The Social Construction Of Freaks

Coming from a country where poverty and less opportunity are the present every day I saw in a lot of kids and youths with talents and aspirations for their lives and their future, and these aspirations could disappear when time goes by and they can’t be reached. We in our country don’t have the support to develop our talents and came true our dreams or goals for our future. Most of the time we are like stars in the sky that can bright, because there is no a chance to show that we can.

The modeling industry has created a culture of exclusion across genders and races. Author Ashley Mears (2010) critically analyses the fashion industry, and how it influences production of culture and beauty ideals around the world. The modeling world is extremely female dominated, and the women who participate are continually commodified as they are used as a means to “promote and disseminate ideas of how women should look,” (p. 23). Because consumption is valued so in today’s society, the model is employed based on her perceived ability to sell a product. The clothes she is hired to wear and the beauty ideal that she is helping sell are more important than her humanity, and she becomes dehumanized. “Clothes take on such utmost importance that models are and should be mere clothes hangers, with perfectly discrete bodies that will display the clothes but not detract from them,” (Mears, 2010, p. 35). Models are blatantly objectified as they are forced be invisible for the sake of

In today’s society we have created this sense of identity that we can either reveal and or hide behind that can include either a computer screen, our skin, or even who we want people to think we are. In John Berger’s essay Ways of Seeing, he breaks down the misogynistic view we have on woman by comparing what it is to be naked versus being simply nude. In Neal Gabler’s essay Our Celebrities, Ourselves, the idealized celebrity is brought down to human level and formed into a never ending narrative that categorizes them into the people they are seen as versus the people they actually are. Berger criticizes the disguise a woman must wear as being surveyed by men in the form of art yet Gabblers idea of a disguise is more like a role a celebrity

In our case, the agent is the Instagram platform used by the artist, Ulman, to publish the photographs of her “Hot Babe” persona, her prototype. The photographs, though constructed, become indexical to her followers, or the recipient and in this case also the patient. By filtering the images through the art nexus, Ulman’s photographs become a reality within themselves, creating a life and person that, by means of her followers’ consumption of the images and posted comments, becomes validated.

By taking a different approach and using comedy and entertainment, Tina Fey has brought people together to understand the important topic of body image in a way people will listen. Body image for women has been a major issue in our world and there has been little change to stop it. “‘Why can’t we accept the human form as it is?’ screams no one. I don’t know why, but we never have. That’s why people wore corsets and neck stretchers and powdered wigs” (142). Everyone wants perfection. Everyone wants what they don’t have. No one is perfect. Everyone has flaws. If the world cannot accept this, people will continue resorting to modified images to produce this “ideal beauty.” One of Fey’s more interesting stories is when she talks about photoshop. Photoshop is a tool which contaminates how people see the human body. But this “perfect body” is intangible. Fey states that everyone is beautiful, and it takes a strong society to believe it. “Photoshop is just like makeup” Fey states, “when it’s done well it looks great, and when it’s overdone you look like a crazy asshole” (142). She relays on the idea that we are taking away the reality of our bodies when using photoshop. Fey’s attachment of a joke with the large and complex idea that photoshop dehumanizes a person is what keeps the reader captivated with the story and wanting to know more. Fey is able to reveal that a picture is an alteration of the true beauty of a person when put through photoshop. The reader is therefore able to assume, beyond all of her funny jokes, Fey

Lovelock begins talking about Instagram, a social media platform which is used to share pictures with your followers. He talks about how people tend to upload photos with the #transformationtuesday, claiming to have transformed their physical features. As more pictures that are being recently uploaded within social media, the further we see people enhancing their photos to become flawless. As we dig further into the social media side of the internet, we are going to see just how much influence society has on people and their decision to become who they perceive as perfect. Throughout the

The dove beauty campaigns are again a perfect example of this, as they depict a digitally altered photo of a woman being presented on a billboard (Tpiper). Depicting a remarkable transformation of an ordinary woman, this video shows a billboard model being produced through means of excessive makeup and hair styling in conjunction with digital editing after the photo was taken. This woman is not natural. She has pounds of makeup on her face, as well as photoshopped touchups, and yet she is perceived by the public as the standard of beauty. Nobody is able to compare with such a carefully sculpted face, and therefore this establishes unrealistic expectations

Similarly, the idea of an artificially constructed version of reality is also evident in the context of our time through social media. The YouTube video “Are you living an Insta lie?” explores how Instagram users post a different “version of reality”. Viewers on Instagram interpret the posts literally, without imagining what effort was made to edit the photo, providing only one version of reality. For example, the image of the girl laying on her bed with the quote “#woke up like this”, when taken literally, shows she woke up looking fresh and perfect. However, the video shows us that she washes her face, brushes her hair and applies make up, clearly revealing one message to the audience that is very different to her reality. The TED Talk ‘Looks aren’t everything, believe me, I’m a model’ by Cameron Russel also exposes the different versions of reality manipulated in the modelling industry. The juxtaposition of the image of the attractive young women posing in her bikini and Cameron’s explanation “this is the first time I ever wore a bikini, I was only a young girl" further highlights the constructed reality we live in, in contemporary society. Through the

According to Annette T. Rottenberg and Donna Haisty Winchell, “ we live in a society where appearance matters” (pg. 697). A design that has been shown through numerous campaigns is the true believing that popularity and physical appearance are what makes people wealthy. Or being “well liked” can make a person successful. Observing the influence of the capitalistic myths throughout the American Dream can showcase how modern society is obsessed with physical beauty. As of now, people are aware that social media has had an extraordinary influence on society.

Imagine the appeal of the promise of supermodel beauty. Amazing right? Did I mention it's not that simple, and maybe not even that desirable? In the book “Uglies”, written by Scott Westerfeld, this is not only the promise, it is societies protocol.

Instagram is a social media base that can aid business revenue by simply following certain guidelines to market any product. In Rachel Daley’s “21 of the Worst Instagram Marketing Mistakes & How to Fix’ Em” written for MadeFreshly, there are many strategies for marketing, therefore Daley was very insightful on what to do and what not do to succeed in marketing a product; however, her credible advice only scratched the surface and should have gone beyond the basics of social marketing. As the article unfolds there are four rhetors that become quite evident: Daley, and MadeFreshly. Additional rhetors include the world of businesses and the public, since the audience of Instagram includes the World Wide Web.

A young girl may follow a celebrity on Instagram and see pictures posted that have been taken by a professional photographer that only a celebrity could have access to, and suddenly the young viewer may feel that her own self-taken photos are inadequate. Social media has now made it more likely that she will pick apart her appearance and want to look more like the celebrity does. This is an unattainable goal, and when this fact is realized the viewer may feel discouraged about how she looks and turn to extreme measures, such as an eating disorder, to try to approach the unattainable as much as possible. As much as people would want to believe differently, in our society “thin” is synonymous with “beautiful” and “successful” and this underlying truth pushes many social media “thinspiration” sites to mass readership.

Glamour in the Age of Kardashian has an overall theme of how “glamour labor” has evolved in recent years due to changes in technology, work ethic, and fashion. “Glamour labor”, a term thought up by Wissinger, is the work an individual does, so that they are perceived as the carefully crafted image that they create and place online. It is the effort and time of shaping one’s body in order to look as put-together as they do online in their day-to-day life. “Glamour laborers” are the individuals who are practiccing glamour labor daily. Typically, glamour laborers are celebrities, because they have the means to put in the work; however, anyone can be considered a glamour laborer. Glamour laborers are those individuals who are constantly going

“In the 1840s, the first nude photographs of prostitutes were taken; advertisements using images of “beautiful” women first appeared in mid-century” (Wolf 215). This is an example of how media can show what is considered “beautiful.” We can now see something similar in contemporary time in which beauty magazines show young woman on the cover who are considered beautiful by the standards of society. The issue of the beauty magazine is it talks about how to get the perfect body with help of a certain brand of makeup. These images of photo shop perfection begins to affect the way woman see themselves and deem themselves as

The beauty company Dove has started a campaign over the past few years to celebrate natural beauty and expose the secrets of the beauty industry. In order to showcase how much editing goes on in a model’s picture, Dove took a seemingly average young woman with an “. . . uneven skin tone, slightly lopsided eyes, and dull, flat hair” and gave her a makeover (Postrel). They started by using professional stylists who “turn[ed] her into a wide-eyed, big-haired beauty with sculpted cheeks and perfect skin” (Postrel). The transformation from the young woman at the start in comparison to the same young woman with her makeup on and her hair styled was extremely noticeable, but Dove was not finished with her yet.