My Feminist Flashback: Action Project

In the first women's studies class I ever took (Fall of 2007), students were required to do a group "action project" as part of their final grade. The project could cover any issue that had been discussed in the class, and Kate (who was also in the class) and I teamed up with another lady for this assignment.

Our topic: the media's effect on body image.
Our goal: to raise awareness of the fact that the media is constantly bombarding people with messages about what is beautiful, and get people to discuss the effects that can have on people's body image.

We focused mainly on one medium, magazines, and our tactic was to pull out advertisements (which make up a large part of most magazines) that portray messages of beauty or attraction and post them on the walls of the Human Rights Center, a building on campus where human-interest clubs meet and hold events.

Here are some pictures of our work (Kate took all the pictures with my camera).


The pictures above show just some of the images we found. We had a decent sized group that attended our event, and we had a pretty engaging conversation about why magazines use the imagery that they do and how it can make people feel. It was interesting to note that most of the appearance motivated ads feature white women.