Culture As A Site Of Contested Meaning Essay

Culture as a Site of Contested Meaning
For years, the modeling industry's perception of what beauty is only consisted of super thin and super skinny women. Their idea of beauty, thereafter, influenced and shaped what our culture’s idea of beauty is as well. Recently though, the meaning of beauty is being challenged. I recently read an article on Fox News' website discussing how magazine publishers were hiring “fatter” models and were also airbrushing pictures of thinner models in order for them to look “fatter”. This shows the clash our culture is having between past and present perceptions of beauty. This article is a good illustration of the idea the culture is "a site of contested meaning." It demonstrates that we are not just recipients of meanings by cultural industries, but we are also the producers who constantly challenge and negotiate those meanings.
Since I could remember, whenever I opened up a magazine I would see the same type of women on the pages, super thin and super tall.
I thought that these women and only women that looked like them were considered beautiful in the eyes of others. People did anything possible to look like the images I saw in the magazines. Based on the article, we see a shift in the cultural meaning of beauty. The article wrote about how women now are being vocal about seeing “healthier” looking females on magazines and on the runway. Photographers and magazine companies are hearing this change in preference and are responding to it by hiring models with different body types and even photo shopping thinner models to make them look “fatter” now. Granted that the change is from a size 0 model to about a size 4 (size 4 is no way "fat"), it is still shows that we as a culture put meaning to a word and constantly change those meanings as
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The article also asked the models’ about their opinion on the photo shopping and newly hired models. Most of the girls were very upset about their pictures being photo shopped. They claimed that they worked very hard by eating right and exercising multiple times a day to get the body they have, and it was disrespectful to alter the image. This shows the power struggle between the dominant group and non- dominant group. What I find interesting is that in most cases the dominant group is the group with the most people, but in this situation (thanks to the power media has over a culture) the dominant group are the supermodels, which are far fewer in number. This dilemma demonstrates that when someone from a dominant or non-dominant group is shown outside the “norm” there is always some tension that is going to be expressed. In this case, the “norm” was for super thin and tall supermodels to be in magazines, so when another group (the less thin) were printed in the magazines, there was tension from the dominant group.
We will all at one point come to struggle with a meaning our culture has produced. The great thing is that those meanings are not stable and secured. We as a culture can challenge and change meaning. The article showed that women don’t need to stand by and accept meaning media has tried to force upon us. It showed us that even though we may be the non- dominant group, our voice can be heard and we can force change.