notions of health, fitness, and beauty. Millard's (2009) study of Dove's “Real Beauty” campaign reveals that social interactions, performances, and self‐presentations construct beauty on a personal and social level. Even interactions occurring in cyberspace have been explored, specifically Waskul's (2002) study of how individuals create meaning by managing their visual appearances online.…”

Section: Symbolic Interactionism Appearance and Identitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Standing OUT/Fitting IN: Identity, Appearance, and Authenticity in Gay and Lesbian Communities

Hutson

2010

Symbolic Interaction

101

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Sexuality scholars have noted the historical connection between appearance and gay or lesbian identity. However, as the social landscape for lesbian women and gay men has shifted over the past forty years, little research has documented how such changes influence gay and lesbian individuals' appearance choices as they form, manage, and maintain their identities. To explore the impact of this "post-closet" (Seidman 2002) era on the identities and appearances of lesbians and gays, in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty individuals, aged eighteen to thirty. Findings suggest that while most people use appearance to attain a sense of authenticity after "coming out, " achieving a feeling of authenticity in gay and lesbian spaces presents unique challenges as individuals come under scrutiny by the community.

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Section: Symbolic Interactionism Appearance and Identitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Standing OUT/Fitting IN: Identity, Appearance, and Authenticity in Gay and Lesbian Communities

Hutson

2010

Symbolic Interaction

101

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“…For example, emergent "love your body" discourses aim to positively affirm women's self-image and selfesteem by celebrating various portrayals of beauty (Gill and Elias, 2014). Dove's famous campaign for "Real Beauty" draws on such discourses, attempting to challenge the status quo around beauty stereotypes by reducing the gap between reality and advertising (Millard, 2009). However, such discourses also engender a shift from "bodily to psychic regulation" (Gill and Elias, 2014: 180), or a combination of both.…”

Section: Affective and Psychic Regulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Wo)men on top? Postfeminist contradictions in young women’s sexual narratives

Rome

Lambert

2020

Marketing Theory

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Feminized sexual consumption has gained increasing legitimacy in the marketplace. Despite calls for critical, feminist perspectives, extant research in marketing continues to prioritize its emancipatory implications. In this article, we draw on the cultural theory of “postfeminism” to critically analyze the sexual narratives of young women. Tightly bound with neoliberal ethics, a postfeminist orientation encourages women—purported to have achieved equality thanks to past feminist activism—to work on, invest in, and manage their sexual lives. This discourse manifests in women’s sexual and intimate experiences in two key ways: first, through their attempts to establish authority and control in their relationships, an endeavor thwarted by neoliberal and patriarchal logics; and second, through an implicit submissive sexual positioning that privileges masculine meanings of sexual pleasure. These findings suggest an inherent contradiction between participants’ understanding of themselves as free, able, and equal, and the constraining, subjugating experiences shaping their relationships and (sexual) lives. Our key contribution to feminist critique and theorizing is to illustrate how postfeminist discourses operate to mask and deny oppressive patriarchal discourses, which paradoxically increases their strength under the guise of female emancipation and consumer choice.

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“…They highlight so-called flaws (like stretch marks, wrinkles or cellulite) to distinguish material bodies from the images that usually inundate viewers. Of course, this celebratory affirmation of flawed realness is fraught with its own set of critiques, especially given its frequent deployment by companies as a marketing tactic (Millard, 2009;Bissell and Rask, 2010). Banet-Weiser (2012), for example, makes the case that discourses of realness and authenticity are frequently commercially co-opted as technologies of branding that thrive on well-established critiques of the mass media's artificial ideals.…”

Section: Real V Perfect (And Other Binaries)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Flaws in the highlightreal: fitstagram diptychs and the enactment of cyborg embodiment

Greene

2020

Feminist Theory

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This article inverts Donna Haraway’s proposition that ‘the ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image’ by instead exploiting everyday experience to approach the contemporary cyborg. It utilises digital tools to compile a corpus of Instagram posts that foreground corporeal hybridity, and examines this social media data through the lenses of feminist STS, affect theory and digital studies. This strategy offers a new vantage on the cyborg by connecting it to concrete and ongoing user practices. To make these interventions, this project focuses specifically on a genre of post popularised by Instagram fitness (or fitstagram) influencers – diptych photographic montages that oppose imperfectly ‘real’ material bodies to unrealistically ‘perfect’ media bodies. Although they formally rely on binary logics (real v. perfect, offline v. online), the posts simultaneously deconstruct them in a number of ways. These repeated boundary transgressions reflect users’ lived experiences of hybrid online/offline corporeality and help forward a theory of cyborg embodiment that relies on quotidian practices as opposed to fixed products or identities. Moreover, close engagement with a final dataset of eighty-nine posts illuminates three particular modes of enacting the cyborg corpus on Instagram: occupation of multiple bodies, awareness of the analogue body and anxious boundary-work. This research extends the cyborg as a critical figure by situating it within a social media context, attending to its imbrication in everyday practices, and affirming female Instagram users as theorists of their cyborg selves.

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Performing Beauty: Dove's “Real Beauty” Campaign

Cited by 35 publications

References 41 publications

Standing OUT/Fitting IN: Identity, Appearance, and Authenticity in Gay and Lesbian Communities

Standing OUT/Fitting IN: Identity, Appearance, and Authenticity in Gay and Lesbian Communities

(Wo)men on top? Postfeminist contradictions in young women’s sexual narratives

Flaws in the highlightreal: fitstagram diptychs and the enactment of cyborg embodiment

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