Thin White Women in Advertising. Deathly Corporeality.2003

Journal of Consumer Culture
http://joc.sagepub.com Thin White Women in Advertising: Deathly Corporeality

Sean Redmond Journal of Consumer Culture 2003; 3; 170 DOI: 10.1177/14695405030032002 The online version of this article can be found at: http://joc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/3/2/170
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Journal of Consumer Culture
ARTICLE
Thin White Women in Advertising

Deathly corporeality
SEAN REDMOND Southampton Institute
Abstract. This article examines the way that contemporary British womens magazine advertising employs idealized images of thin white women to confer status on a range of beauty products and services. These lean, pure, radiant images of white women are imagined to be natural sources of light, beauty, and the entry point (with the product) to a higher state of female grace. However, the article also addresses what is argued to be the absence effect and the lack of corporeal life that is also at the core of many of these lacking images of white women. The article argues that such textual ruptures and contradictions, in turn, point to the way that thinness itself, as a self-willed body project, can be considered to be a resistant body practice, or one that draws attention to the life and death struggle at the heart of what it means to be a good white woman in a patriarchal society. Key words absence q commodity fetish q esh q glow q holy anorexia q resistance
INTRODUCTION In this article I intend to look at whiteness in terms of specic articulating processes around womanhood, femininity, and body design. Through the case study of mainly contemporary UK magazine health and lifestyle advertising I will address the way thinness, female beautication, and skin colour (as both metaphor and literal sign system) work to both commodify and valorize white womanhood as a beauty and moral ideal and to produce self-surveillance and dietary practices in the behaviour of real
Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 3(2): 170190 [1469-5405 (200307) 3:2; 170190; 034013]
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Redmond / Thin white women in advertising
female readers that renders their thin, white, female bodies as docile, boundaried, and under strict control. However, it is also my intention to work through to a set of possibly more contradictory representational articulations produced by such advertising texts. By adopting a Gramscian position I hope to demonstrate that advertising texts which attempt to construct an idealized version of white womanhood, through the lter of thinness, inevitably open up ideological spaces where such skeletal visions of whiteness can be seen to be deathlike and destructive, and where self-surveillance and dietary practices can be seen to be resistant, counter-hegemonic performance strategies. I want to draw on both Mary Ann Doane (1982) and Judith Butler (1990) here, who both argue, in relation to gender performance, and the use of parody in drag and cross-dressing, that femininity can read as masquerade. My adoption of this position, in relation to whiteness, is that the representation of thin white women in advertising, and what I see as connected performative body projects such as anorexia, work to show idealized white femininity as always a contradictory form of representation, and as something which can manifest itself in resistant body behaviours. In this article, then, I argue that the representation of thin white women in advertising, produced in a fashion-beauty complex (Bartky, 1990) largely controlled and constructed by white men, can actually produce textual ruptures where the representation on offer becomes an embodied critique of idealized white femininity, a rejection of white patriarchy, and one which can anchor or give meaning to resistant strategies in the behaviours of those reading white women who come to see (themselves) through the lens more darkly. The article begins with an historical and contextual account of the way the thin, female body has been represented in the media and popular culture more generally. This critical overview is then connected to sociological and psychological studies on body satisfaction in women, and to the racial codings that go into the representation of female thinness. Whiteness is more explicitly picked up at this point in the article and textually examined in relation to its position as the feminine ideal. Finally, the article goes on to explore the argument that there is actually an unstable, life and death struggle at the core of a number of British womens magazine adverts that feature thin white women as their objects of beauty and identication. THIN WOMEN IN ADVERTISING Within consumer culture the body is proclaimed as a vehicle of pleasure: its desirable and desiring and the closer the actual body
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Journal of Consumer Culture 3(2)
approximates to idealised images of youth, health, tness and beauty the higher its exchange value. Consumer culture permits the unashamed display of the human body. (Featherstone, 1991: 177) The contemporary popular media is saturated in images of thin and healthy and beautiful female bodies. Female lm stars, pop stars, cat-walk models, television hosts, the leading lady of romantic ction narrative, and advertising hoardings, in the main, operate under a tyranny of slenderness (Chernin, 1983), where thin is beautiful, desirable, and valuable (transferring success onto a range of life goals, practices and products, and women who t the thin ideal). Eileen Guillen and Susan Barr (1994) looked at body representation in the US adolescent magazine Seventeen between 1970 and 1990, and found the over-determination of the thin body and the contribution to what they saw as the expected female norm to be thin. Similarly, Silverstein et al. (1986) looked at body size in 33 television shows and found that 69 per cent of female characters were coded as thin, while only 5 per cent of female characters were thought of as heavy or large. In terms of the types of female body most frequently found in the womens magazines Ladies Home Journal and Vogue, Silverstein et al. (1986) also found not only that a thin body dominated copy, but that the female bodies represented in the magazines had become signicantly thinner since the 1930s. The historical emergence of the super-thin body is something picked up by Schwartz (1986), Bordo (1993) and Grogan (1999). Grogan charts a cultural change in the perception and representation of the ideal female body from the voluptuous gures favoured from the middle ages to the turn of this century, to the thin body types favoured by the fashion magazines of today (p. 285). Grogan locates the 1920s as a key moment where the idealization of slimness is rst produced in the successful marketing strategies of the fashion and cosmetics industry. The female body then goes through a series of different incarnations over the course of the century, all of them market led the apper of the 1920s; the rounded and shapely gure of lm stars such as Lana Turner and Jane Russell in the 1930s and 1940s; in the 1950s and 1960s, a return to the slim ideal with the iconic status of such stars/celebrities as Grace Kelly and Twiggy; and in the contemporary age, an exaggeration of the slim ideal in the waif-like body ideal, represented through such models as Kate Moss. Bordo (1993) also shows that the ideological positions and meanings taken from thin and fat bodies went through an inversion at the turn of
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the last century: at rst, thinness is associated with illness because of its link to tuberculosis (TB), while plumpness connotes wealth (when male) and fecundity and beauty (when female). However, what then happens is that the existence, the very appearance of excess esh comes to be seen as an indicator of a lack of self-control and discipline, an indicator, in fact, of low morality. By contrast, slenderness comes to embody being in control of ones potentially wayward and immoral body, an indicator or embodiment of culturedness and civility. This is symbolized through the way the thin body is represented as a healthy, beautiful, successful body in a range of visual popular media texts. Bordo, utilizing the writings of Foucault, argues that it is because patriarchy increasingly needed to have the (female) body under control, regulated and boundaried, that thinness achieves its status as an ultimate ideal in the 20th century. Female thinness becomes a social control mechanism or a body that is absolutely tight, contained, bolted down, rm (1993: 190) and therefore both xed in meaning and passive in orientation. For Bordo, nowhere is this more evident than in contemporary health and beauty adverts where the construction of the body as an alien attacker, threatening to erupt in unsightly displays of bulging esh, is a ubiquitous cultural image (1993: 189). Susie Orbach (1993) draws some powerful parallels between esh and power and gender norms. Flesh, corporeal substance, bulkiness is an associated male trait, at least in honed muscle form, and helps connote notions of natural male physical power within society. Fleshy women, by contrast, seem like a form of matter out of place, and a threat to such normative associations about how and why mens and womens bodies work the way they do. So if women cannot have eshy, bulky bodies then they have to keep their bodies thin and marginal through cultivation practices. As Orbach contends, The receptivity that women show (across class, ethnicity, and through generations) to the idea that their bodies are like gardens arenas for constant improvement and resculpturing rooted in the recognition of their bodies as commodities creates all sorts of body image problems for women. (1993: 17) It is this very conception of the female body as a type of commodity fetish that Orbach goes on to explore. Orbach argues that from the very early stages of primary socialization, young girls are taught to view their bodies as commodities in the dual sense that ideal girls/womens bodies are used to eroticize and humanize, and sell an enormous range of products; and in
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the sense that idealized girls/womens bodies are themselves sexually objectied or presented as the ultimate commodity (1993: 17) within popular culture. Orbach makes a link between this objectication of the ideal thin female body and the rise of anorexia nervosa in women, increasingly, of all ages. Over the past 10 years there have been numerous studies on the relationship between the representation of the thin female body and body satisfaction in women. Lori Irving (1991) looked at the effects of viewing slides of thin models on 162 women college students with eating disorders. Irving found that exposure to thin models resulted in lowered self-esteem, especially around appearance and body size. Irving also discovered that in terms of perceived social pressure on staying thin and looking good, the media was rated as the most powerful inuence. Myers and Biocca (1992) found that one in three of all adverts involved attractiveness-based messages and that the long-term effects on real body esteem were devastating. Over time women would hold up their own bodies in a mirror to/with ideal bodies, and see themselves as lacking and faulty. Myers and Biocca concluded that body image is elastic and susceptible to external forces and media pressures. Leslie Heinberg and Kevin Thompson (1995) looked at the effects of ideal-model centred adverts on 139 women and found that women who were already suffering from low self-esteem became less satised with their own bodies after exposure to such adverts. Grogan et al. (1996) assessed the effects on both men and women of viewing slim, ideal images of themselves. They concluded that both men and women came to be less satised, or to have reduced body esteem, after viewing such images. All in all, the weight of research conducted on body esteem and behaviour modication in relation to exposure to media images of the thin and beautiful female body suggests a close correlation. However, what I would also like to suggest about these research ndings in general is that there is a key bridge between them other than the one linked to thinness and body esteem. Much of the research has tended to focus on white female/male participants and on white beauty ideals, not least because, as the research ndings conrm, the modern media is awash with such white female idealized images. What is being produced, therefore, as a body of knowledge, is an understanding of how white, thin female bodies are constructed as ideals and how white females come to struggle with their own bodies and body esteem because of, or in spite of, the skeletal images they consume. Where research has been carried out on black women and their bodies a different picture seems to emerge.
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A 1995 study by researchers at the University of Arizona, entitled Body Image and Weight Concerns Among African American and White Adolescent Females: Differences that Make a Difference, found that black girls who were thick bodied were happier with their bodies than white girls, who disliked their bodies, perceived themselves to be overweight (even when they were not) and who often dieted or starved to achieve the ideal or idealized body size. White girls also connected dieting and being thin as the project that would lead them to achieving a more perfect life, with more friends and more boyfriends. By contrast, black girls emphasized personality traits over the physical when describing their ideal selves. Media images of beautiful bodies were seen to be important here: white girls were/are repeatedly bombarded with the white and thin female ideal, while black girls, because of the symbolic annihilation of the black female body in the media, through absence or animalistic fetishization, had fewer of their images with which to enter into a dialogue. Duquin (1989) found that only 3 per cent of all adverts in 13 US womens magazines depicted visible-minority women. McMahon (1990),Williamson (1986) and hooks (1992) have argued that models coded along ethnic lines are used to convey the sense of the exotic, and their otherness acts to normalize and entrench the dominant ideal of white beauty. Across the body of work, then, on both women in advertising and thin women in advertising, there seems to be a clearly entrenched racial coding to the beautications on offer: the appearance of the beautiful, beautifulbecause-thin white woman is an over-determining ideal image, commodity fetish and wish fullment in popular culture. Fat and esh are, by contrast, immoral and failing markers for the white woman, and so the excess esh needs to be burned, punished, repulsed.The immorality of weighty or bulky white female body can also be linked to racial transgression since it becomes more like the thick bodied black body, splitting open the very notion that racial superiority and difference resides in the body. This is why thin white women in the real world train and starve their bodies, why they go to work on their bodies in ever more extreme ways. However, it is precisely this notion of training and working that I think problematizes the dialectic between image/text/representation and consumption and behaviour change. The very nature of having to work the body to achieve the ideal body opens up spaces of resistance, contestation and opposition that I also think reside in adverts that have worked in thin white women at their centre. What I would like to do now is examine the white female bodies found in contemporary health and lifestyle adverts with the intention of looking into the lens a little more darkly.
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THIN WHITE WOMEN IN ADVERTS The current body of fashion is taut, small-breasted, and of a slimness bordering on emaciation; it is a silhouette that seems more appropriate to an adolescent boy or a newly pubescent girl than to an adult woman. (Bartky, 1990) White women in adverts are often narrativized in symbolically loaded white settings, with carefully selected iconography that uses both the colour white to connote ideas of purity and innocence and radiance, and high-key light to bathe the female model in an imaginary halo that therefore marks her out as heavenly. These white women are invariably thin, often blonde, and through the combination of setting, colour scheme, and lighting effect are constructed as corporeal real but yet translucent, ephemeral, spiritual/heavenly representations. This is an idealized representation, which, by corporeal and symbolic denition, only thin white women can achieve. Let me take an example to make an initial exploration of these ideas. In the Let the Mood Take You to Bordeaux magazine advertising campaign of 2001, red and white wines are represented in starkly different ways. In the double page advert (found running, for example, in The Observer magazine during the summer) the red wine is imagined in a passionate, darkly lit mise-en-scne with a voluptuous, pouting, dark-haired model, dressed in a red velvet dress, dominating the image. Emotive words such as full bodied provide the evocative anchorage to the pre-coital encounter. The full bodied red wine, it is signied, takes the imagined male purchaser to this passionate moment, into the arms, the full body of the/a seductive and highly eroticized woman. This risky woman is all body (just like the wine), but because she is all body and sexually charged she has to be represented through symbolism which smothers her in danger the redish darkness of the shot, and the red velvet dress almost transform her into a complete sexual fetish. The white wine, by contrast, is imagined in a natural outdoor setting, with two lifetime friends caught in a nostalgic moment of recounting innocent childhood memories. Both friends are blonde haired, although one has long blonde hair that, because of the sunlight (high-key light) that falls onto it, literally appears to glow. In fact, this friend glows all over: the long, owing, glowing hair falls onto her exposed neck and shoulders, and again because of the sunlight, because of her full, whiter-than-white smile, and because of the white dress that she wears, creates the appearance that she herself radiates light. Richard Dyer (1997) has suggested that the production of a glow is central to idealizing white womanhood:
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Idealized white women are bathed in and permeated by light. It streams through them and falls on to them from above. In short, they glow. They glow rather than shine. The light within or from above appears to suffuse the body. Shine, on the other hand, is light bouncing off the surface of the skin. It is the mirror effect of sweat, itself connoting physicality, the emissions of the body and unladylike behaviour, in the sense of both work and parturition. (1997: 122) Her friend, also blonde and also smiling, has some of this glow about her too: in fact in the way the are positioned, face to face, foreheads and arms touching (as if, in this childhood garden that they have returned to, this is the moment where a long-time secret has just been shared), the glow appears to pass between them and through them, as if this is a natural essence that belongs to them, that binds together their friendship. However, subtle differences are encoded between the two friends in the advert: the short-haired blonde friend holds the glass of white wine in the air: her friend innocently clutches a piece of ivy; the short-haired blonde wears a owery, brightly coloured dress in contrast to the whiterthan-white dress of her friend; the short-haired blonde is given more of the appearance that she has worked on her appearance the designer bobbed hair, the earring, the fashion statement dress in contrast to the heavenly, naturally dened friend who, it is implied, appears as nature intended. In short, to accommodate some of the risk of the wine, and some of the modernity of adulthood, a big sister and little sister narrative is created. Both sisterfriends glow, both sisterfriends have radiance and beauty, both sisterfriends are thin, but only one sisterfriend has the full aura of childhood innocence and virginity around her shoulders. The cottage background, and the verdant green garden they sit in recalls their childhood days, supported by the poetic, dislocated prose that lls an oversized wine glass on the accompanying page, childhood friends cool clouds melting secret blossoming laughter, but it is the long-haired blonde friend who seems closer to the purity and the innocence of those halcyon days. But thinness, I want to also argue, is crucial here in constructing this version of idealized white femininity made translucent. The advert not only relies on symbolism, mise-en-scne, iconography and non-verbal communication to establish notions of glowing beauty and innocence, but on a vanishing corporeality, or a minimization of the white female bodies in question.
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While it is clear that the advert relies on the two bodies to connote some of the tranquillity of hot, summer days, and to help structure the looking in terms of a voyeuristic gaze there is also, clearly, a degree of to-be-looked-at-ness (Mulvey, 1975) in the presentation of these bodies the two bodies are also meant to signify for degrees of absence or for uidity, for body borders and boundaries that dissolve in the shimmer of the glow that surrounds them. The two bodies, suffused in this glow, caught up in all this innocence and tranquillity, appear to be able to oat right off the page. The two sisterfriends, then, are heavenly in appearance and angelic in connotation. Angels are where earthly, feminine-pure corporeality melts into air for the highest state of feminine being. The two heavenly bodies in fact are meant to embody the pale, fresh, light and airy white wine that, in the pictorial composition, where it is shown in the oversized glass that also has the emotive text written across it, allows light and background setting to pass through it. A quasi-religious state of affairs sancties the holy commodication on offer. Thin bodies do this passing through best because there is not much to them in the rst place, their lines and shapes being economical. But with glow, with haze and shimmer alongside, above, beyond, and owing over the skin the thinness makes it easier for the body borders to be seen to disappear, or oat upwards. But not only this the thinness produces the sense that these bodies have been kept natural, unpolluted, and pure. The implied abstinence, especially in relation to the long-haired blonde sisterfriend (who hasnt even let the wine touch her lips), who is coded as more angelic and heavenly, suggests containment and self-control. In this oscillating mix of uidity and yet self-control, of translucence and yet xivity, the cultural signicance/importance of the thin, white woman is realized. She is body that is self-contained and controlled, and through such self-regulation marked by abstinence (nothing or very little enters her body), she is pure; but being pure she naturally glows, and in glowing the very minimal borders of her body are allowed to oat away into a heavenly state of grace. No wonder, then, the white wine wants to be associated with such a powerful mythos or discursive formation since the value transference will grant the wine both the value of the highest status commodity fetish, and the apparent ascension into a state of eternal grace white wine, in fact, re-imagining its link to the body of Christ through these ascending angels. No wonder, then, white women feel both touched by the glow of their white skin, and yet terrorized by the implications and demands put on them and their bodies, to achieve such a glow. To summarize: this advert is not simply about the selling of white wine
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through the literal and metaphorical association with an idealized version of white womanhood. Alongside its tools of persuasion and manipulation are its hyper-ritualizations (Goffman, 1979), gender inscripted tableaux (Marchand, 1985), and cultivation and grooming lesson(s) on what constitutes the perfect white woman (Orbach, 1993). Through adverts like this, it can be contended, white women are presented with ideal images of themselves and they are encouraged, interpolated, to think that the rub of the glow, and the beautiful thinness of the white body, will become a part of their everyday lives, will become them, if only they beautify, diet, and remain pure in body and in mind. However, I think two problems emerge which complicate or open up the dominant and closed-off reading I have just produced for the white wine advert. First, not only does a great deal of apparent construction and gender performance go into the implied narrative of this advert the representation is full of excess but some of the contradiction and contestation of what it means to be an ideal white woman clearly nds its way into the advert, threatening to tear its coherency of message open. For example, the two sisterfriends have to be both ideal bodies, that is, pretty, physical bodies, to be admired and fantasized over, and no bodies at all, or bodies that dissolve in glow and apparition, that is, if the ascension motif is to truly work. Similarly, the slightly less than natural sisterfriend has a degree of modernity and autonomy (she is having all the fun) that potentially carries a weight of identication above and beyond the one true angel. Second, if there is the potential for semiotic spillage and representational fracture, then reader responses and behaviour modication may be more radical and subversive. One could argue, borrowing from Palmer (1980), that white women who diet to excess are engaged in a rejection of feminine identity, or in my inection, a rejection of idealized white femininity, so that rather than dieting and starving the body being slavish responses to the cult of (white) femininity, they are examples of resistant, counter-hegemonic responses by white women who deliberately take the mythos of the glowing, absent white body to their logical extreme so that they literally disappear from sight. This could itself be seen as an inversion of the concept of holy anorexia where, as Bell (1985) has argued, starvation was seen as a way for women to experience the sufferings experienced by Christ. In my inection this is a form of quasi-blasphemy where holiness is itself being parodied. In this process of parodic excess (Benson, 1997: 142) these women may have seen the dark side of the white lens more clearly than anyone
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else and may be responding with embodied excesses of their own. What I would like to do now is explore these arguments through looking at a range of modern UK health and lifestyle adverts found across a range of monthly womens magazines THE TYRANNY AND MUTINY OF WHITE SLENDERNESS Modern UK health and lifestyle advertising is saturated in images of thin white women, objectied, to varying degrees, in a state of grace. Taking a snapshot of a range of best selling glossy teen and womens magazines from MarchApril 2002, I want to look at the type of ideal female most commonly represented in terms of this trope of whitely thinness. The best selling magazines I have chosen to examine are: Cosmopolitan, aimed at (professional, working) women in their early-to-late 20s; Company, with a slightly younger professional prole; B, with a similar readership prole to Company; 19, aimed at older working/non-working teenagers; Bliss, aimed at younger school/college-based teenagers; Hair and Beauty, aimed at women in their early to late 20s; and NewU Health and Slimming, aimed at a very wide age range of girls and women since, as the magazine itself suggests in its advertorials, all women need to renew themselves through health and diet regimes. A number of similarities and differences can be immediately identied with regard to the number and type of adverts found across these magazines. Cosmopolitan (March 2002) has 97 clearly dened adverts in an edition with 364 pages in it. However, the magazine is also full of covert adverts in the form of Cosmo-Promotions, competitions and fashion shoots where a range of beauty and fashion brands are threaded into the narrative of the magazine. Of the 97 adverts, only one uses models of a non-white appearance (and this also actually pictures the only non-white faces in the whole magazine). The GAP New Khaki advert stars three oriental models, positioned as friends, in close body proximity, all wearing different khaki coloured versions of the high-fashion trousers. The visual and representational play here is, of course, all about different types of browns literally presented in the different shades of the trousers but personied in the different shades of hair and skin colour of the three oriental models presented. Of all the other adverts that use models to sell their products, beautiful, thin white women are the objects/subjects of choice. In Cosmopolitan the vast majority of adverts are for hair, beauty (make-up, moisturizer, skin lotion, perfume etc.), clothing and dieting products, with the rest of the adverts (less than 10) for cars, alcohol, and domestic items such as cat food
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and toilet tissue. Representationally, close-up, high-key lit shots of the face; long shots of the whole body (undressing, or naked, or being made up, or caught in a romantic embrace, and/or being touched or caressed by the model herself); and fragmented shots of parts of the body (legs, arms, breasts, cheeks) dominate the image system on offer. Women models are being systematically eroticized, fetishized and commodied in exactly the manner that Berger (1972), Bordo (1993), McCracken (1993) and Orbach (1993) have identied with regards to media culture. Nonetheless, throughout, as I will presently argue, ephemeral and translucent images of the idealized white woman are also central to the commodication on offer. Company (April 2002) has 59 overt adverts in an edition with 217 pages in it but, as is the case with Cosmopolitan and the rest of the magazines that I am analysing, covert advertising increases this amount considerably. Woven into the very fabric of these magazines, then, is a fashionbeauty synergy where advertorials, promotions, competitions, and fashion shoots carry on and carry over the adverts preoccupation with beautication, thinness, and self-presentation. There is both a cult of femininity (Ferguson, 1983) aligned with a tyranny of slenderness in operation here. In this edition of Company, two linked adverts for Benetton are the only ones to carry non-white models. Benetton, of course, imagines itself as a utopian brand, uniting people of different skin colours/races through the magical, healing qualities of their clothes. Both adverts here one with a close-up of a smiling black girl, face-on, and one with Siamese twins, identically dressed captures this sense of hands-across-the-world but with a degree of racial mythology clearly built in. The rest of the adverts in this edition follow the Cosmopolitan prole I outlined above in terms of the female subjects/objects under the commodity gaze, in terms of the representational codes used to photograph them, and in terms of the idealized versions of white femininity found across the adverts. In fact, the same adverts repeatedly run across the two magazines (and to a degree all the magazines under analysis here) conrming the saturating nature of an ongoing advertising campaign, and the extent to which advertisers target both similar and divergent types of female readers. However, one difference does emerge: in Company there are a greater number of adverts for tanning: perhaps this is because the April edition heralds the spring/summer holiday period, and the reader imagined reality that skin is again being revealed in public places as the weather gets warmer. In these adverts, tanning is constructed as an attempt/need/desire to be less pale, less white, less anaemic looking, and more healthy, and so this is something I do want to go onto explore since the representation inverts the meaning of whiteness, and
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reverts to the whiteness equals sickness (is in fact death-like) relationship that held at the turn of the last century. In the April (2002) 154 page edition of B there are 32 overt adverts, but none that feature non-white models. Again, adverts for hair, health, and beauty dominate. In 19 there are 23 overt adverts in an edition of 130 pages, with one black model found in a Government-sponsored ecstasy awareness/drugs helpline advert. Again, both the same type of advert, and the same brands found in the other magazines, nd their way into 19: Garnier hair, Dove shampoo, Rimmel make-up, Palmers cocoa butter formula, Max Factor, and Impulse deodorant are the major reoccurring branded adverts. In Bliss (April 2002) there are 27 adverts in an edition of 122 pages, but here there is a greater use of, and visibility for, non-white models: black and Asian models appear in at least four adverts although for three of these the adverts are Government-sponsored two for Aim Higher, a skills and education-based initiative, and one for drugs helpline/ecstasy awareness. The irony of this should not be lost: in the reality-based world of Government advertising, black women nd themselves being represented, made visible, but only in the context of under-achievement (the Aim Higher campaign is a push to get more black girls to apply to Higher Education), and drug taking. By sharp contrast, in the fantasy land of high fashion, dream dates, and beauty ideals, black girls are nowhere to be found. In Bliss, 19, Cosmopolitan, B, and Company it is white girls who get the chance to try out all these goods: it is white girls who are presented as the embodiments of cultural, universal beauty. White girls glow, they have all the luck. Neither the NewU Health & Slimming magazine (issue 2, 2002) or the Hair & Beauty magazine (April/May 2002) have any overt adverts within them. NewU is entirely composed of health and slimming features, articles, and interactive health, diet, and tness charts that women readers are supposed to utilize to take control of bodies that have gone wayward this side of Christmas. The magazine is full of quasi-physiological and biological information and advice about how to get t, stay healthy, and lose weight. Real women who have defeated their bulges and bulks are featured in real life stories, while major and minor celebrities are interviewed about their lifestyles. Positive, glamorous images of these celebrities occur throughout the magazine in both interior (fully dressed) and exterior (acres of esh) settings. As such, celebrity status and thinness are being conated in ways that try to convince women that glamour and thinness are closely related and highly achievable if women beautify and learn to control their bulges. Hair & Beauty features a gallery of beautiful models/hairstyles, so that
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on page after page the reader is presented with a beautiful face, a glamorous, stylish hair design, and a new intoxicating hair colour. For the most part, then, it is hair that is being fetishized and the face that is being objectied. However, if there is one magazine where glow, shine and light are constructed as the most positive, life-determining forces then it is Hair & Beauty. There are three key areas that I would like to now look at in terms of idealized versions of white femininity. First, I want to explore the way adverts across these magazines all utilize the idea of light, literally, metaphorically, visually and through advertising copy, to suggest that glow and radiance are the dening markers of female health and beauty. Second, I want to examine those adverts (which seem to dominate the magazines) where idealized versions of white femininity are conjured up through lighting effect, dress, embodiment, body language, and mise-en-scne. Third, I want to very briey look at a range of contrasting adverts particularly the tanning adverts where colour and risk are utilized to construct more apparently energized and sexualized feminine images. The overall aim remains to both show how idealized white womanhood comes into being but also to show how, in coming into being, contradictions and ruptures necessarily accompany it. We live now, virtually everywhere, in a world that is potentially permanently illuminated, in which it is generally possible to let light be at human will and in which articial light can reach further and more effectively than the brightest sunshine. (Dyer, 1997: 106) Richard Dyer (1997) has suggested that we live in a culture of light (1997: 103) where visibility, seeing, is an indicator of authenticity, knowability, and where giving off light is imagined as a highly positive attribute. People who shine, radiate, glow, have sunshine smiles or who light up a grey day are those who are picked out (often, literally the brightest kids make it onto the catwalk, into catalogue magazines, and into the very best universities) as carriers of the most precious of human qualities. In this culture of light, as Dyer contends, it is whiteness which is so clearly light producing, which is even made up from light itself, white people are central to it, to the extent that they come to seem to have a special relationship to light (1997: 103). Black people, by contrast, are dark, they soak up light or it reects off their skin because it doesnt really belong there on the unknowable surface of their bodies (black bodies, as Dyer also demonstrates, are harder to light and photograph). Many of the adverts within the magazines I am looking at reproduce this culture of light. In fact, I would like
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to argue that for every hair product, and for most of the skin products in these magazines, light imagined as glow, shine, radiance, and vitality is the essence of the persuasion, the positive value transference on offer. And since it is white women caught up in and giving off this radiant light (triggered by the use of a product), it is white femininity that is being valorized and naturalized. Light is used in the following ways. High-key light is used to eradicate shadow and line, and to produce the effect that the models hair, eyes, face, or full body is caught up in a natural, heavenly glow. What produces this glow is imagined as not some unseen, articial light (the lighting rig effaced from the narrative of almost all adverts) but the light that comes naturally from within the white models very state of being. Of course, the product has had to ignite or switch on this light, but there is never any question that light the light of life, the light of natural beauty is a corporeal reality for the white woman, or something that is already there within her, that belongs to her. The Lancome Miracle perfume advert, found in Cosmoplitan, features a blue-eyed, blonde model caught in the dazzling rays of a bright sun. The advert is in part tinted pink, with the sky, clouds, two suns, and over-sized perfume bottle (pictured to the left of the model, in this double-page spread) painted in an expressionistic, moody pink. The glare of the rst sun catches the perfume bottle in exactly the same way, in what is a mirroring metaphor, as the second sun catches the model. Light radiates towards the perfume/model, and in turn glow and light rises out off the bottle, out of or off of the models skin, with its source coming from within the lan of the model. She (the model) is a miracle, a mirage: a heavenly, romantic expanse of light. She is the ultimate ideal. She is light. This physical use of light seems to structure almost all the adverts that have beautiful white women as their commodity fetish. Whether it be for make up, moisturizer, shampoo, or hair colour, light simultaneously falls on and emanates from the face, lips, arms, torso, and hair that is being focused upon. Light is the signier of beauty, of desirability, of vitality. Light is what white women have in abundance if only they bothered to beautify. Light, as Richard Dyer (1997) has also argued, is what makes white women distinct. But light is also materialized and sanctied through the advertising copy or anchorage that accompanies many of these adverts: Cointreau: glow with Cointreau; Revlon: the rst mascara to use light-interplay technology to illuminate your eyes; LOral: new shock resist shine and staying power; Garnia: new Garnia Lumia brightening colour creme . . .
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low in ammonia yet full of light; LOral Moussing Wax: make your hair shine with light; Maybelline: new water shine diamonds . . . shimmering . . . sparkling lipstick; Garnier: blonding highlights; Nivea Pearl and Shine lip care: add dazzle to your smile; Elizabeth Arden Revitalizing Treatment: reveal skin that is visibly rmer, incredibly smooth, clearly glowing. Elizabeth Ardens Peel & Reveal Revitalzing Treatment, found in Company, features a black and white medium shot of the neck and face of a model applying the treatment. This face also radiates light but largely because the monochrome effect empties the shot of competing textures the model has a awless, radiant complexion that seems to be the very essence of pure light. The colour white is also used symbolically here through the brush that is used to put the treatment on. The clinically clean white applicator connects the treatment to science, to the laboratory, to the invention and experiment that produces this marvellous new skin care. Good, rejuvenating science is generally symbolically encoded through white iconography (white lab coats) and mise-en-scne (white-walled laboratories), as it is here with the white brush, sterile-clean applicator captured against a white backdrop. But good science is white encoded, or light encoded in another sense, because good science is simultaneously also a creator of light or all things that are benecial to the culture of light it operates within. The white applicator here applies that gel that lights up the skin and takes dullness away. Peel & Reveal Revitalizing Treatment, then, is a product of white science, and a commodity product that promises light at the end of the tunnel for dry, dull skin. The advertising copy draws together these twinned motifs of light and science in a much more explicit way. The occupational language used to describe the product and its effects is quasi-scientic: retexturing, extract, exfoliators, and, of course, treatment. The benets of the treatment are described in terms of rejuvenation and light as if the skin care will produce a new state of being (an accession) for the treated skin: lift away dullness . . .,discover new texture and tone, ne lines seem to fade way, reveal skin that is visibly rmer. However, Peel & Reveal is also suggested to be a natural product made from cabernet grapeseed extract and natural exfoliators, and this is another element in the good science trope, since good science harnesses the natural, and deplores the articial. Peel & Reveal is a natural stimulator of light for skin, for white women who, as I have already contended, have that natural source of light within them anyway but need the trigger to set it off. But Peel & Reveal is also suggested to do something else in this
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advertising copy, a suggestion that, in fact, hinges on a paradox or oxymoron, and one that again points to and conrms the impossible duality of idealized white female embodiment in our culture of light. The advertising copy opens with the line now you see it, now you dont. The line suggests that, before white women use Peel & Reveal, they are highly visible because of the dullness, dry akes and surface signs of stress on their skin. However, once they use the treatment, such visibility becomes a thing of the past as women swap ne lines and pores for translucency in the form of smoothness and glow. The advert, then, promises white women that they will be less visible, or rather that their visibility will be all about an ephemeral absence, a heavenly state of grace if they use this revitalizing treatment. It is connoted that less (dullness, physicality) is more (light, glow). White women need to have great skin that is dened by its nothingness, by its smoothness, softness, glowyness by its absence effect, in fact. But this is precisely where the impossible nature of this duality lies: white women are asked to make up themselves so that they appear not to be made up at all, so that they appear natural or naturally absent all glow, in a heavenly state of grace. White women are asked to work at their state of grace even while they are being told that this state of grace exists within. Nature, the essential, and the manufactured get mixed up in what are often representations of excess. This is then the terror, but also the confusion at the core of images of white femininity. These are the spaces where gaps, silences and the potential for oppositional readings emerge. This paradoxical state of being, as it is imagined in Peel & Reveal, and as I have argued it is imagined in the white wine advert, may work to produce excessive responses in women readers, from cosmetic surgery, skin lightening, to anorexia nervosa practices. Real white women make themselves less because they are told it is more; or real white women see through the paradox of less is more, and deliberately take the message system to its logical conclusion by literally disappearing out of sight. White women disappear almost out of sight in many of these advertising images because lighting effect and advertising copy are combined with other representational and advertising strategies. Across a range of adverts, for a diverse range of products, blue-eyed, blonde-haired women, bathed in light, with awless thin bodies, and faces, are found in abundance. These women glow, and the products often glow beside them, or on them. Gold and white clothes are worn, and innocence and naturalness are connoted as belonging to the ideal white woman who beauties and regulates her body with the named product on show, and often in use. In B, Clarins energizing morning cream is described as the secret of
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radiant skin and the close-up shot of a awless, fresh looking high-key lit models face (with natural blonde hair oating at the edges of the shot) conrms this state of radiance a radiance that itself conrms the essential ingredients of an idealized white female beauty; Garniers blonding highlights is described as sexy, subtle and looks professional, and the medium shot of a glowing, smiling, radiant looking blonde-haired model conrms and personies the message of the advertising copy. In this advert those women who dont have natural blonde hair are promised the attributes and the values that blonde hair can bring. They are promised natural light that other people (signicant others) will take for naturalness. In Cosmopolitan, the advert for Estee Lauders advanced night repair eye recovery complex is bathed in a golden aura: the blonde-haired, blue-eyed model has golden skin, and wears a gold-coloured nightdress, while the lettering on the product and the top of the product are in gold too. The whole advert is saturated with an ethereal quality that renders the imagery that oating-away effect; Cliniques Happy perfume advert has a black and white medium-close-up shot of a model supposedly caught in a moment of pure happiness: the face is high-key lit, in the middle of a wide-open smile, and sunowers are falling into the models hair. Her white, sleeveless top extends the connotation of innocent, radiant beauty captured in a magically real moment of loving life; the advert for Chanel No 5 superimposes a golden-dressed, golden-skinned, golden-haired model against a giant, golden-lit No 5 sign, with the bottle of perfume, shot as if it is falling, pouring out golden drops of perfume; in the advert for Max Factors hypersmooth foundation, the close-up shot of the models face is so pale, light, and smooth that it would disappear into the page if it wasnt for the models own lips and eyelashes. The face is all light, and one could disappear into its milky substance. In Company, the advert for LOrals Elvive shampoo features the blonde-haired, light-generating Claudia Schiffer; John Friedas Sheer Blonde shampoo features two blonde-haired models, situated in a golden, golden-brown mise-en-scne. One model (Alex) is a strawberry blonde, the other (Brit) a platinum blonde: both models personify the ultimate golden glow that the advertising copy promises everything about them, from their radiant skin to their golden clothes and hair, creates the impression that light comes off them and surrounds them. In Bliss, the advert for Collection 2000 Creme Make-up is a big closeup of an almost bleached out white face that seems to dissolve into the page the advertising copy tells the reader that sexy skin starts here. In 19, Max Factors hyperfull lipstick advert features a close-up of a blonde-haired
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models face: the face itself is milky white and light seems to pour onto it (out from it) from the right-hand corner of the page. It is only the full, red lips, pursed and fully formed, that add denition, depth, a fully sexualized space for this advert (like strawberries in cream). Blondeness, then, seems to be one of the key signiers of idealized white femininity across these adverts: blonde hair seems to be light itself, and something that helps radiate skin, esh, face. Blondeness is marketed as a physical characteristic that seems to have divine origins, and which naturally produces a heavenly appearance. Blondeness is a physical characteristic that is natural and essential, but which, nonetheless, all white women can achieve if they use, for example, the right, subtle hair-dye. Marina Warner (1994) has traced the signicance of blondeness in religion, fairy tale and myth and found that blondeness is equated with beauty, with goodness, and with heroic deed. In many of these magazine adverts blondeness works in exactly the same way it is beauty, it is light. But it may also be death. Idealized versions of white femininity may also be death-like too: the abstinence and purity that, in part, produces the glow and the aura of a heavenly state of grace may also be seen as sterility, an absence of life, of lived experiences. So instead of one reading these images through the metaphors of translucence and milk, one can read them through ghostliness and powder (ash). The heavenly creature in the white wine advert I analysed earlier has no life; the numerous, luminous milky faces I have encountered only come to life through other features that have been eroticized, for example, the red lips on a white face in the Max Factor advert are really the vulva, the womans genitalia between white, powdery legs. These adverts, then, as I have intimated earlier, wrestle with the contradictions and contestations that necessarily emerge from constructing white female bodies that are supposed to be not really there, and natural or essential, and at the same time as white bodies that have to be worked at/on, manufactured, dieted, beautied, to become this ideal. The death-like nature of these compositions is also brought into the light through other adverts which offer a more radical, liberating representation of white femininity. In numerous adverts white women are asked to colour up, to be more daring, provocative, to have more life. The Garnier advert for Fructis asks women to shake up your style, and features an action shot of a wild, street-wise woman who returns the gaze with some authoritative power. The Dior addict advert captures the model in the moment of orgasm, or drug-high: her red lips are open wide, her black hair is sweaty and matted, and her eyes are half closed, and in a mirror reection we get a sense of sexual transgression. This quasi, sexualized death-like
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trance state is, it is suggested, what living is all about. The tanning adverts, in general, articulate this sense that whiteness is death-like, and that colour is life. In tanning adverts we get glow and radiance, but it comes from darkly bronzed arms, legs, faces, and torsos: here, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, milky white bodies and faces are being rejected (covered over, painted) for what are represented to be the real embodiments of health and beauty. Finally, idealized versions of white femininity may be death-like because they produce death-like responses in some white female readers. Absence, the denial and refusal to allow things into the body, can be seen as a by-product of media images that suggest that such behaviours lead to a state of grace. But it may also be a type of resistant strategy where having seen through to the construction of idealized white femininity as a construction of paradox and of death, having seen it as control, and manipulation, white women readers let themselves die a little each day. Thin white women die a little each day because their thinness, in part, comes to embody their own resistance to the holy ideal and the cruel paradox at the heart of their white femininity. Their act of near vanishing also potentially opens up a corporeal space where the ideology of thinness is being made visible as a constructed, nullifying mechanism of patriarchal control. Whitely thinness can read as masquerade. Thin white women are emptying their bodies of the signs and codes of femininity, and through the corresponding pain and suffering, powerfully reject the tyranny at the core of their beings. References
Bartky, S. (1990) Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. London: Routledge. Bell, R.M. (1985) Holy Anorexia. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Benson, S. (1997) The Body, Health, and Eating Disorders, in Kathryn Woodward (ed.) Identity and Difference, pp. 12166. London: Sage. Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bordo, S. (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism,Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Chernin, K. (1983) Womansize:The Tyranny of Slenderness. London: The Womens Press. Doane, M.A. (1982) Film and Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator, Screen 23(3/4): 7487. Duquin, M.E. (1989) Fashion and Fitness: Images in Womens Magazine Advertisements, Arena Review 13(2): 97109. Dyer, R. (1997) White. London: Routledge.
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Featherstone, M. (1991) The Body in Consumer Culture, in M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth and B.S. Turner (eds) The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, pp. 17096. London: Sage. Ferguson, M. (1983) Forever Feminine: Womens Magazines and the Cult of Femininity. London: Heinemann. Goffman, E. (1979) Gender Advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grogan, S. (1999) Body Image: Understanding Body Dissatisfaction in Men,Women and Children. London: Routledge. Grogan, S. and Wainwright, N. (1996) The Effect of Viewing Same Gender Photographic Models on Body Satisfaction,Women and Psychology Quarterly 20: 56975. Guillen, E. and Barr, S. (1994) Nutrition, Dieting, and Fitness Messages in a Magazine for Adolescent Women, 19701990, Journal of Adolescent Health 67: 11215. Heinberg, L. and Thompson, J.K. (1995) Body Image and Televised Images of Thinness and Attractiveness: A Controlled Laboratory Investigation, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 14: 32538. hooks, b. (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press. Irving, L. (1990) Mirror Images: Effects of the Standard of Beauty on the Self and Body-esteem of Women Exhibiting Varying Levels of Bulimic Symptoms, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 9: 23042. Marchand, R. (1985) Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 19201940. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McCracken, E. (1993) Decoding Womens Magazines. London: Macmillan. McMahon, K. (1990) The Cosmopolitan Ideology and the Management of Desire, The Journal of Sex Role Research 27(3): 38196. Mulvey, L. (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen 16(3): 618. Myers, P. and Biocca, F. (1992) The Elastic Body Image: The Effects of Television Advertising and Programming on Body Image Distortions in Young Women, Journal of Communication 42: 10833. Orbach, S. (1993) Hunger Strike:The Anorectics Struggle as a Metaphor for our Age. London: Penguin. Palmer, R. (1980) Anorexia Nervosa. London: Penguin. Schwartz, H. (1986) Never Satised:A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat. London: Macmillan. Silverstein, B., Peterson, B. and Purdue, L. (1986) Some Correlates of the Thin Standard of Physical Attractiveness of Women, International Journal of Eating Disorders 5: 898905. Warner, M. (1994) From the Beast to the Blonde. London: Chatto & Windus. Williamson, J. (1986) Woman is an Island: Femininity and Colonization, in T. Modleski (ed.) Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, pp. 99118. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sean Redmond is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the Southampton Institute, UK. He is coeditor of The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor (Wallower Press, 2002) and editor of Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader (Wallower Press, forthcoming). He has research interests in the cultural representations of whiteness and cinematic transgression.
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