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Library | Material Type | Call Number | Child Count | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
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Searching... Science | Book | 305.3 SHI555M | 1 | Stacks | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... Science | Book | P96 .G44 S54 2002 | 1 | Stacks | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
The mute gestures of advertising images are frozen for posterity by photographers and illustrators, gestures that, for better or worse, perpetuate a certain aesthetic and eventually become emblematic of a period. The images of today display the values of a society that has more interest in the body than the mind. They are technoenhanced labyrinths of unattainable appearances that leave women and men feeling horrified, estranged, and restricted by unrealistic, silent mandates. Measuring Up looks at advertising as more than just a way to extract money from unsuspecting people but as a vehicle for conveying the larger views of a confining, body-obsessed culture.
By weaving theoretical and textual insights from feminist and cultural studies with the voices of real women and men, Measuring Up offers a unique reception analysis of the effects of repetitious exposure to advertisements of perfect bodies in our everyday lives. Shields examines a particular, complex relationship between the idealized images of gender we see in advertising and our own thoughts, feelings, and behavior in relation to these images. The study is unique in presenting audience reception in terms of ethnographic data, not textual interpretations alone.
Measuring Up engages with and informs current theoretical debates within these sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory literatures: feminist media studies, feminist film theory, critical social theory, cultural studies, and critical ethnography. This is an important work that explores the forms and channels of power used in one of the most insidious and overt means of mass influence in popular culture.
Reviews (1)
Choice Review
The ways in which advertising images portray women was most famously studied by Erving Goffman in Gender Advertisements (CH, Sep'79), and since then the subject has received enormous attention from feminist and cultural studies scholars examining the effects of these images on the consciousness and behavior of girls and women. In the first chapter of the current work, Shields (women's studies, Bowling Green State Univ.) reports on a study she conducted wherein her female and male subjects responded to "sense-making" questions about a series of magazine ads in which the use of female models ranged from the conventionally sexist to the quasi-liberationist. In subsequent chapters Shields analyzes these images from feminist and semiotic perspectives, using the subjects' responses to illustrate how gender, sexual orientation, and personal experience determine whether one gives a "preferred," oppositional, or negotiated reading of an ad. Shields provides a good explication of Goffman's work and a compelling chapter-length first-person narrative by one of her students, but she gives an incomplete account of her own research and never fully articulates her theory of media effects. The bibliography is extensive but not especially current; reproductions of print ads, although small and not in color, are adequate; the writing is generally clear. Most useful to upper-division undergraduates. T. Gleeson Neumann College