Beauty Demands

Our Beauty Demands blog is 5 years old this year! We have had many brilliant posts over those years, so we're going to revisit some of these, starting with the ever-important topic of social media. Below is Emilie Lawrence's discussion on body positivity, which introduces a paper she presented at our workshop back in 2016:  In this post, Emilie Lawrence (UCL) discusses her work on body positivity discourse as it plays out on social media. The paper I am presenting at the forthcoming Beauty Demands workshop explores social media sites as platforms for creating networked communities (Papacharissi, 2010, 2011 & 2012) notions of the performative body (Butler, 1988) and embodied subjectivity (Braidotti, 2013.) I will explore body positive feminism ( an emerging form of online and offline activism stemming from Love Your Body (LYB) discourse, ‘positive, affirmative, seemingly feminist-inflected media messages, targeted exclusively at girls and women, that exhort us ...

Men’s appearance concerns have historically had less attention than women’s beauty. So, it’s a strange thing when representations of attractive men become a source of public outrage. In this blog we consider three recent examples, where the representation of ‘hottie’, ‘handsome’ or simply ‘good’’ masculinity has provoked responses of shock, anger or indignation that appear to underpin a desire to annihilate them. These are, TubeCrush, a website where users send in unsolicited photographs of attractive men on the London Underground; a Lumen dating adver t for the over-50s company whose ‘Pull a cracker…’ campaign was banned on the London Underground, and; the notorious Gillette advert , ‘The best a man can be’, which received a raft of media attention   for its clean-shaven, non-toxic image of masculinity (e.g reactions here , here and here ). Below we discuss each of these examples and why we think this outrage is misplaced. Photo: kevin-bhagat-804491-unsplash So, starting...

In Footnotes on Shoes , an interdisciplinary group of writers reflects on the cultural meanings of shoes and, in particular, women’s fascination with shoes – something which it seems has existed through the ages and across the globe.  The editors Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferris (2001) note in their introduction that there is an Imelda Marcos lurking in each and everyone of us, referring to the infamous wife of the Philippine dictator who amassed more than 3,000 pairs of shoes during her lifetime. Women seem to have an insatiable lust for shoes. Feminist scholars have had plenty to say about this female obsession with shoes (Wilson, 1985; Wolf, 1990; O’Keefe, 1996; Bergstein, 2012).  Initially, they viewed women wearing high heels as the victims of male oppression. Stiletto heels were the ultimate symbol of female subjugation, reducing their wearer to the position of sex object, crippling and deforming them in the name of male-defined beauty norms, and preventing them fr...

Johnny Weissmuller was famous, both as an Olympic swimmer and as Tarzan.  He won five Olympic gold medals in swimming between 1924 and 1928, and played Tarzan in twelve films between 1932 and 1948. Johnny Weissmuller's body is, inevitably, well documented in film and photograph.  It is the highly muscled body that is typical both of the elite swimmer of that period and of many actors.  Yet it is a very different body to that of his modern counterparts, be these the swimmer Michael Phelps or Alexander Skarsgård, the most recent actor to play Tarzan. Both these bodies are like Weissmuller's in being highly muscled.  However, the definition of the muscle is much more precise, in what body builders refer to as clean bulking.  In the case of Skarsgård the definition is almost ludicrously clean (or is this just CGI?). It might be argued, in the cases of Phelps, that this development of the body is simply a product of sports science.  It is a more efficien...