Perfect Me

Perfect Me PDF Author: Heather Widdows
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691197148
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today's worldThe demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or a failure. Perfect Me explores the changing nature of the beauty ideal, showing how it is more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before.Heather Widdows argues that our perception of the self is changing. More and more, we locate the self in the body--not just our actual, flawed bodies but our transforming and imagined ones. As this happens, we further embrace the beauty ideal. Nobody is firm enough, thin enough, smooth enough, or buff enough-not without significant effort and cosmetic intervention. And as more demanding practices become the norm, more will be required of us, and the beauty ideal will be harder and harder to resist.If you have ever felt the urge to "make the best of yourself" or worried that you were "letting yourself go," this book explains why. Perfect Me examines how the beauty ideal has come to define how we see ourselves and others and how we structure our daily practices-and how it enthralls us with promises of the good life that are dubious at best. Perfect Me demonstrates that we must first recognize the ethical nature of the beauty ideal if we are ever to address its harms.

Perfect Me

Perfect Me PDF Author: Heather Widdows
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691197148
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today's worldThe demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or a failure. Perfect Me explores the changing nature of the beauty ideal, showing how it is more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before.Heather Widdows argues that our perception of the self is changing. More and more, we locate the self in the body--not just our actual, flawed bodies but our transforming and imagined ones. As this happens, we further embrace the beauty ideal. Nobody is firm enough, thin enough, smooth enough, or buff enough-not without significant effort and cosmetic intervention. And as more demanding practices become the norm, more will be required of us, and the beauty ideal will be harder and harder to resist.If you have ever felt the urge to "make the best of yourself" or worried that you were "letting yourself go," this book explains why. Perfect Me examines how the beauty ideal has come to define how we see ourselves and others and how we structure our daily practices-and how it enthralls us with promises of the good life that are dubious at best. Perfect Me demonstrates that we must first recognize the ethical nature of the beauty ideal if we are ever to address its harms.

The Beauty Myth

The Beauty Myth PDF Author: Naomi Wolf
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006196994X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity. In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty."

Ideals of Beauty

Ideals of Beauty PDF Author: Julian Raby
Publisher: Thames and Hudson
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A curator-led tour through more than one hundred masterworks.

The depiction of beauty ideals and beauty standards in Robert Iscove's "She's all that"

The depiction of beauty ideals and beauty standards in Robert Iscove's Author: Dennis Alexander Goebels
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640299922
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 12

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Englisches Seminar), course: Skin Deep - Beauty, Bodies and Business, WS 2005/2006, language: English, abstract: In Robert Iscove’s "She’s all that" beauty ideals and beauty standards play a major role and the submission of Laney to these standards and ideals is the reason why Zack falls in love with her. That is why I am going to argue that in Robert Iscove’s movie ideals of white, middle-class, male society are taken as a basis to prove that submission to these standards is the only way for women to be accepted by men.

Beauty and the Norm

Beauty and the Norm PDF Author: Claudia Liebelt
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319911740
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Recent decades have seen the rise of a global beauty boom, with profound effects on perceptions of bodies worldwide. Against this background, Beauty and the Norm assembles ethnographic and conceptual approaches from a variety of disciplines and across the globe to debate standardization in bodily appearance. Its contributions range from empirical research to exploratory conversations between scholars and personal reflections. Bridging hitherto separate debates in critical beauty studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, the history of science, disability studies, gender studies, and critical race studies, this volume reflects upon the gendered, classed, and racialized body, normative regimes of representation, and the global beauty economy.

Consumptive Chic

Consumptive Chic PDF Author: Carolyn A. Day
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350009407
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there was a tubercular 'moment' in which perceptions of the consumptive disease became inextricably tied to contemporary concepts of beauty, playing out in the clothing fashions of the day. With the ravages of the illness widely regarded as conferring beauty on the sufferer, it became commonplace to regard tuberculosis as a positive affliction, one to be emulated in both beauty practices and dress. While medical writers of the time believed that the fashionable way of life of many women actually rendered them susceptible to the disease, Carolyn A. Day investigates the deliberate and widespread flouting of admonitions against these fashion practices in the pursuit of beauty. Through an exploration of contemporary social trends and medical advice revealed in medical writing, literature and personal papers, Consumptive Chic uncovers the intimate relationship between fashionable women's clothing, and medical understandings of the illness. Illustrated with over 40 full color fashion plates, caricatures, medical images, and photographs of original garments, this is a compelling story of the intimate relationship between the body, beauty, and disease - and the rise of 'tubercular chic'.

Handbook of Positive Body Image and Embodiment

Handbook of Positive Body Image and Embodiment PDF Author: Niva Piran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190841885
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
For five decades, negative body image has been a major focus of study due to its association with psychological and social morbidity, including eating disorders. However, more recently the body image construct has broadened to include positive ways of living in the body, enabling greater understanding of embodied well-being, as well as protective factors and interventions to guide the prevention and treatment of eating disorders. Handbook of Positive Body Image and Embodiment is the first comprehensive, research-based resource to address the breadth of innovative theoretical concepts and related practices concerning positive ways of living in the body, including positive body image and embodiment. Presenting 37 chapters by world-renowned experts in body image and eating behaviors, this state-of-the-art collection delineates constructs of positive body image and embodiment, as well as social environments (such as families, peers, schools, media, and the Internet) and therapeutic processes that can enhance them. Constructs examined include positive embodiment, body appreciation, body functionality, body image flexibility, broad conceptualization of beauty, intuitive eating, and attuned sexuality. Also discussed are protective factors, such as environments that promote body acceptance, personal safety, diversity, and activism, and a resistant stance towards objectification, media images, and restrictive feminine ideals. The handbook also explores how therapeutic interventions (including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Dissonance, and many more) and public health and policy initiatives can inform scholarly, clinical, and prevention-based work in the field of eating disorders.

The Force of Beauty

The Force of Beauty PDF Author: Holly Grout
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807159905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The market for commercial beauty products exploded in Third Republic France, with a proliferation of goods promising to erase female imperfections and perpetuate an aesthetic of femininity that conveyed health and respectability. While the industry's meteoric growth helped to codify conventional standards of womanhood, The Force of Beauty goes beyond the narrative of beauty culture as a tool for sociopolitical subjugation to show how it also targeted women as important consumers in major markets and created new avenues by which they could express their identities and challenge or reinforce gender norms. As cosmetics companies and cultural media, from magazines to novels to cinema, urged women to aspire to commercial standards of female perfection, beauty evolved as a goal to be pursued rather than a biological inheritance. The products and techniques that enabled women to embody society's feminine ideal also taught them how to fashion their bodies into objects of desire and thus offered a subversive tool of self-expression. Holly Grout explores attempts by commercial beauty culture to reconcile a standard of respectability with female sexuality, as well as its efforts to position French women within the global phenomenon of changing views on modern womanhood. Grout draws on a wide range of primary sources-hygiene manuals, professional and legal debates about the right to fabricate and distribute "medicines," advertisements for beauty products, and contemporary fiction and works of art-to explore how French women navigated changing views on femininity. Her seamless integration of gender studies with business history, aesthetics, and the history of medicine results in a textured and complex study of the relationship between the politics of womanhood and the politics of beauty.

The Culture of Beauty

The Culture of Beauty PDF Author: Louise I. Gerdes
Publisher: Greenhaven Press, Incorporated
ISBN: 9780737763102
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Looks at the culture of beauty, including beauty standards, societal impact, and psychological effects.

Healthy Is the New Skinny

Healthy Is the New Skinny PDF Author: Katie H. Willcox
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
ISBN: 1401951635
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
We live in a world where beauty is everything. Society tells us that if we just looked a certain way, if we had the right products, if we were skinny enough, then we would be enough —we would have value. Society is wrong, but it took Katie H. Willcox years to understand this: “Over the course of my 30 short years, I have both worked as a professional model and been the exact opposite of our culture’s beauty ideal. I have struggled with my weight and felt like I didn’t and never would fit in. Then I had a powerful realization: my misery and self-loathing didn’t change with my weight or how ‘pretty’ society thought I was, so my looks weren’t the source of happiness and worth that I had believed them to be. But then, what was? And how had I come to invest so much of myself in beliefs that were so untrue?” In these pages, Katie shares the lessons she learned in her journey to find the answers to these questions. She reveals who gains from our feeling small and why we need to examine the messages we receive from our culture and our families. She explains how we can redefine beauty, make healthy the new “skinny,” and harness the power of our thoughts to choose self-love. Katie encourages us to discover our true magnificent selves, find our purpose, and pursue our dreams —and help others to do the same. Join the movement! Visit www.HealthyIsTheNewSkinny.com and follow us on Instagram @healthyisthenewskinny.