Description

How advertising and art manipulate body-image norms: a visual analysis with strategies for resistance

Images of bodies operate as powerful signifiers and as cultural determinants. Normative ideas of the body and beauty in particular shape images of the self and the world; they produce bodies that create inequalities and reflect the prevailing relations of power and violence. Which bodies are represented and how? Whose gaze determines them? Which bodies are not shown or only shown in a particular way and in a particular context? Talking Bodies examines mechanisms of representation of the body in media culture--posters and advertisements--from gender stereotypes to images of Black bodies and the representation of disabled and non-normative bodies. With its focus on the construction and impact of body images and on possible strategies of resistance, Talking Bodies offers a critical contribution to current debates.