The importance of body image in marketing comunications. The comparison of ideal and real beauty measures using clustering method and MML-TGI data.

This dissertation focuses on dominant contemporary depictions of women in order to investigate the related processes of producing and policing physical attractiveness and privilege in mainstream cultural productions. I examine how certain US Latina, Colombian, and Dominican female portrayals fit definite paradigms of ideal beauty and contribute to patterns of power within magazines, films and television, music, and literary novels. I explore the ways in which the majority of dominant representations in all three countries favor specific beauty ideals linked with an Anglo or Northern European archetype, thus limiting the acceptable model and excluding a great part of the racially mixed female population which fails to match this criterion. By studying the relationship between body image and messages that inspire anxiety for those women who fall outside of ideal beauty patterns, my analysis bridges sociological and anthropological studies within literary theories and visual culture and contributes to new perspectives on Latinidad and Tropicalism by including a trans-nationalistic approach. While much work has been done on the connection between the body and identity within the United States, scholarship within this area has been more limited within Hispanic literature and Latin American popular culture in terms of the role of power structures. While one perception of beauty is that it is merely physical, in reality racial classification and the recognition of “legitimate” beauty have tangible impacts on social matters such as access to employment, marriageability, perceptions of education, civilization, decency, and purity.

Kroppens yttre utseende har varierande betydelser i människors liv, men alla har en uppfattning om hur de tänker och känner kring sin kropp. Vår kroppsuppfattning influeras oftast av yttre faktorer, inklusive sociala medier som presenterar innehåll som kan påverka vårt tankesätt. Under det senaste decenniet har Instagram blivit en integrerad del av vårt vardagliga liv och spelar en avgörande roll för att utveckla vår attityd och inställning till vårt utseende.  Uppsatsen syftar till att undersöka hur unga kvinnor i åldrarna 18-25 får upplever framställningen av skönhetsingrepp på Instagram, vidare ligger uppsatsen fokus på om respondenterna själva upplever att de vill, eller redan har genomgått ett skönhetsingrepp med Instagram som bidragande orsak. Med hjälp av kvalitativa fokusgrupper och en kvantitativ enkätundersökning har vi undersökt om kvinnorna själva upplever att Instagram är en bidragande orsak till att vilja förändra sitt eget utseende genom skönhetsingrepp.  Studiens syfte har uppnåtts med följande frågeställningar:  -  Hur upplever unga kvinnor framställningen av skönhetsingrepp på Instagram? -  Upplever respondenterna att framställningen av skönhetsingrepp på Instagram är  en bidragande faktor till att förändra sitt utseende med hjälp av estetiska ingrepp?  Resultatet har analyserats i enlighet utifrån teorierna ideologi i visuell kommunikation, parasociala interaktionsteorin, teorier om identitet och interpellationteorin samt utifrån tidigare forskning kring ämnet. Sammanfattningsvis visar resultatet av enkätundersökningen att majoriteten upplever att det finns ett rådande skönhetsideal på Instagram och att de känner sig pressade att se ut på ett visst sätt. Kvinnorna fick även ta ställning till huruvida framställningen av skönhetsingrepp på Instagram påverkar dem i den mån att de själva vill förändra sitt utseende och mer än hälften menar att dem är påverkade. / The external appearance of the body has varying meanings in people's lives, but everyone has an idea of how they think and feel about their body. Our body image is most often influenced by external factors, including social media that presents content that may affect our way of thinking. Over the past decade, Instagram has become an integral part of our daily lives and plays a crucial role in developing our attitudes towards our appearance.  The essay aims to investigate how young women aged 18-25 may experience the presence of beauty procedures on Instagram, furthermore, the essay focuses on whether the respondents themselves feel that they want to, or have already undergone a beauty procedure with Instagram as a contributing cause. With the help of qualitative focus groups and a quantitative survey, we have investigated whether the women themselves feel that Instagram is a contributing reason for wanting to change their appearance through beauty procedures.  The purpose of the study has been achieved with the following questions:  -  How do young women experience the portrayal of beauty procedures on Instagram? -  Do the respondents feel that the presentation of beauty procedures on Instagram is a contributing factor to changing their appearance with the help of aesthetic procedures?  The results have been analyzed by the theories ideology in visual communication, parasocial interaction theory, theories of identity, and interpellation theory and based on previous research on the subject. In summary, the results of the survey show that the majority feel that there is a prevailing beauty ideal on Instagram and that they feel pressured to look a certain way. The women also had to decide whether the presentation of beauty procedures on Instagram affects them to the extent that they want to change their appearance and more than half believe that they are affected.

From 2015 to 2018 many Swedish news media were publishing articles about the same topic; body activism. The purpose of this study is to examine how Swedish news media linguistically uses the term body activism, how they define the term and if discursive themes and patterns can be identified when it comes to how the news media report about body activism. The study relies on a theoretical framework with ideas about media logic, news values and framing; theories about social movements and the media; theories about beauty standards, norms and the consumer society; and also studies about body activism, fat activism and body positivity. The method used is a connected content analysis of a material consisting of 676 texts published in Swedish news media. The connected content analysis was achieved by the use of Textometrica which is a tool for examining frequency and correlation of words used in texts. To further analyse the results a discourse analysis has been used. The study shows that body activism in Swedish news media gets framed and defined as something that is about opposition and wanting change, something that is about size and weight, something that often gets told through individual stories and experiences, something that takes place on social media, and as an activism that is performed by women for the sake of women. Furthermore, the results of the study show interesting thematic patterns not only in how body activism gets defined but also in how the news media report about body activism. When it comes to the question of how the texts about body activism get told there is a pattern in that a few female activists become main profiles in the texts, which raises questions about representation and power structures. About the framing of the message of the activism, there is a discussion of beauty and looks, self-acceptance and liberation of ideals and norms of beauty. About the framing of the response to the activism there is a discussion about meeting symbolic violence and the risk of facing hate as a body activist. When it comes to the framing of the tool for spreading the activism, I discuss consumerism on social media and the interesting divergence between wanting to oppose how consumerism works to reproduce ideals and norms of beauty with activism on platforms closely linked to commercials and consumerism.

The internet and social media networks have created a changed world of media. Influencers work with creating content on these platforms. This study is focused on five female influencers which each has a large audience of viewers and that work within the category of beauty. They make content that mainly focuses on makeup and fashion. The study's aim is to examine discourses about beauty, identity and emotions in content created by these influencers, and to examine if norms and ideals about beauty is reproduced or challenged. The study relies on a theoretical framework with theories about influence marketing, identity and self-presentation online, the consumer society and how it relates to beauty, gender analysis, and also the role of emotion in cultural politics. The study uses two methods, the first being an analysis of content posted on Twitter using the tool Textometrica and the second being a multimodal discourse analysis of ten videos posted on YouTube. The results show that western ideals of beauty often are reproduced in this material, and that they are reproduced in different ways and forms. Multiple themes and topics within the discourse is discussed. These for example involving who the influencers are and what it takes to become a popular influencer, the identities these influencers build online and aspects of how they create their content, the myth that anyone can become as beautiful and sellable as the influencers if only they use the right products in the right ways, how the body and someone's appearance is seen as a never-ending project that can always be improved and also at theme about an internalised judging gaze. Beauty in this discourse is a word that metonymically becomes sticky with positive values and emotions and almost becomes a synonym for concepts of happiness and health. To be ideally beautiful becomes equivalent to be happy and confident.  To be ideally beautiful becomes equivalent to be healthy. The reproduction of these norms is problematic in many ways, where one of the most important is that it excludes people that does not live up to the norms. It can also be harmful in a way of effecting mental health and wellbeing of the people trying to live up to these norms.

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Scholarly attention to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French art has focused on the importance that Johann Joachim Winckelmann attributed to the male nude figure in his definition of ideal beauty, and the impact of his work on debates over the 'beau idéal' in French art and art criticism. In contrast, Winckelmann's extensive interest in the detail of ancient costume, the folds of drapery, and the teleological and aesthetic significance that he ascribed to them, has been underplayed. The role played by costume and drapery as components of the 'beau idéal' in French art and aesthetics has also not been fully explored. This thesis examines the way in which costume and drapery formed an important component and embodiment of ideal beauty in the work of Winckelmann and in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French artistic circles, providing new insights into the arguments over the meanings of Truth, Beauty and Nature in this period. The thesis proposes that ideal beauty in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century France was conveyed in works of art through the accurate rendering of costume and the expressive qualities of drapery in combination with the perfect form and contour of the nude body. The first part of the thesis sets up a proposition that costume and drapery formed part of the definition of ideal beauty in the work of Winckelmann. Highlighting the significance of Winckelmann's work on costume and drapery in French art theory, it demonstrates how the definition of ideal beauty in France also incorporated the accurate rendering of costume and the aesthetic impact of drapery. In demonstrating the significance of costume and drapery to both Winckelmann and French theorists it is proposed that the application of a meta-historical approach of costume and drapery to French art theory can provide new understandings and readings of the definition of ideal beauty, the hierarchy of the genres and the broader aesthetic concerns of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century French art. The second part of the thesis applies the proposed hermeneutic of costume and drapery to a small selection of theoretical work on the nature of ideal beauty and on a significant collection of Salon criticism. With this approach to the primary material this thesis demonstrates how French artists were able to express the 'beau idéal' within the traditional academic conventions and hierarchies, and negotiate the sense of public unease over the use of nudity in contemporary art.