Abstract:
Beauty is an important and complex concept. A variety of sociocultural environments articulates beauty and physical attractiveness to success and popularity. The influence of media deserves particular attention as it is able to create and circulate dominant ideals of beauty. Research suggests that dominant ideals of beauty created by media have a strong impact on women’s perceptions of beauty. However, the influence of media is not absolute, and the audiences can decode media messages from a variety of positions: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. Further, the decoding positions may vary depending on the context and the individual’s critical skills required to interrogate media messages.
The main goal of this research was to qualitatively explore the role of beauty in the lives of young women in New Zealand, and to investigate how media influences their perceptions of beauty. Additionally, I aimed to explore whether media literacy skills impacted how young women decode visual texts in media.
Drawing on feminist cultural studies, this qualitative research involved two in-depth individual interviews with sixteen participants. The results are organised into three main themes. The first theme focuses on how young women make meaning about beauty and explains the key physical characteristics they associate with dominant ideals of beauty. I explore the emergence of the ‘skinny-curvy’ trend and its growing popularity in place of previously dominant ideals of thinness. The second theme focuses of the importance of beauty, beauty practices, pleasures and pressures of beauty, and how young women resist dominant ideals of beauty. The third theme addresses young women’s knowledge of media literacy, and their levels of critical awareness of image manipulation used in media.
The implications for this study are associated with the importance of teaching critical media literacy. By examining the influence of beauty ideals on the lives of young women, this research reinforced the feminist cultural studies perspective on the multidirectional flow of power in relation to young women and their engagement with beauty, thus creating a “dialectical play between resistance and incorporation” (Storey, 1997, p. 11).