Feminist Pedagogies Reading - 2

Stanhope, C. (2013). Beauty and the Beast – Can Life Drawing Support Female Students in Challenging Gendered Media Imagery?, International Journal of Art & Design Education. 32: 352-361.

Can be accessed online at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1476-8070.2013.12030.x?saml_referrer

(Accessed 22 October 2023)

Abstract

Discourse: The article discusses how life drawing impacts a group of 14-16 year-old female art and design students and their perception with body image.

Context: The article identifies a cultural climate where advertising, social media and celebrity culture constantly propagates stereotypes associated with idealised body types, which can affect the relationship that young girls have with their own bodies.

Methodology: This article reflects on the responses from a group of adolescent female students as they engage in life-drawing with a female nude model. The researcher will first discuss their thoughts and observations during the life-drawing session, then the initial responses from the students through a questionnaire and finally the discussion that took place a week after the session.

Introduction

Theory cited in introduction:

Judith Butler, (1990). states female identities are performed. (Summary of text below.)

(Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, 1990)

-She discusses the 'performativity' of all genders, where identity is constructed through

repetitive performances and so is not a stable or essential aspect of a person's

identity.

-She also discusses that gender performance is not always in alignment of social

norms, where performing one's own gender has subversive potential that can

disrupt binary understandings of gender and open-up possibilities for a more

diverse/ fluid spectrum of gender identities.

-She also encourages a more inclusive and intersectional approach that recognises

the complexities of individual identities and experiences, she argues for the

importance of deconstructing and challenging normative categories.

Research goal:

This research questions whether insecurities felt by young females during a life drawing session was linked to a gender-specific model endorsed by the media and, if so, can we challenge these notions in a classroom through art-based research?

Contextualisation/ 'Background'

Sexual Violence to children (TW - SA)

Contemporary issues that young girls face in London (around the school that the researcher works at) include: - Gang culture, teenage pregnancy, sexual violence.

The researcher even reflects her understanding that young girls will even be '...willing to risk being raped in return for the status of membership (to gangs).'

A survey by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) ‘has suggested that a third of teenage girls have been forced into sexual activity against their will’ (Townsend 2012).

With issues such as these being so prevalent in the areas surrounding the school, and with the sexualisation of women by the media, this research initially aimed to introduce life-drawing into the curriculum in order to provide 'an educational experience where the female form was not viewed in a sexual context'.

Population

The research focussed on a group of twenty female art and design students living in south east London, aged between 15 and 16. This population included mixed abilities, varying SEN and various ethnic and social backgrounds.

Analysis of the Session

Questionnaire:

A questionnaire was distributed to the students after the session, with the following questions:

1. What was your initial response to taking part in a life drawing session and drawing from a naked form?

2. Would your answer above be any different if the model had been male?

3. Why do you think you were asked to draw from a nude figure?

4. Did your views change after you had completed the session

These questions are unbiased, not leading and qualitative. They are written, anonymous and individual, so they require each student to think for themself without being influenced by the group around them.

Responses:

Most of the 20 girls felt it would be a positive experience, but one that would make them slightly uncomfortable.

All 20 students expressed it would be 'inappropriate' if the model had been a male.

2 students expressed that it was 'disgusting'.

5 of the students felt that they were asked to participate for 'experience'. (To make their drawing better).

7 of the students suggested they were asked to participate to make them more mature.

3 students could not offer an opinion.

On initial reading, the students reflected that they wanted to experience new things, they accepted that they were nervous and found the idea of life drawing ‘weird’, but that they wanted to be more mature and overcome these feelings.

However it was also clear that there is an underlying worry about the sexual nature of the session. This is reflected in the students' claim of inappropriateness in response to the suggestion that the model could have been male.

One student even questioned the ethicality of allowing a man to be nude in front of so many young girls.

Session breakdown:

- Usual excitement of engaging with a new experience. - excitement, intrigue and anxiety.

(Model was a middle-aged, slim-built female.)

- As the model entered for the first time, silence fell on the group, the teacher was very aware of the students' anxiety.

- Anxiety calmed as students became focussed on the first task.

- Five students could not move beyond seeing the naked skin of the model and resulted in stifled laughs.

- One student was asked to leave by the artist who ran the session.

- All students, irrespective of positive or negative experiences, reflected that they felt some anxieties at some point before or during the session. This was either anxiety in reference to the naked female body, or the naked form's association with sex.

- Student discussion refocussed on body image and what is deemed beautiful.

- All students agreed that women in the media are portrayed unrealistically.

Two student reflections on how women are portrayed in media:

One said: 'Women are portrayed as sex objects not normal humans.'

Another said: 'Women are portrayed as “perfect”. They are fake, they are twisted lies. Women are sexual objects.'

Applying this to the classroom, to create a feminist pedagogy, we should recognise and present a range of body types and present women in contexts removed from sexualisation. This will help to counter established and reinforced gender stereotypes and reshape students understandings of women. We should help to encourage students that as artists, our art creates media and to be mindful of the power that we have as artists (or content creators) to challenge the representations we see every day.

Susan Bordo(Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the body. 2003) stated that ‘Virtually every celebrity image you see – in the magazines, in the videos, and sometimes even in the movies – has been digitally modified.’ That was ten years ago, and the students all seemed to have a visual knowledge of the manipulation that occurs now; they also spoke strongly that they felt this was wrong.

One student thought that the life drawing model would look like someone of a billboard, with 'big tits and a flat waist', but the student said instead that 'I was glad she wasn't. I was glad she wasn't perfect.'

Highlights the importance of presenting different body types and how it is appreciated by students. But this is also a good opportunity to challenge student's language. What is perfect? if you are glad that the model wasn't perfect, then doesn't this mean that we need to reshape our understanding or language that we use to describe women.

Paradox of insecurity & representation

This paradoxical statement, summarises the students’ thoughts and insecurities:

‘Although I don’t think it's right to have perfect women on billboards, I don’t want to see women that are not perfect.’

Students are trapped between wanting to fight gender stereotypes and wanting to fulfil them. They cannot separate the two identities.

This inability to separate between the real and the unreal was prevalent in postmodern thinking. Baudrillard (1988)suggests that ‘images had become detached from any certain relation to a real world, that we now live in a scopic regime dominated by simulations, or simulacra’.

This is arguably increasingly relevant as we shift into a post-digital world. How can we teach our children to appreciate the imperfections in themselves, if they can at any time escape them virtually, and enter a world of identities in which such imperfections do not exist.

It is of course relevant to our role-models we associate with, para-social relationships can cast fake images of celebrities that we look up to/aspire to achieve their lifestyle that present impossible standards of beauty that we normalise.

The effect of these influences can and has been researched and proven to have negative impacts on the subconscious minds of children. Young women surveyed before and after being shown fashion and beauty magazines have decreased self-image and increased desire to lose weight compared to young women shown news magazines’ (Jillian Croll, Body image and Adolescents. 2005)

-Croll also discusses how adolescents' perceptions of body image is influenced by

cultural messages and social standards of attractiveness, especially during the

developmental stage of puberty.

Physical effects of limited representation

(Wold, N. The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used against women. 1991) Wolf discusses how this objectification of women is not only debilitating in terms of life careers, but can also lead in severe cases to eating disorders.

Wolf also discusses the editing of older women in the media. '...to airbrush age of a woman’s face is to erase women’s identity, power, and history’.

Sexualisation in contemporary feminist dialogues

(Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media, 2007) Gill explores how female media image has shifted over the past ten years. She analyses the shift from the objectification of women, to active sexual subjects. She discusses how we see celebrities with very little clothing on, in overtly sexual poses, which on initial viewing promotes a strong female stance of being in control. While the reclamation of sexuality may be an important step in feminism discourse, the constant sexualisation of women is negatively impacting the minds of young people who do not see women being presented in any other way.

'Increasingly all representations of women in adverts are being refracted through sexually objectifying imagery... young free sexy symbols in the workplace has given way to a style of representation in which every woman must embody all those qualities ... this is the new super woman.'

The exclusivity of women reclaiming sexuality

(Myra, Macdonald. Representing Women: Myths of femininity in the Popular Media. 1995)

McDonald notes that only some women are party to this media image, that is, the young, beautiful and slim. She states (McDonald 1995, 190): ‘By attending to media representations, we might easily forget that fat, ugly, disabled, or wrinkled women have sexual desire, too, and that stretch marks are not incompatible with sexual pleasure.’

These comments are the foundations by which students gave judgement.

Students' comments positioned themselves on the side of the slim, young, 'perfect' and beautiful.

The students showed horror at seeing an older woman in the life drawing class. They stated that it was not nice to 'see older flesh'. The students discussed how there is a lack of representation of older women in the media, unless they have had a lot of work done to make them appear younger. but they also discussed how they did not want to see an older person in a swimsuit etc.

As young females do not consistently see older (unedited) female role models in the media, it influences their concept of female. Wolf calls this the erasure of female identity. (1991)

Conclusions

Students are visually aware of the manipulation that occurs in the media, however, these stereotypes are ultimately what informs their subconscious ideal of beauty.

It is even more important to offer ways of renegotiating identities, within the classroom context.

'The female body is dense with meaning in a patriarchal culture and these connotations cannot be shaken off entirely. There is no possibility of recovering the female body as a neutral sign for feminist meanings, but signs and values can be transformed and different identities can be set in place.' (Lynda Nead. Art History and the Body.1992).

Life drawing cannot redefine gender stereotypes, but perhaps by offering art-based research sessions we can start to pick away and irritate the deep-rooted codes of gender, and start to challenge identities and offer alternatives.

Young girls need this dialogue; however uncomfortable it makes them feel, they need to be offered alternatives. Despite any discomfort it may cause young girls in a classroom, this discomfort is necessary to expound beyond the set understandings and define learning within a feminist pedagogy that challenges students' udnerstandings of gender stereotypes. By challenging these ideas, we might just influence the students positively, combatting societal pressures that limit future careers, facilitate issues of mental health(self worth, eating disorders etc) and restrict understandings of female identity.

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