Week 9: Images and Viewers

Week 9: Images and Viewers
Grace Petersen
5/26/2019

This week the topic has shifted once more to the financial economic factor in fashion. Looking beyond simple production values of processing modes, however, this week we are looking into how advertising or marketing operates as a cultural actor in the world of fashion.  For this week, the media offered a vastly different point of perspective than the reading on women in fashion advertising, with  Frith, Cheng, and Shaw's 2004 article on the similarities and differences between Asian and Western depictions of women as models. Utilizing a combination of a cultural studies method along with an intersectional Feminist critique, the article examines hundreds of images and finds that there is an interesting preference to depict Western women as sex objects than their Asian counterparts.

The authors attribute the core of their concept to Erving Goffman, but even Goffman had his predecessor in John Berger's 1971 "Ways of Seeing," which coined the term 'male gaze.' The authors of this article do not use this specific language in their essay, however it is clear that the heart of what they are discussing relates to both the male gaze as well as the western gaze. While the study is inconclusive as far as a deeper meaning behind these images, it is clear that the ways in which both race and gender are represented are tied to cultural gendered understandings of performance and embodiment.




Works Cited:
Berger, John. "Ways of Seeing." Penguin Books, 1971. 

Frith, Katherine Toland, Hong Cheng, and Ping Shaw. "Race and Beauty: A Comparison of Asian and 
      Western Models in Women’s Magazine Advertisements." Sex Roles, Vol. 50, 2004.