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WebLinks: Contexts for Exploring Visual and Verbal Texts |
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Chapter 8 - Debating Culture |
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How would you describe the girls in the photos? Do any of the images feel "empowering"? Why? How can we overcome our obsession with body image?
http://www.laurengreenfield.com/girlculture/
Lauren Greenfield's project has become something of a phenomenon, having spawned a coffee table book, photo essays in major magazines, and exhibits across the country. This segment of Greenfield's Web site includes most of what you'll want to know about her work. You can view a slide show of photographs from Girl Culture accompanied by the voices of their subjects, read articles about the genesis of Greenfield's project, and find out where the exhibition is now (it's slated to tour through 2006). Between the photographs themselves and what people have to say about them, the material here tells the story of a culture at once fatally obsessed with appearance and desperately searching for an antidote.
http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/branches/ccp/education/girlculturefacultyguide/essays/greenfield.htm
In the book version of her project, Girl Culture, Lauren Greenfield attempts to explain in words what her photographs so eloquently express. In this excerpt from the book, Greenfield muses on the elements of her own life that inspired the project, and in doing so adds a layer of complexity. Though the images seem to paint a bleak picture for girls—the obsession with body image cannot bode well—Greenfield's essay approaches the problem from the inside, pointing to the subtle interrelationship between what we know is harmful and what makes us feel good. In doing so she restores the girls' will and desires to what might otherwise seem like mindless obedience to a dictated standard of beauty.
http://www.4woman.gov/BodyImage/
As is demonstrated in many of the images in Girl Culture, body image is not just about self esteem. When people begin to drastically alter the landscape of their bodies through dieting, exercise, and even surgery, the issue of body image becomes one of health. And as it is primarily women who wind up at eating disorder clinics and in the offices of plastic surgeons, body image has, for better or worse, comes to be seen as a women's health issue. This site is the National Women's Health Information Center's source for all that concerns women's health, linking to dozens of publications on subtopics such as eating disorders.
http://www.adiosbarbie.com/
There just may be an antidote to the body image epidemic, if you know where to look. Though the mainstream media enforces a particular beauty ideal, voices on the fringes—such as those found on this Web site—find humor, joy, and, yes, empowerment in wrestling with the ideal (or, as the editors see it, Barbie). The site features entertaining essays on topics ranging from weight-related insults to Black women's hair, and includes a media digest, examining the array of harmful messages sent by everyone from Pantene to Wal-mart.
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