Final Project Proposal-Renee Curva

For my Convergence project, I would like to focus on the social issue of the unrealistic beauty standards that the media creates for women. More specifically, I will research and expand upon how the media’s control over ‘what is beautiful’ germinated, how it remains at large today, and how these standards have created a beauty/body shaming culture on the internet. I am more interested in the writing aspect of this topic, so am still deciding between a Tumblr campaign or an article that could be used in a magazine. 

Victoria's Secret Campaign

I will start my project off by providing a background on the early onset of societal beauty standards created by the media in the early 20^th century. The book Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons by Lynn Peril is one source that elaborates on the history of pop culture and how it created a particular feminine ideal in America. An article that is beneficial to my project is “Female Body Image and the Mass Media:Perspectives on How Women Internalize the Ideal Beauty Standard”, which talks about the Social Comparison Theory, and how projected images from the media affect how women perceive themselves. I will also use modern women as examples that perpetuate these beauty standards such as Kim Kardashian, Dita Von Teese, Kylie Jenner, or Candice Swanepoel.

Kim Kardashian Shopping

This project will be a critical piece of media because it will serve as an exposition that assesses how the media has molded the ideal feminine beauty into something so synthetic, yet  so commonplace to viewers. From plastic surgery to Photoshop and filters, media has found ways to mechanically/digitally change what the public sees. This project comments on convergence by using magazines, movies, Instagram and other facets of media to dissect how each one contributes to, or helps to combat, the unrealistic bar set for women.