The representation on media always
help audience to identify themselves into different social groups that are
being portrayed on TV, flims, adverts, music videos, magazines, etc. There are
discourses lie on media along with the representations, according to Foucault,
discourse is a way of speaking about the world, but also about what is allowed
to be said about a particular aspect o society and about how someone or a
social group is represented in the media. Discourse defines and produces the
objects of out knowledge and governs the way that a topic can be meaningfully
practice and used to regulate the conduct of others, nothing that is meaningful
exists outside discourse (Hall, 1997: 49) Identity refers to the idea of
selfhood, personal identity marks someone out as a unique and quite distinct
individual, people realize the difference between themselves and the others, at
the same time, identify themselves into a certain group of people who they
reckon they are similar, and hence, identify is formed. (Fulcher and Scott, 2011)
In short, the formation of identity builds up on comparing and contrasting
oneself with another.
I am going to focus how mass media represent fat female body as abject and unattractive
by analysing its lack of male admirers, the figure of fun and sign of fear,
gender ambiguously along with the monstrous feminine. Then, I will slightly talk about the notion of race, the representation of
blackness on media and how the dominant white reinforce their identity as
disgusting and marginalised them.
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Plus
size women usually being seen as ugly and unattractive in all areas of life,
the stereotypes of fat women mainly build up on the representation on media.
Mass media is especially harmful to women because it constrict negative
perception of women and reinforces them on daily basis, not only is fat an
immediate determinate for ugliness, the fat body is discursively constricted as
a failed body produce by the media. Media constantly emphasises that women are
defined by their bodies, fat women is seen as deviant and alien and in order to
accorded personhood, is expected to engage in a continual process of
transformation, which being fat is something that needs to be controlled.
(Champman, 2011) Women’s bodies are organised by a heterosexual economy in
which beauty is defined as heterosexual attractiveness and women interiorise
the surveillance of an imagined male observer, they are supposed to be objects
of sexual stimulation under male gaze. For some women, the imagined observer is
not essentially male, but as in integral element of womanliness, this part of
woman that watches herself being watched is a central part of her womanliness.
‘Men act, and women appear. Men look at women, and women watch themselves being
looked at.’ (Berger 1972) They gain pleasure in looking at others person and
being looked as erotic subjects. (Mulvey, 2003: 52) However, for fat female
body, it could be theorizsd as being unwatched because it is unattractive, they
may feels the lack of male admirer and thus, avoid the imaginary male observer,
this can be said as a lack of womanliness. They want to be heterosexual
attractive but it requires thinness in modern society; therefore a resistance
of the ‘beauty’ norm is created. They reject the current construction of beauty
and try considering their bodies worthy of observation and admiration; they
resist the objectification of women as sexual object and then step outside the
notion of female identity. Large size women therefore, identify themselves as
‘fat’, ugly, not sexually appealing when comparing with the thin girls who are
categorised as beauty in contemporary culture, at the same time, they develop a
resistance on femininity, and create another identity that doesn’t for plus
size women bodies.
According
to French, fat female body is a site of comedy, usually treated as object or
butt of a joke, fat women have to construct their own identities through the
performance, links it with feminist discourse in media.(Hole, 2003: 315) Her
performance, as what Judith Butler said, is the performance of gender, the
representation of herself about repeated and naturalised bodily practices, the
female body performs femininity for an audience of men and women. One is not
born, but rather becomes a woman and becoming is something the individual must
work at themselves, or is imposed on them by social and cultural pressures,
People do not create gender, rather their gender performances create them and
develop their identity. For fat female, they refuse to perform the gender
expected of them, they reckon themselves not a site of male desire, the female
bodies evades simply categorisation as women. However, bodies are always
already gendered, and performativity becomes a restricting demand rather than
the possibility of freedom. People must perform their gender through their
body, but to a script that is written by others. The role of media is to create
and reproduce the definition of beauty and feminine, via discourse in adverts
or TV shows or movies, they represent the low image of fat female bodies and
empower the thinness of models. Since fat female refuse to follow the rules,
the script written by the mainstream society, they are then de-sexed by their
inability to reproduce and their assumed lack of heterosexual attractiveness
and so they are the not feminine enough to be seen as women. Therefore they are
being denied the possibility of playing with gender or masquerading as feminine
because their bodies are unfeminine, they are failed to meet the exacting standards
of femininity currently demanded by the culture and society. Marry Ann Doane
(1991: 25) claimed ‘masquerade constitutes an acknowledgement that it is
femininity itself which is constructed as mask, as the decorative layer which
conceals a non-identity. The masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a
distance, womanliness is a mask, which can be worn or removed.’ It is not the
freedom to play with gender and therefore identity, but it conservative and
constitutive of female identity, necessary act that all women perform in order
to conform. Hole called it less-than-women because the fat female cannot match
up to the model of woman, that body is actually an excessive sign, a grotesque
sign which carries an overabundance of meanings that are themselves
contradictory and opposed. It is a mixture of disparate parts and cannot be
confined to the category of women. At the same time, it is not only
less-than-woman but physically she is also portrayed as more-than-woman, this
can be split into pseudo-male and ultra-female. Pseudo male because she is big
like man, she takes up public space and ultra-female because at the same time
her female attributes, her breasts and her belly are enlarged, she is the
embodiment of the maternal. The current beauty standard doesn’t allow the
evidence of sexual maturity, models are all working hard on shaving, exercising
or do surgery to remove belly fat in order to connote their powerlessness when
comparing to male, however, fat female body cases a distaste or disgust born of
anxiety at the power she thereby embodies. Due to their big body, her eroticism
as maternity, her display becomes a threat. Media relocates the fat female body
away from ‘to-be-looked-at’ to ‘to-be-laughed-at’, neutralising the threat and
releasing the fear as laughter, it is used as object or butt in comedy or
disavowal, which transmutes fear into laughter. (Hole, 2003: 321)
French
& Saunder is a comedy that best illustrates how fat female body are
portrayed as to-be-laughed-at by media. It revokes the truth that fat woman
cannot properly carry on the masquerade. In series three, Dawn French plays
Jane Russel and Jennifer Saunders becomes Marilyn Monroe, they made a parody of
‘Two Little Girls from Little Rock’, both of them are well dressed and made up,
they strike poses and display their spectacular bodies, however in French case,
she seemed to be threatening to burst out, she struggled to gather up her
dress, it was hard for her to climb down the stage and dance, when she finally
managed to get down, she had to go up there again. The act points out the gap
between ideal femininity and the reality, it also reproduce the idea of fat
female body equals to spectacular femininity, it locates the fat female body
within a comedy text rather in a beauty context, French could not conceal her
excessive body behind the feminine mask of make up and costume, the body always
exceeded and failed at the performance of femininity. Therefore the masquerade
of fat woman is a failure, by her attempting and failing, performing the
masquerade that that female body exposes it as performance. (Hole, 2003: 322)
Although
French is being labelled as a successful comedian, she once told the audience
that ‘she feels not successful because I have failed in terms of my body and
the ideal. If I were living in Ruben’s time, I wouldn’t have to be a comedian
to earn a living. I would rather be a fabulous model.’ (Hole, 2003: 320) This reinforces the notion of female success
as dependent on physical and sexual desirability, real woman has to be
heterosexually attractive and gain pleasure by being gazed. There are many
beauty contests on TV requires thinness and toned body as the top requirement
for the winner, for example, the American Next Top Model and Beauty Pageant,
when contestants are in the show, they usually wear tight clothes or bikinis in
order to show off the slim bodies, super small waist and somehow unbalanced
breasts and hip sizes, they strike for all possible feminine poses in front of
the camera, try their very best to be the ideal sexual object. These are the
role women that are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their
appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said
to connote 'to-be-looked-at-ness'. They are categorised as the perfect, real
woman due to their body and appearance, they defined what is beauty yet such
beauty is unreachable for fat women as they are not skinny, they are not
allowed to masquerade femininity, they are less-than-a-woman and also
more-than-a-woman. In mainstream beauty contests throughout the time, not even
one plus size female has ever won the competition, they are being marginalised
in the name of ‘beauty’. Certain fat women want to meet up the beauty standard
in the society and they worked out, controlled their daily calories intake, yet
at least they suffer from anorexia. Hole gave an example of a bride who lost a
lot of weight quickly for her wedding and she made a point of ‘anorexia has
replaced the corset’, since she developed her identity as a fat women over a
lifetime, the suddenly weight drop also made her ‘didn’t know who she was’.
French added in contemporary society, the attempt to control the female body
have been interiorised, no longer is the body seen as merely physical. (Hole, 2003: 319)
Additionally,
there is a gender ambiguity among fat female, they do not perform in
femininity, fat female has a chance at identity-formation that is not based on
performance and audience as the eyes of heterosexual attractiveness cannot beat
to look at the fat female body, they are descried as a grotesque figure, that’s
a figure that embodying gender instability and makes it a representation of
female mobility and mutability, they can move away from traditional feminine
pursuits. Due to this phenomenon, fat female are excluded and marginalised in
terms of fashion and beauty, they are big enough, and they are freed from many
of the time-wasting concerns of those normal women who must strive for
femininity. They do not have to follow the fashion trend, it is impossible to
buy fashionable clothes as most of the designer brands are designed for skinny
body, just like the models who display the clothes on runway or on advert; they
are not expected to spend hours on hair and make-up because whatever they do,
they are unable to achieve the beauty that is represented on the media due to
their body. Big woman also seen as masculinity instead of femininity because of
their body size and lack of the feminine elements like make up, this increase
the sign of fear of the monstrous feminine, turn the fat female body to pure
spectacle. Fat woman has no opportunities in becoming the mainstream pretty
woman, apart from being seen as hilarious, what is remaining is ugliness and
abjectness.
Apart
from the weight, race is another big issue when talking about the
representation of media in marginalising a certain group of people. Black
people are usually being mis-represented on media, usually portrayed in an
unrealistic manner to make white people seems to be more powerful and more
desirable on media. Hall (1997) said the west, especially Europe as a civilised
centre of the world, created through representation and narratives, they
becomes the dominant and production techniques across media platforms operate
according to hierarchies of race and ethnicity. The white attempts to
categories and rank the others group, by ordering, describing, defining,
cataloguing and controlling the natural and social worlds. There is a tendency
for them to discursively reduce a whole group of people to a number of
essential negative characteristics, which are then taken to define that group.
The white representations of blackness as totalising locate the power as wholly
external to us as an extrinsic force. Therefore the dominant white classifies
the societies into different categories and it explains the different on skin
colour via mass media.
Black
people, especially woman contribute an absent present on Hollywood films, they
got no romantic scenes, no one cares and they are not represented. (Hook, 1992)
Even though they are being presented, the representations are usually untrue.
Comics great Dwayne Muduffle said ‘you only had two types of characters
available for children. You had the stupid angry brute and the she’s smart but
she’s black characters.’ (Martin, 2013) For example, in X-Men, storm is the
only black female character, and she is an African witch-priestess with perfect
booty body shape, brave and smart. She is black yet she has white hair and blue
eyes, obviously most of the black people aren’t look like her, and she is the
white representation of blackness. What’s more, she is one of the mutants, this
imply she is not a ordinary human, the setting is alienating the black woman,
saying she is black and she is abnormal. Beyoncé is another black woman on
screen, although she is black, in most of the posters she is represented as a
white by lightening her skin colour and following the western beauty standard.
(fig. 1)
fig. 1
Numerous
adverts from the old time, until nowadays, connote the white supremacy and
producing a racist discourse towards the black people, giving them dirty,
disgusting and uncivilised identities. Figure 2 is one of the classic racist
soup adverts, it represents the black people as sign of dirt, reinforces the
white supremacy and tells readers that the society got no place for the black. Figure
3 is another old time advert that connotes a similar message with the first
one, the two black kids are painting themselves white with happy faces, with the
caption ‘see how it covers over black’, the designer of the advert is probably
a white and it shows the low image of black people in the society, they are
considered as something that should not exist, white people should be the only
race who own the right to live in the society.
fig. 2
fig. 3
People
of colour are often featured in jungle settings and media are presenting them
as an entirely different species from what they are, in figure 4 & 5, these
are modern perfume adverts taken from Kenzo, both models are black and
portrayed as ancient people with exotic animals in the background, the adverts
imply the black society is relatively under-developed and uncivilised when comparing
to the white, therefore they are being marginalised with the contemporary
culture.
The dominant white emphasises their
differences with black people on mass media and constructs their identities as
unwelcomed, they are stereotyped and depicted in ways there they are not
individuals, rather they are projected as characters and a mass body parts for
white’s consumption. (Stephens and Phillips, 2005: 42)
fig. 4
fig. 5
To
conclude, mass media plays a very important role in marginalising fat female
identity as ugly and not heterosexually attractive, thus unable to be a real,
feminine woman. Their big body and lack of femininity creates gender ambiguity
and the anxiety at the power she embodies, in order to overcome this, media
usually represents her as object or butt in comedy or disavowal, which
transmutes fear into laughter. The media at the same time depowered the black
people and reproduce the white dominance, they represent the black people
identity in a way that is beneficial to the white, like treating them as a
disgusting race and should not be given any right in the society.
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
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