Thin White Women in Advertising. Deathly Corporeality.2003

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Journal of Consumer Culture

DOI: 10.1177/14695405030032002 2003; 3; 170 Journal of Consumer Culture

Sean Redmond Thin White Women in Advertising: Deathly Corporeality

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ARTICLE

Thin White Women in AdvertisingDeathly corporealitySEAN REDMONDSouthampton Institute

Abstract. This article examines the way that contemporary British women’s magazineadvertising employs idealized images of thin white women to confer status on a rangeof beauty products and services. These lean, pure, radiant images of white women areimagined to be natural sources of light, beauty, and the entry point (with the product)to a higher state of female grace. However, the article also addresses what is argued tobe the ‘absence’ effect and the lack of corporeal life that is also at the core of many ofthese ‘lacking’ images of white women. The article argues that such textual rupturesand contradictions, in turn, point to the way that thinness itself, as a self-willed bodyproject, can be considered to be a resistant body practice, or one that draws attentionto the life and death struggle at the heart of what it means to be a ‘good’ whitewoman in a patriarchal society.

Key wordsabsence ● commodity fetish ● flesh ● glow ● holy anorexia ● resistance

INTRODUCTIONIn this article I intend to look at whiteness in terms of specific articulat-ing processes around womanhood, femininity, and body design. Throughthe case study of mainly contemporary UK magazine health and lifestyleadvertising I will address the way thinness, female beautification, and skincolour (as both metaphor and literal sign system) work to both commodifyand valorize white womanhood – as a beauty and moral ideal – and toproduce self-surveillance and dietary practices in the behaviour of ‘real’

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female readers that renders their thin,white, female bodies as docile, bound-aried, and under strict control.

However, it is also my intention to work through to a set of possiblymore contradictory representational articulations produced by such adver-tising texts. By adopting a Gramscian position I hope to demonstrate thatadvertising texts which attempt to construct an idealized version of whitewomanhood, through the filter of thinness, inevitably open up ideologicalspaces where such skeletal visions of whiteness can be seen to be death-like and destructive, and where self-surveillance and dietary practices canbe seen to be resistant, counter-hegemonic ‘performance’ strategies. I wantto draw on both Mary Ann Doane (1982) and Judith Butler (1990) here,who both argue, in relation to gender performance, and the use of parodyin drag and cross-dressing, that femininity can read as masquerade. Myadoption of this position, in relation to whiteness, is that the representationof thin white women in advertising, and what I see as connected perfor-mative body projects such as anorexia, work to show idealized white femi-ninity as always a contradictory form of representation, and as somethingwhich can manifest itself in resistant body behaviours.

In this article, then, I argue that the representation of thin white womenin advertising,produced in a ‘fashion-beauty complex’ (Bartky,1990) largelycontrolled and constructed by white men, can actually produce textualruptures where the representation on offer becomes an embodied critiqueof idealized white femininity, a rejection of white patriarchy, and one whichcan anchor or give meaning to resistant strategies in the behaviours of those‘reading’ white women who come to see (themselves) through the lensmore darkly.

The article begins with an historical and contextual account of the waythe thin, female body has been represented in the media and popular culturemore generally. This critical overview is then connected to sociological andpsychological studies on body satisfaction in women, and to the racialcodings that go into the representation of female thinness. Whiteness ismore explicitly picked up at this point in the article and textually examinedin relation to its position as the feminine ideal. Finally, the article goes onto explore the argument that there is actually an unstable, life and deathstruggle at the core of a number of British women’s magazine adverts thatfeature thin white women as their objects of beauty and identification.

THIN WOMEN IN ADVERTISING

Within consumer culture the body is proclaimed as a vehicle ofpleasure: it’s desirable and desiring and the closer the actual body

Redmond / Thin white women in advertising

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approximates to idealised images of youth, health, fitness andbeauty the higher its exchange value. Consumer culture permitsthe unashamed display of the human body. (Featherstone, 1991:177)

The contemporary popular media is saturated in images of thin and healthyand beautiful female bodies. Female film stars, pop stars, cat-walk models,television hosts, the ‘leading lady’ of romantic fiction narrative, and adver-tising hoardings, in the main, operate under a ‘tyranny of slenderness’(Chernin, 1983), where thin is beautiful, desirable, and valuable (transfer-ring success onto a range of life goals, practices and products, and womenwho fit the thin ideal).

Eileen Guillen and Susan Barr (1994) looked at body representation inthe US adolescent magazine Seventeen between 1970 and 1990, and foundthe over-determination of the thin body and the contribution to what theysaw as the expected female norm to be thin. Similarly, Silverstein et al.(1986) looked at body size in 33 television shows and found that 69 percent of female characters were coded as thin, while only 5 per cent offemale characters were thought of as heavy or large. In terms of the typesof female body most frequently found in the women’s magazines LadiesHome Journal and Vogue, Silverstein et al. (1986) also found not only that athin body dominated copy, but that the female bodies represented in themagazines had become significantly thinner since the 1930s.

The historical emergence of the super-thin body is something pickedup by Schwartz (1986), Bordo (1993) and Grogan (1999). Grogan charts acultural change in the perception and representation of the ideal femalebody from ‘the voluptuous figures favoured from the middle ages to theturn of this century, to the thin body types favoured by the fashion maga-zines of today’ (p. 285). Grogan locates the 1920s as a key moment wherethe idealization of ‘slimness’ is first produced in the successful marketingstrategies of the fashion and cosmetics industry. The female body then goesthrough a series of different incarnations over the course of the century, allof them market led – the ‘flapper’ of the 1920s; the rounded and shapelyfigure of film stars such as Lana Turner and Jane Russell in the 1930s and1940s; in the 1950s and 1960s, a return to the slim ideal with the iconicstatus of such stars/celebrities as Grace Kelly and Twiggy; and in thecontemporary age, an exaggeration of the slim ideal in the waif-like bodyideal, represented through such models as Kate Moss.

Bordo (1993) also shows that the ideological positions and ‘meanings’taken from thin and fat bodies went through an inversion at the turn of

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the last century: at first, thinness is associated with illness because of its linkto tuberculosis (TB), while plumpness connotes wealth (when male) andfecundity and beauty (when female). However, what then happens is thatthe existence, the very appearance of excess flesh comes to be seen as anindicator of a lack of self-control and discipline, an indicator, in fact, of lowmorality. By contrast, slenderness comes to embody being in control ofone’s potentially wayward and immoral body, an indicator or embodimentof culturedness and civility. This is symbolized through the way the thinbody is represented as a healthy, beautiful, successful body in a range ofvisual popular media texts.

Bordo, utilizing the writings of Foucault, argues that it is because patri-archy increasingly needed to have the (female) body under control, regu-lated and boundaried, that thinness achieves its status as an ultimate idealin the 20th century. Female thinness becomes a social control mechanismor ‘a body that is absolutely tight, contained, bolted down, firm’ (1993: 190)and therefore both fixed in meaning and passive in orientation. For Bordo,nowhere is this more evident than in contemporary health and beautyadverts where ‘the construction of the body as an alien attacker, threaten-ing to erupt in unsightly displays of bulging flesh, is a ubiquitous culturalimage’ (1993: 189).

Susie Orbach (1993) draws some powerful parallels between flesh andpower and gender norms. Flesh, corporeal substance, bulkiness is an associ-ated male trait, at least in honed muscle form, and helps connote notionsof natural male physical power within society. Fleshy women, by contrast,seem like a form of ‘matter out of place’, and a threat to such normativeassociations about how and why men’s and women’s bodies work the waythey do. So if women cannot have fleshy, bulky bodies then they have tokeep their bodies thin and marginal through cultivation practices. AsOrbach contends,

The receptivity that women show (across class, ethnicity, andthrough generations) to the idea that their bodies are likegardens – arenas for constant improvement and resculpturing –rooted in the recognition of their bodies as commodities –creates all sorts of body image problems for women. (1993: 17)

It is this very conception of the female body as a type of commodity fetishthat Orbach goes on to explore. Orbach argues that from the very earlystages of primary socialization, young girls are taught to view their bodiesas commodities in the dual sense that ideal girls’/women’s bodies are usedto eroticize and humanize, and sell an enormous range of products; and in


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the sense that idealized girls’/women’s bodies are themselves sexually objec-tified or ‘presented as the ultimate commodity’ (1993: 17) within popularculture. Orbach makes a link between this objectification of the ideal thinfemale body and the rise of anorexia nervosa in women, increasingly, of allages.

Over the past 10 years there have been numerous studies on therelationship between the representation of the thin female body and bodysatisfaction in women. Lori Irving (1991) looked at the effects of viewingslides of thin models on 162 women college students with eating disorders.Irving found that exposure to thin models resulted in lowered self-esteem,especially around appearance and body size. Irving also discovered that interms of perceived social pressure on staying thin and looking good, the‘media’ was rated as the most powerful influence.

Myers and Biocca (1992) found that one in three of all adverts involved‘attractiveness-based messages’ and that the long-term effects on real bodyesteem were devastating. Over time women would hold up their ownbodies in a mirror to/with ideal bodies, and see themselves as lacking andfaulty. Myers and Biocca concluded that body image is ‘elastic’ and suscep-tible to external forces and media pressures.

Leslie Heinberg and Kevin Thompson (1995) looked at the effects ofideal-model centred adverts on 139 women and found that women whowere already suffering from low self-esteem became less satisfied with theirown bodies after exposure to such adverts. Grogan et al. (1996) assessed theeffects on both men and women of viewing slim, ideal images of them-selves. They concluded that both men and women came to be less satisfied,or to have reduced body esteem, after viewing such images.

All in all, the weight of research conducted on body esteem and behav-iour modification in relation to exposure to media images of the thin andbeautiful female body suggests a close correlation. However, what I wouldalso like to suggest about these research findings ‘in general’ is that there isa key bridge between them other than the one linked to thinness and bodyesteem. Much of the research has tended to focus on white female/maleparticipants and on white beauty ideals, not least because, as the researchfindings confirm, the modern media is awash with such white female ideal-ized images. What is being produced, therefore, as a body of knowledge, isan understanding of how white, thin female bodies are constructed as idealsand how white females come to struggle with their own bodies and bodyesteem because of, or in spite of, the skeletal images they consume. Whereresearch has been carried out on black women and their bodies a differentpicture seems to emerge.


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A 1995 study by researchers at the University of Arizona, entitled BodyImage and Weight Concerns Among African American and White AdolescentFemales: Differences that Make a Difference, found that black girls who were‘thick bodied’ were happier with their bodies than white girls, who dislikedtheir bodies, perceived themselves to be overweight (even when they werenot) and who often dieted or ‘starved’ to achieve the ideal or idealized bodysize. White girls also connected dieting and being thin as the project thatwould lead them to achieving a more perfect life, with more friends andmore boyfriends. By contrast, black girls emphasized ‘personality traits’ overthe physical when describing their ideal selves.

Media images of beautiful bodies were seen to be important here:white girls were/are repeatedly bombarded with the white and thin femaleideal, while black girls, because of the ‘symbolic annihilation’ of the blackfemale body in the media, through absence or animalistic fetishization, hadfewer of their images with which to enter into a dialogue. Duquin (1989)found that only 3 per cent of all adverts in 13 US women’s magazinesdepicted visible-minority women. McMahon (1990),Williamson (1986)and hooks (1992) have argued that models coded along ethnic lines areused to convey the sense of the ‘exotic’, and their ‘otherness’ acts to normal-ize and entrench the dominant ideal of white beauty.

Across the body of work, then, on both women in advertising and thinwomen in advertising, there seems to be a clearly entrenched racial codingto the beautifications on offer: the appearance of the beautiful, beautiful-because-thin white woman is an over-determining ideal image, commodityfetish and wish fulfilment in popular culture. Fat and flesh are, by contrast,immoral and failing markers for the white woman, and so the excess fleshneeds to be ‘burned’, punished, repulsed.The immorality of weighty orbulky white female body can also be linked to racial transgression since itbecomes more like the thick bodied black body, splitting open the verynotion that racial superiority and difference resides in the body. This is whythin white women in the real world train and starve their bodies, why theygo to work on their bodies in ever more extreme ways.

However, it is precisely this notion of training and working that I thinkproblematizes the dialectic between image/text/representation and con-sumption and behaviour change. The very nature of having to ‘work’ thebody to achieve the ideal body opens up spaces of resistance, contestationand opposition that I also think reside in adverts that have worked in thinwhite women at their centre. What I would like to do now is examine thewhite female bodies found in contemporary health and lifestyle advertswith the intention of looking into the lens a little more darkly.


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THIN WHITE WOMEN IN ADVERTS

The current body of fashion is taut, small-breasted, and of aslimness bordering on emaciation; it is a silhouette that seemsmore appropriate to an adolescent boy or a newly pubescent girlthan to an adult woman. (Bartky, 1990)

White women in adverts are often narrativized in symbolically loaded whitesettings, with carefully selected iconography that uses both the colour whiteto connote ideas of purity and innocence and radiance, and high-key lightto bathe the female model in an imaginary halo that therefore marks herout as heavenly. These white women are invariably thin, often blonde, andthrough the combination of setting, colour scheme, and lighting effectare constructed as corporeal ‘real’ but yet translucent, ephemeral,spiritual/heavenly representations.This is an idealized representation,which,by corporeal and symbolic definition, only thin white women can achieve.Let me take an example to make an initial exploration of these ideas.

In the ‘Let the Mood Take You to Bordeaux’ magazine advertisingcampaign of 2001, red and white wines are represented in starkly differentways. In the double page advert (found running, for example, in TheObserver magazine during the summer) the red wine is imagined in apassionate, darkly lit mise-en-scène with a voluptuous, pouting, dark-hairedmodel, dressed in a red velvet dress, dominating the image. Emotive wordssuch as ‘full bodied’ provide the evocative anchorage to the pre-coitalencounter. The full bodied red wine, it is signified, takes the imagined malepurchaser to this passionate moment, into the arms, the full body of the/aseductive and highly eroticized woman. This risky woman is all body (justlike the wine), but because she is all body and sexually charged she has tobe represented through symbolism which smothers her in danger – theredish darkness of the shot, and the red velvet dress almost transform herinto a complete sexual fetish.

The white wine, by contrast, is imagined in a ‘natural’ outdoor setting,with two ‘lifetime’ friends caught in a nostalgic moment of recountinginnocent childhood memories. Both friends are blonde haired, althoughone has long blonde hair that, because of the sunlight (high-key light) thatfalls onto it, literally appears to glow. In fact, this friend glows all over: thelong, flowing, glowing hair falls onto her exposed neck and shoulders, andagain because of the sunlight, because of her full, whiter-than-white smile,and because of the white dress that she wears, creates the appearance thatshe herself radiates light. Richard Dyer (1997) has suggested that theproduction of a ‘glow’ is central to idealizing white womanhood:


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Idealized white women are bathed in and permeated by light. Itstreams through them and falls on to them from above. In short,they glow. They glow rather than shine. The light within orfrom above appears to suffuse the body. Shine, on the otherhand, is light bouncing off the surface of the skin. It is themirror effect of sweat, itself connoting physicality, the emissionsof the body and unladylike behaviour, in the sense of both workand parturition. (1997: 122)

Her friend, also blonde and also smiling, has some of this glow about hertoo: in fact in the way the are positioned, face to face, foreheads and armstouching (as if, in this childhood garden that they have returned to, this isthe moment where a long-time secret has just been shared), the glowappears to pass between them and through them, as if this is a naturalessence that belongs to them, that binds together their friendship.

However, subtle differences are encoded between the two friends inthe advert: the short-haired blonde friend holds the glass of white wine inthe air: her friend innocently clutches a piece of ivy; the short-hairedblonde wears a flowery, brightly coloured dress in contrast to the whiter-than-white dress of her friend; the short-haired blonde is given more ofthe appearance that she has worked on her appearance – the designerbobbed hair, the earring, the fashion statement dress – in contrast to theheavenly, naturally defined friend who, it is implied, appears as natureintended. In short, to accommodate some of the ‘risk’ of the wine, andsome of the modernity of adulthood, a big sister and little sister narrativeis created. Both sister–friends glow, both sister–friends have radiance andbeauty, both sister–friends are thin, but only one sister–friend has the fullaura of childhood innocence and virginity around her shoulders. Thecottage background, and the verdant green garden they sit in recalls theirchildhood days, supported by the poetic, dislocated prose that fills an over-sized wine glass on the accompanying page, ‘childhood – friends – cool –clouds – melting – secret – blossoming – laughter’, but it is the long-hairedblonde friend who seems closer to the purity and the innocence of thosehalcyon days.

But thinness, I want to also argue, is crucial here in constructing thisversion of idealized white femininity made translucent.The advert not onlyrelies on symbolism, mise-en-scène, iconography and non-verbal communi-cation to establish notions of glowing beauty and innocence, but on avanishing corporeality, or a minimization of the white female bodies inquestion.


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While it is clear that the advert relies on the two bodies to connotesome of the tranquillity of hot, summer days, and to help structure thelooking in terms of a voyeuristic gaze – there is also, clearly, a degree of‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (Mulvey, 1975) in the presentation of these bodies –the two bodies are also meant to signify for degrees of absence or forfluidity, for body borders and boundaries that dissolve in the shimmer ofthe glow that surrounds them. The two bodies, suffused in this glow, caughtup in all this innocence and tranquillity, appear to be able to float right offthe page. The two sister–friends, then, are heavenly in appearance andangelic in connotation. Angels are where earthly, feminine-pure cor-poreality melts into air for the highest state of feminine being. The twoheavenly bodies in fact are meant to embody the pale, fresh, light and airywhite wine that, in the pictorial composition,where it is shown in the over-sized glass that also has the ‘emotive’ text written across it, allows light andbackground setting to pass through it. A quasi-religious state of affairssanctifies the holy commodification on offer.

Thin bodies do this passing through best because there is not ‘much tothem’ in the first place, their lines and shapes being economical. But withglow, with haze and shimmer alongside, above, beyond, and flowing overthe skin the thinness makes it easier for the body borders to be seen todisappear, or float upwards. But not only this – the thinness produces thesense that these bodies have been kept natural, unpolluted, and pure. Theimplied abstinence, especially in relation to the long-haired blondesister–friend (who hasn’t even let the wine touch her lips), who is codedas more angelic and heavenly, suggests containment and self-control. In thisoscillating mix of fluidity and yet self-control, of translucence and yetfixivity, the cultural significance/importance of the thin, white woman isrealized. She is body that is self-contained and controlled, and through suchself-regulation marked by abstinence (nothing or very little enters herbody), she is pure; but being pure she naturally glows, and in glowing thevery minimal borders of her body are allowed to float away into a heavenlystate of grace. No wonder, then, the white wine wants to be associated withsuch a powerful mythos or discursive formation since the value transfer-ence will grant the wine both the value of the highest status commodityfetish, and the apparent ascension into a state of eternal grace – white wine,in fact, re-imagining its link to the body of Christ through these ascend-ing angels. No wonder, then, white women feel both touched by the glowof their white skin, and yet terrorized by the implications and demands puton them and their bodies, to achieve such a glow.

To summarize: this advert is not simply about the selling of white wine


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through the literal and metaphorical association with an idealized versionof white womanhood. Alongside its tools of persuasion and manipulationare its hyper-ritualizations (Goffman, 1979), gender inscripted tableaux(Marchand, 1985), and cultivation and grooming lesson(s) on what consti-tutes the perfect white woman (Orbach, 1993). Through adverts like this,it can be contended, white women are presented with ideal images ofthemselves and they are encouraged, interpolated, to think that the rub ofthe glow, and the beautiful thinness of the white body, will become a partof their everyday lives, will become them, if only they beautify, diet, andremain pure in body and in mind.

However, I think two problems emerge which complicate or open upthe ‘dominant’ and closed-off reading I have just produced for the whitewine advert. First, not only does a great deal of apparent construction andgender performance go into the implied narrative of this advert – therepresentation is full of excess – but some of the contradiction and contes-tation of what it means to be an ideal white woman clearly finds its wayinto the advert, threatening to tear its coherency of message open. Forexample, the two sister–friends have to be both ideal bodies, that is, pretty,physical bodies, to be admired and fantasized over, and no bodies at all, orbodies that dissolve in glow and apparition, that is, if the ascension motifis to truly work. Similarly, the slightly less than natural sister–friend has adegree of modernity and autonomy (she is having all the fun) that poten-tially carries a weight of identification above and beyond the one trueangel.

Second, if there is the potential for semiotic spillage and representa-tional fracture, then reader responses and behaviour modification may bemore radical and subversive. One could argue, borrowing from Palmer(1980), that white women who diet to excess are engaged in a rejection offeminine identity, or in my inflection, a rejection of idealized white femi-ninity, so that rather than dieting and starving the body being slavishresponses to the cult of (white) femininity, they are examples of resistant,counter-hegemonic responses by white women who deliberately take themythos of the glowing, absent white body to their logical extreme – sothat they literally disappear from sight. This could itself be seen as an in-version of the concept of ‘holy anorexia’ where, as Bell (1985) has argued,starvation was seen as a way for women to experience the sufferings experi-enced by Christ. In my inflection this is a form of quasi-blasphemy whereholiness is itself being parodied.

In this process of ‘parodic excess’ (Benson, 1997: 142) these womenmay have seen the dark side of the white lens more clearly than anyone


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else and may be responding with embodied excesses of their own. What Iwould like to do now is explore these arguments through looking at a rangeof modern UK health and lifestyle adverts found across a range of monthlywomen’s magazines

THE TYRANNY AND MUTINY OF WHITE SLENDERNESSModern UK health and lifestyle advertising is saturated in images of thinwhite women, objectified, to varying degrees, in a state of grace. Taking asnapshot of a range of ‘best selling’ glossy teen and women’s magazines fromMarch–April 2002, I want to look at the type of ideal female mostcommonly represented in terms of this trope of whitely thinness. The ‘bestselling’ magazines I have chosen to examine are: Cosmopolitan, aimed at(professional, working) women in their early-to-late 20s; Company, with aslightly younger ‘professional’ profile; B, with a similar readership profile toCompany; 19, aimed at older working/non-working teenagers; Bliss, aimedat younger school/college-based teenagers; Hair and Beauty, aimed atwomen in their early to late 20s; and NewU Health and Slimming, aimed ata very wide age range of girls and women since, as the magazine itselfsuggests in its advertorials, all women need to renew themselves throughhealth and diet regimes. A number of similarities and differences can beimmediately identified with regard to the number and type of advertsfound across these magazines.

Cosmopolitan (March 2002) has 97 clearly defined adverts in an editionwith 364 pages in it. However, the magazine is also full of covert advertsin the form of ‘Cosmo-Promotions’, competitions and fashion shootswhere a range of beauty and fashion brands are threaded into the narrativeof the magazine. Of the 97 adverts, only one uses models of a non-whiteappearance (and this also actually pictures the only non-white faces in thewhole magazine). The GAP ‘New Khaki’ advert stars three ‘oriental’models, positioned as friends, in close body proximity, all wearing differentkhaki coloured versions of the high-fashion trousers. The visual and repre-sentational play here is, of course, all about different types of browns –literally presented in the different shades of the trousers but personified inthe different shades of hair and skin colour of the three ‘oriental’ modelspresented.

Of all the other adverts that use models to sell their products, beauti-ful, thin white women are the objects/subjects of choice. In Cosmopolitanthe vast majority of adverts are for hair, beauty (make-up, moisturizer, skinlotion, perfume etc.), clothing and dieting products, with the rest of theadverts (less than 10) for cars, alcohol, and domestic items such as cat food


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and toilet tissue. Representationally, close-up, high-key lit shots of the face;long shots of the whole body (undressing, or naked, or being made up, orcaught in a romantic embrace, and/or being touched or caressed by themodel herself); and fragmented shots of parts of the body (legs, arms,breasts, cheeks) dominate the image system on offer. Women models arebeing systematically eroticized, fetishized and commodified in exactly themanner that Berger (1972), Bordo (1993), McCracken (1993) and Orbach(1993) have identified with regards to media culture. Nonetheless, through-out, as I will presently argue, ephemeral and translucent images of the ideal-ized white woman are also central to the commodification on offer.

Company (April 2002) has 59 overt adverts in an edition with 217 pagesin it but, as is the case with Cosmopolitan and the rest of the magazines thatI am analysing, covert advertising increases this amount considerably.Woveninto the very fabric of these magazines, then, is a fashion–beauty synergywhere advertorials, promotions, competitions, and fashion shoots carry onand carry over the adverts’ preoccupation with beautification, thinness, andself-presentation. There is both a ‘cult of femininity’ (Ferguson, 1983)aligned with a ‘tyranny of slenderness’ in operation here.

In this edition of Company, two linked adverts for Benetton are theonly ones to carry non-white models. Benetton, of course, imagines itselfas a utopian brand, ‘uniting’ people of different skin colours/races throughthe magical, healing qualities of their clothes. Both adverts here – one witha close-up of a smiling black girl, face-on, and one with ‘Siamese twins’,identically dressed – captures this sense of hands-across-the-world – butwith a degree of racial mythology clearly built in. The rest of the advertsin this edition follow the Cosmopolitan profile I outlined above in terms ofthe female subjects/objects under the commodity gaze, in terms of therepresentational codes used to photograph them, and in terms of the ideal-ized versions of white femininity found across the adverts. In fact, the sameadverts repeatedly run across the two magazines (and to a degree all themagazines under analysis here) confirming the saturating nature of an on-going advertising campaign, and the extent to which advertisers target bothsimilar and divergent types of female readers. However, one difference doesemerge: in Company – there are a greater number of adverts for tanning:perhaps this is because the April edition heralds the spring/summer holidayperiod, and the reader ‘imagined’ reality that ‘skin’ is again being revealedin public places as the weather gets warmer. In these adverts, tanning isconstructed as an attempt/need/desire to be less pale, less white, less anaemiclooking, and more healthy, and so this is something I do want to go ontoexplore since the representation inverts the meaning of whiteness, and


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reverts to the whiteness equals sickness (is in fact death-like) relationshipthat held at the turn of the last century.

In the April (2002) 154 page edition of B there are 32 overt adverts,but none that feature non-white models. Again, adverts for hair, health, andbeauty dominate. In 19 there are 23 overt adverts in an edition of 130pages, with one black model found in a Government-sponsored ecstasyawareness/drugs helpline advert. Again, both the same type of advert, andthe same brands found in the other magazines, find their way into 19:Garnier hair, Dove shampoo, Rimmel make-up, Palmer’s cocoa butterformula, Max Factor, and Impulse deodorant are the major reoccurringbranded adverts.

In Bliss (April 2002) there are 27 adverts in an edition of 122 pages,but here there is a greater use of, and visibility for, non-white models: blackand Asian models appear in at least four adverts although for three of thesethe adverts are Government-sponsored – two for ‘Aim Higher’, a skills andeducation-based initiative, and one for drugs helpline/ecstasy awareness.The irony of this should not be lost: in the reality-based world of Govern-ment advertising, black women find themselves being represented, madevisible, but only in the context of under-achievement (the ‘Aim Higher’campaign is a push to get more black girls to apply to Higher Education),and drug taking. By sharp contrast, in the fantasy land of high fashion,dream dates, and beauty ideals, black girls are nowhere to be found. In Bliss,19, Cosmopolitan, B, and Company it is white girls who get the chance totry out all these goods: it is white girls who are presented as the embodi-ments of cultural, universal beauty. White girls glow, they have all the luck.

Neither the NewU Health & Slimming magazine (issue 2, 2002) or theHair & Beauty magazine (April/May 2002) have any overt adverts withinthem. NewU is entirely composed of health and slimming features, articles,and ‘interactive’ health, diet, and fitness charts that women readers aresupposed to utilize to take control of bodies that have gone wayward thisside of Christmas.The magazine is full of quasi-physiological and biologicalinformation and advice about how to get fit, stay healthy, and lose weight.Real women who have defeated their bulges and bulks are featured in ‘reallife’ stories, while major and minor celebrities are interviewed about theirlifestyles. Positive, glamorous images of these celebrities occur throughoutthe magazine in both interior (‘fully dressed’) and exterior (‘acres of flesh’)settings. As such, celebrity status and thinness are being conflated in waysthat try to convince women that glamour and thinness are closely relatedand highly achievable if women beautify and learn to control their bulges.

Hair & Beauty features a gallery of beautiful models/hairstyles, so that


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on page after page the reader is presented with a beautiful face, a glamorous,stylish hair design, and a new intoxicating hair colour. For the most part,then, it is hair that is being fetishized and the face that is being objectified.However, if there is one magazine where glow, shine and light are constructedas the most positive, life-determining forces then it is Hair & Beauty.

There are three key areas that I would like to now look at in terms ofidealized versions of white femininity. First, I want to explore the wayadverts across these magazines all utilize the idea of ‘light’, literally, meta-phorically, visually and through advertising copy, to suggest that glow andradiance are the defining markers of female health and beauty. Second, Iwant to examine those adverts (which seem to dominate the magazines)where idealized versions of white femininity are conjured up throughlighting effect, dress, embodiment, body language, and mise-en-scène. Third,I want to very briefly look at a range of contrasting adverts – particularlythe tanning adverts – where ‘colour’ and ‘risk’ are utilized to construct moreapparently energized and sexualized feminine images. The overall aimremains to both show how idealized white womanhood comes into beingbut also to show how, in coming into being, contradictions and rupturesnecessarily accompany it.

We live now, virtually everywhere, in a world that is potentiallypermanently illuminated, in which it is generally possible to letlight be at human will and in which artificial light can reachfurther and more effectively than the brightest sunshine. (Dyer,1997: 106)

Richard Dyer (1997) has suggested that we live in a ‘culture of light’ (1997:103) where visibility, ‘seeing’, is an indicator of authenticity, knowability,and where giving off light is imagined as a highly positive attribute. Peoplewho shine, radiate, glow, have sunshine smiles or who ‘light up’ a grey dayare those who are picked out (often, literally – the ‘brightest’ kids make itonto the catwalk, into catalogue magazines, and into the very best universi-ties) as carriers of the most precious of human qualities. In this culture oflight, as Dyer contends, it is whiteness which is so clearly light producing,which is even made up from light itself, ‘white people are central to it, tothe extent that they come to seem to have a special relationship to light’(1997: 103). Black people, by contrast, are dark, they soak up light or itreflects off their skin because it doesn’t really belong there on the unknow-able surface of their bodies (black bodies, as Dyer also demonstrates, are‘harder’ to light and photograph). Many of the adverts within the maga-zines I am looking at reproduce this culture of light. In fact, I would like


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to argue that for every hair product, and for most of the skin products inthese magazines, light – imagined as glow, shine, radiance, and vitality – isthe essence of the persuasion, the positive value transference on offer. Andsince it is white women caught up in and giving off this radiant light(triggered by the use of a product), it is white femininity that is beingvalorized and naturalized.

Light is used in the following ways. High-key light is used to eradicateshadow and line, and to produce the effect that the model’s hair, eyes, face,or full body is caught up in a natural, heavenly glow. What produces thisglow is imagined as not some unseen, artificial light (the lighting rig effacedfrom the narrative of almost all adverts) but the light that comes naturallyfrom within the white model’s very state of being. Of course, the producthas had to ignite or switch on this light, but there is never any questionthat light – the light of life, the light of natural beauty – is a corporealreality for the white woman, or something that is already there within her, thatbelongs to her.

The Lancome ‘Miracle’ perfume advert, found in Cosmoplitan, featuresa blue-eyed, blonde model caught in the dazzling rays of a bright sun. Theadvert is in part tinted pink, with the sky, clouds, two suns, and over-sizedperfume bottle (pictured to the left of the model, in this double-pagespread) painted in an expressionistic, moody pink. The glare of the first suncatches the perfume bottle in exactly the same way, in what is a mirroringmetaphor, as the second sun catches the model. Light radiates towards theperfume/model, and in turn glow and light rises out off the bottle, out ofor off of the model’s skin, with its source coming from within the élan ofthe model. She (the model) is a miracle, a mirage: a heavenly, romanticexpanse of light. She is the ultimate ideal. She is light.

This physical use of light seems to structure almost all the adverts thathave beautiful white women as their commodity fetish. Whether it be formake up, moisturizer, shampoo, or hair colour, light simultaneously falls onand emanates from the face, lips, arms, torso, and hair that is being focusedupon. Light is the signifier of beauty, of desirability, of vitality. Light is whatwhite women have in abundance if only they bothered to beautify. Light,as Richard Dyer (1997) has also argued, is what makes white womendistinct.

But light is also materialized and sanctified through the advertisingcopy or anchorage that accompanies many of these adverts: Cointreau:‘glow with Cointreau’; Revlon: ‘the first mascara to use light-interplaytechnology to illuminate your eyes’; L’Oréal: ‘new shock resist – shine andstaying power’; Garnia: ‘new Garnia Lumia brightening colour creme . . .


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low in ammonia yet full of light’; L’Oréal ‘Moussing Wax’: ‘make your hairshine with light’; Maybelline: ‘new water shine diamonds . . . shimmering. . . sparkling lipstick’; Garnier: ‘blonding highlights’; Nivea ‘Pearl and Shinelip care’: ‘add dazzle to your smile’; Elizabeth Arden ‘Revitalizing Treat-ment’: ‘reveal skin that is visibly firmer, incredibly smooth, clearly glowing’.

Elizabeth Arden’s ‘Peel & Reveal Revitalzing Treatment’, found inCompany, features a black and white medium shot of the neck and face ofa model applying the treatment. This face also radiates light but largelybecause the monochrome effect empties the shot of competing textures –the model has a flawless, radiant complexion that seems to be the veryessence of pure light. The colour white is also used symbolically herethrough the brush that is used to put the treatment on. The clinically cleanwhite applicator connects the ‘treatment’ to science, to the laboratory, tothe invention and experiment that produces this marvellous new skin care.Good, rejuvenating science is generally symbolically encoded throughwhite iconography (white lab coats) and mise-en-scène (white-walled labora-tories), as it is here with the white brush, sterile-clean applicator capturedagainst a white backdrop.

But good science is white encoded, or light encoded in another sense,because good science is simultaneously also a creator of light or all thingsthat are beneficial to the culture of light it operates within.The white appli-cator here applies that gel that lights up the skin and takes dullness away.‘Peel & Reveal Revitalizing Treatment’, then, is a product of white science,and a commodity product that promises light at the end of the tunnel fordry, dull skin. The advertising copy draws together these twinned motifs oflight and science in a much more explicit way.

The ‘occupational’ language used to describe the product and its effectsis quasi-scientific: ‘retexturing’, ‘extract’, ‘exfoliators’, and, of course, ‘treat-ment’. The benefits of the treatment are described in terms of rejuvena-tion and light as if the skin care will produce a new state of being (anaccession) for the treated skin: ‘lift away dullness . . .’, ‘discover new textureand tone’, ‘fine lines seem to fade way’, ‘reveal skin that is visibly firmer’.However, ‘Peel & Reveal’ is also suggested to be a natural product madefrom ‘cabernet grapeseed extract and natural exfoliators’, and this is anotherelement in the good science trope, since good science harnesses the natural,and deplores the artificial. ‘Peel & Reveal’ is a natural stimulator of lightfor skin, for white women who, as I have already contended, have thatnatural source of light within them anyway but need the trigger to set itoff.

But ‘Peel & Reveal’ is also suggested to do something else in this


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advertising copy, a suggestion that, in fact, hinges on a paradox oroxymoron, and one that again points to and confirms the impossible dualityof idealized white female embodiment in our culture of light. The adver-tising copy opens with the line ‘now you see it, now you don’t’. The linesuggests that, before white women use ‘Peel & Reveal’, they are highlyvisible because of the ‘dullness, dry flakes and surface signs of stress’ on theirskin. However, once they use the treatment, such visibility becomes a thingof the past as women swap ‘fine lines’ and ‘pores’ for translucency in theform of smoothness and glow. The advert, then, promises white womenthat they will be less visible, or rather that their visibility will be all aboutan ephemeral absence, a heavenly state of grace if they use this revitalizingtreatment. It is connoted that less (dullness, physicality) is more (light, glow).White women need to have ‘great skin’ that is defined by its nothingness,by its smoothness, softness, glowyness – by its absence effect, in fact.

But this is precisely where the impossible nature of this duality lies:white women are asked to ‘make up’ themselves so that they appear not tobe made up at all, so that they appear natural or naturally absent – all glow,in a heavenly state of grace. White women are asked to work at their stateof grace even while they are being told that this state of grace exists within.Nature, the essential, and the manufactured get mixed up in what are oftenrepresentations of excess. This is then the terror, but also the confusion atthe core of images of white femininity. These are the spaces where gaps,silences and the potential for oppositional readings emerge.

This paradoxical state of being, as it is imagined in ‘Peel & Reveal’, andas I have argued it is imagined in the white wine advert, may work toproduce excessive responses in women readers, from cosmetic surgery, skinlightening, to anorexia nervosa practices. Real white women make them-selves less because they are told it is more; or real white women see throughthe paradox of less is more, and deliberately take the message system to itslogical conclusion – by literally disappearing out of sight.

White women disappear almost out of sight in many of these adver-tising images because lighting effect and advertising copy are combinedwith other representational and advertising strategies. Across a range ofadverts, for a diverse range of products, blue-eyed, blonde-haired women,bathed in light, with flawless thin bodies, and faces, are found in abundance.These women glow, and the products often glow beside them, or on them.Gold and white clothes are worn, and innocence and naturalness areconnoted as belonging to the ideal white woman who beautifies and regu-lates her body with the named product on show, and often in use.

In B, Clarins’ energizing morning cream is described as ‘the secret of


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radiant skin’ and the close-up shot of a flawless, fresh looking high-key litmodel’s face (with natural blonde hair ‘floating’ at the edges of the shot)confirms this state of radiance – a radiance that itself confirms the essen-tial ingredients of an idealized white female beauty; Garnier’s blondinghighlights is described as ‘sexy, subtle and looks professional’, and themedium shot of a glowing, smiling, radiant looking blonde-haired modelconfirms and personifies the message of the advertising copy. In this advertthose women who don’t have natural blonde hair are promised the attrib-utes and the values that blonde hair can bring. They are promised naturallight that other people (significant others) will take for naturalness.

In Cosmopolitan, the advert for Estee Lauder’s ‘advanced night repair eyerecovery complex’ is bathed in a golden aura: the blonde-haired, blue-eyedmodel has golden skin, and wears a gold-coloured nightdress, while thelettering on the product and the top of the product are in gold too. Thewhole advert is saturated with an ethereal quality that renders the imagerythat floating-away effect; Clinique’s ‘Happy’ perfume advert has a black andwhite medium-close-up shot of a model supposedly caught in a momentof pure happiness: the face is high-key lit, in the middle of a wide-opensmile, and sunflowers are ‘falling’ into the model’s hair. Her white, sleeve-less top extends the connotation of innocent, radiant beauty captured in amagically ‘real’ moment of loving life; the advert for ‘Chanel No 5’ super-imposes a golden-dressed, golden-skinned, golden-haired model against agiant, golden-lit ‘No 5’ sign, with the bottle of perfume, shot as if it isfalling, pouring out golden drops of perfume; in the advert for Max Factor’s‘hypersmooth foundation’, the close-up shot of the model’s face is so pale,light, and smooth that it would disappear into the page if it wasn’t for themodel’s own lips and eyelashes. The face is all light, and one could disappearinto its milky substance.

In Company, the advert for L’Oréal’s ‘Elvive’ shampoo features theblonde-haired, light-generating Claudia Schiffer; John Frieda’s SheerBlonde shampoo features two blonde-haired models, situated in a golden,golden-brown mise-en-scène. One model (‘Alex’) is a strawberry blonde, theother (‘Brit’) a platinum blonde: both models personify the ‘ultimate goldenglow’ that the advertising copy promises – everything about them, fromtheir radiant skin to their golden clothes and hair, creates the impressionthat light comes off them and surrounds them.

In Bliss, the advert for ‘Collection 2000 Creme Make-up’ is a big close-up of an almost bleached out white face that seems to dissolve into the page– the advertising copy tells the reader that ‘sexy skin starts here’. In 19, MaxFactor’s ‘hyperfull lipstick’ advert features a close-up of a blonde-haired


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model’s face: the face itself is milky white and light seems to pour onto it(out from it) from the right-hand corner of the page. It is only the full, redlips, pursed and fully formed, that add definition, depth, a fully sexualizedspace for this advert (like strawberries in cream).

Blondeness, then, seems to be one of the key signifiers of idealized whitefemininity across these adverts: blonde hair seems to be light itself, and some-thing that helps radiate skin, flesh, face. Blondeness is marketed as a physicalcharacteristic that seems to have divine origins, and which naturallyproduces a heavenly appearance. Blondeness is a physical characteristic thatis natural and essential, but which, nonetheless, all white women can achieveif they use, for example, the right, subtle hair-dye. Marina Warner (1994)has traced the significance of blondeness in religion, fairy tale and myth andfound that blondeness is equated with beauty, with goodness, and withheroic deed. In many of these magazine adverts blondeness works in exactlythe same way – it is beauty, it is light. But it may also be death.

Idealized versions of white femininity may also be death-like too: theabstinence and purity that, in part, produces the glow and the aura of aheavenly state of grace may also be seen as sterility, an absence of life, oflived experiences. So instead of one reading these images through themetaphors of translucence and milk, one can read them through ghostli-ness and powder (ash). The heavenly creature in the white wine advert Ianalysed earlier has no life; the numerous, luminous milky faces I haveencountered only come to life through other features that have beeneroticized, for example, the red lips on a white face in the Max Factor advertare really the vulva, the woman’s genitalia between white, powdery legs.These adverts, then, as I have intimated earlier, wrestle with the contradic-tions and contestations that necessarily emerge from constructing whitefemale bodies that are supposed to be not really there, and natural or essen-tial, and at the same time as white bodies that have to be worked at/on,manufactured, dieted, beautified, to become this ideal.

The death-like nature of these compositions is also brought into thelight through other adverts which offer a more radical, liberating represen-tation of white femininity. In numerous adverts white women are asked tocolour up, to be more daring, provocative, to have more life. The Garnieradvert for ‘Fructis’ asks women to ‘shake up your style’, and features an‘action shot’ of a wild, street-wise woman who returns the gaze with someauthoritative power. The Dior ‘addict’ advert captures the model in themoment of orgasm, or drug-high: her red lips are open wide, her black hairis sweaty and matted, and her eyes are half closed, and in a mirror reflec-tion we get a sense of sexual transgression. This quasi, sexualized death-like


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trance state is, it is suggested, what living is all about. The tanning adverts,in general, articulate this sense that whiteness is death-like, and that colouris life. In tanning adverts we get glow and radiance, but it comes from darklybronzed arms, legs, faces, and torsos: here, sometimes implicitly, sometimesexplicitly, milky white bodies and faces are being rejected (covered over,painted) for what are represented to be the real embodiments of health andbeauty.

Finally, idealized versions of white femininity may be death-likebecause they produce death-like responses in some white female readers.Absence, the denial and refusal to allow things into the body, can be seenas a by-product of media images that suggest that such behaviours lead toa state of grace. But it may also be a type of resistant strategy where havingseen through to the construction of idealized white femininity as aconstruction of paradox and of death, having seen it as control, andmanipulation, white women readers let themselves die a little each day.

Thin white women die a little each day because their ‘thinness’, in part,comes to embody their own resistance to the holy ideal and the cruelparadox at the heart of their white femininity. Their act of near vanishingalso potentially opens up a corporeal space where the ideology of thinnessis being made visible as a constructed, nullifying mechanism of patriarchalcontrol. ‘Whitely thinness’ can read as masquerade. Thin white women areemptying their bodies of the signs and codes of femininity, and throughthe corresponding pain and suffering, powerfully reject the tyranny at thecore of their beings.

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Sean Redmond is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the Southampton Institute, UK. He is co-editor of The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor (Wallflower Press, 2002)and editor of Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader (Wallflower Press, forthcoming). Hehas research interests in the cultural representations of whiteness and cinematic transgression.


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Documents

Thin White Women in Advertising. Deathly Corporeality.2003