Browsing Working papers by Subject "Advertising"
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The Portraval of Beauty in Woman's Fashion MagazinesMoeran, Brian (Frederiksberg, 2009)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The primary contents of women’s fashion magazines are fashion, beauty and health. This paper sets out to explore the ways in which international fashion magazines such as Elle, Vogue and Marie Claire portray feminine beauty in textual and advertising matter and how their readers react to such portrayals. Beauty is analysed as grooming practice, and make-up as the prime symbol of the self and its many facets in social interaction. The paper looks at the different kinds of ‘face’ that magazines invite their women readers to put on and suggests that they – and their advertisers – adopt a ‘technology of enchantment’ as a means of exercise control over them. Magazine and advertising language is imbued with ‘magical’ power, and the paper shows how the structure of advertisements closely parallels that of magical spells used in certain healing rituals. It concludes by using magazine reader interviews to learn the extent to which women do or do not believe in such ‘spells’ and whether they are encouraged to buy into the ‘beauty myth’. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7817 Files in this item: 1
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Abstract: This working paper – written for inclusion as a chapter on Japanese society, to be published in Chinese by the Beijing University of Foreign Studies later in 2011 – looks at popular culture as a form of cultural production. It argues for the need to study popular cultural forms like advertisements, ceramics, fashion magazines and folk art as both products and as processes of design, manufacture, distribution, appreciation and use, which must all be taken into account. Precisely because popular cultural forms are both cultural products and commodities, they reveal the complementary nature of the two categories of culture and the economy. The paper outlines and analyses the different ways in which social, cultural, symbolic and economic capital are converted by those participating in advertising, ceramic, fashion magazine and folk art worlds, and suggests that popular culture may best be seen as a name economy. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8252 Files in this item: 1
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