Selling genital cosmetic surgery to healthy women: a multimodal discourse analysis of Australian surgical websites

Moran, Claire; Lee, Christina

doi:10.1080/17405904.2013.813772

Cited by 50 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 43 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The black-and-white images are associated with traditional, repressed and insecure over-emotional femininities, encoding the 'before' subject of the coaching make-over. Another postfeminist stylistic is the use of women against decontextualized backgrounds, a tactic that can promote postfeminism and neoliberal values (Moran and Lee, 2013). Images on the webpages rarely show women against concrete backgrounds, thus giving the effect of erasing socioeconomic and cultural contexts as if society does not matter, reinforcing a message that universalizes certain feminine values as timeless.…”

Section: Postfeminist Stylisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Postfeminist Stylistics, Work Femininities and Coaching: a Multimodal Study of a Website

Swan

2017

Gender Work & Organization

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The aim of this article is to examine representations of work femininities on a British website offering coaching specifically aimed at women. It builds on and contributes to studies of postfeminist representations but with a specific focus on work femininities and coaching webpages. Although studies on postfeminist representation have analysed the way young women's embodied and sexualized femininities are depicted across a wide variety of mainstream media, there has not been a study that focuses on the representation of work femininities on coaching websites. My approach matters because feminist authors critique popular psychology and link it to postfeminism and neoliberalism, but as yet studies have focused on self‐help books and magazines and not on newer media. Furthermore, coaching websites are an important medium for circulating postfeminist work femininities and psychological advice, produced through the digital labour of women entrepreneurs. Through my analysis of one website, influenced by feminist social semiotic multimodality literature, this article contributes to postfeminist theory and organization studies by explaining how ‘postfeminist stylistics’ reproduce postfeminist tropes and depictions of relational and individualized entrepreneurial femininities visually and textually.

show abstract

Section: Postfeminist Stylisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Postfeminist Stylistics, Work Femininities and Coaching: a Multimodal Study of a Website

Swan

2017

Gender Work & Organization

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…11 Widely available pornography containing selective or digitally altered images, together with limited exposure to other women's genitals, 7 gives a false impression of what is normal. 12 Our research 13 on cosmetic surgery websites that offer labiaplasty shows the pathologising of normal genital diversity, by depicting and describing large labia as abnormal.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What's normal? Influencing women's perceptions of normal genitalia: an experiment involving exposure to modified and nonmodified images

Moran

Lee

2013

BJOG

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Objective Examine women's perceptions of what is 'normal' and 'desirable' in female genital appearance.Design Experiment with random allocation across three conditions. Setting Community.Sample A total of 97 women aged 18-30 years.Methods Women were randomly assigned to view a series of images of (1) surgically modified vulvas or (2) nonmodified vulvas, or (3) no images. They then viewed and rated ten target images of surgically modified vulvas and ten of unmodified vulvas.Main outcome measures Women used a four-point Likert scale ('strongly agree' to 'strongly disagree'), to rate each target image for 'looks normal' and 'represents society's ideal'. For each woman, we created two summary scores that represented the extent to which she rated the unmodified vulvas as more 'normal' and more 'society's ideal' than the modified vulvas.Results For ratings of 'normality,' there was a significant effect for condition (F 2,94 = 2.75 P = 0.007, r 2 adj = 0.082): women who had first viewed the modified images rated the modified target vulvas as more normal than the nonmodified vulvas, significantly different from the control group, who rated them as less normal. For ratings of 'society's ideal', there was again a significant effect for condition (F 2,92 = 7.72, P < 0.001, r 2 adj = 0.125); all three groups rated modified target vulvas as more like society's ideal than the nonmodified target vulvas, with the effect significantly strongest for the women who had viewed the modified images.Conclusions Exposure to images of modified vulvas may change women's perceptions of what is normal and desirable. This may explain why some healthy women seek labiaplasty.

show abstract

“…Popular diabetes-related pages on Facebook therefore represent an apt analytical site for examining multimodal health discourses on SNSs. However, in contrast to Harvey (2013) and Moran and Lee's (2013) studies, which address physiological states at the contested borders of medical pathology, type 1 and type 2 diabetes are widely accepted as deleterious -and currently uncurablehealth problems. It is likely, therefore, that representations of illness will differ from those identified in previous multimodal research as the medical status of diabetes might be assumed to be given knowledge for the viewer.…”

Section: The Internet and Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rather than medicalising bodily diversity, therefore,these Facebook pages semiotically ameliorate long-term illness through their repeated representation of people with diabetes as confident and socially engaged. However, in keeping with Moran and Lee (2013) and Harvey (2013), it is the visual rhetoric of the smiling, confident social actor which acts as the prevailing face of diabetes and provides the visual appeal for social engagement to the pages' viewers. This optimistic vision may well provide a motivation towards active selfmanagement for the pages' diabetic subscribers even while it elides the daily problems of self-care catalogued by many users in the comments they append to posts.…”

Section: Figure 4 -Post To the Diabetes Uk Facebook Pagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similarly, Moran and Lee's (2013) multimodal analysis of websites that promote female genital cosmetic surgery identifies a comparable representation of people who undergo medical procedures as conventionally attractive, able bodied and desirable. Web content produced by cosmetic surgery businesses present the recipient of surgery as empowered, playful and sexually confident and also employ 'demand' images to draw the viewer into this representation of 'successful femininity ' (2013, p. 377).…”

Section: The Internet and Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The many faces of diabetes: A critical multimodal analysis of diabetes pages on Facebook

Hunt

2015

Language & Communication

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Selling genital cosmetic surgery to healthy women: a multimodal discourse analysis of Australian surgical websites

Cited by 50 publications

References 43 publications

Postfeminist Stylistics, Work Femininities and Coaching: a Multimodal Study of a Website

Postfeminist Stylistics, Work Femininities and Coaching: a Multimodal Study of a Website

What's normal? Influencing women's perceptions of normal genitalia: an experiment involving exposure to modified and nonmodified images

The many faces of diabetes: A critical multimodal analysis of diabetes pages on Facebook

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About