Annotated List
Exploring Media Messages in Visual Culture:
Self Esteem, Body Image, Gender Ideals
Barrett, T. (2003). Interpreting visual culture. Art Education, 56(2), 6-12.
This article insists on advocating learners ability to successfully decipher the many messages circulating in the images and objects of visual culture if given the opportunities and strategies. Barrett explores and discusses issues of racial stereotyping of African Americans throughout visual culture and media. Images that denigrate and degrade African Americans while feeding racist delusions about the absence of humanity in Blacks- the savage African, the happy slave, the devoted servant, the corrupt politician, the irresponsible citizen, the petty thief, the social delinquent, the vicious criminal, the sexual superman, the un-happy non-white, the natural-born cook, the natural-born musician, the perfect entertainer, the superstitious church-goer, the chicken and watermelon eater, the uninhibited expressionist, and the mental inferior.
Terry Barrett is a Professor of Art Education at the Ohio State University, Columbus.
Beauty and body image in the media. (2010). Media Awareness Network, Retrieved from http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/women_beauty.cfm
This article argues that the barrage of messages about thinness, dieting and beauty tells "ordinary" women that they are always in need of adjustment—and that the female body is an object to be perfected. Research discussed reports that women’s magazines have ten and one-half times more ads and articles promoting weight loss than men’s magazines do, and over three-quarters of the covers of women’s magazines include at least one message about how to change a woman’s bodily appearance—by diet, exercise or cosmetic surgery. This article intends to address these issues in hopes of educating readers to be more aware of the hidden messages in media.
Media Awareness Network is a Canadian non-profit organization that has been pioneering the development of media literacy and digital literacy programs since its incorporation in 1996. Efforts are focused on equipping adults with information and tools to help young people understand how the media work, how the media may affect their lifestyle choices and the extent to which they, as consumers and citizens, are being well informed.
Chalmers, F. G. (2005). Visual culture education in the 1960s. Art Education, 58(6), 6-11.
This article discusses changing the art curriculum and recognizing the importance of educating students on the importance of decoding the symbols of their social environment and historical heritage, and recognizing changing visual symbols.
When this article was published, Graeme Chalmers was a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Duncum, P. (2002). Clarifying visual culture art education. Art Education, 55(3), 6-11.
This article discusses Visual Culture Art Education and its goals of critical understanding and empowerment through an emphasis on image making where students have freedom to explore meaning for themselves.
Paul Duncam is a lecturer in Visual Arts Curriculum in the School of Early Childhood and Primary Education. He is a member of the Faculty of Education at the University of Tasmania in Australia.
Freedman, K. (2000). Social perspectives on art education in the US: Teaching visual culture in a democracy. Studies in Art Education, 41(4), 314-329.
This article is an overview of social perspectives on art education. These perspectives include a concern with issues and interactions of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, special ability, and other body identities and cultures; socioeconomics, political conditions, communities, and natural and humanly-made environments, including virtual environments. Social reconstructionist versions of these perspectives are also founded on the belief that art education can make a difference in student understanding of and action in the world and that difference can enrich and improve social life.
Professor Freedman’s research focuses on questions concerning the relationship of curriculum to art, culture, and technology, particularly on questions concerning student engagement with visual culture and issues surrounding curriculum change in light of postmodern educational conditions. Dr. Freedman has authored and edited several books and has published over 100 articles and book chapters on art, education, and technology. She has worked over 25 countries and has been a visiting professor and Fulbright scholar at several overseas universities. She has served on many editorial boards and is currently the Senior Editor of Studies in Art Education, the research journal of the National Art Education Association.
Keifer-Boyd, K., & Smith-Shank, D. (2011). Visual culture and gender. Retrieved from http://explorations.sva.psu.edu/vcg/
A peer-reviewed international multimedia journal published annually. It is co-edited by Karen Keifer-Boyd and Deborah Smith-Shank. The journal's purpose is to encourage and promote an understanding of how visual culture constructs gender in context with representations of race, age, sexuality, social units, disability, and social class and to promote international dialogue about visual culture and gender. VCG concerns the learning and teaching processes or practices used to expose culturally learned meanings and power relations that surround the creation, consumption, valuing, and dissemination of images, and involves issues of equity and social justice in the learning, teaching, and practice of art.
Karen Keifer-Boyd, Ph.D., is a professor of art education and affiliate of women’s studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Her writings on feminist pedagogy, visual culture, cyberNet activism art pedagogy, action research, and identity speculative fiction are in more than 45 peer-reviewed research publications, and translated into several languages. She co-authored InCITE, InSIGHT, InSITE (NAEA, 2008), Engaging Visual Culture (Davis, 2007), co-edited Real-World Readings in Art Education: Things Your Professors Never Told You (Falmer, 2000), and served as editor of the Journal of Social Theory in Art Education and guest editor for Visual Arts Research.
Deborah L. Smith-Shank, Ph.D., is a professor of art education at the Ohio State University. Among her numerous publications is the edited book, Semiotics and Visual Culture: Sights, Signs, and Significance (2004). She served the National Art Education Association as president of the Women’s Caucus from 1998-2000, and president of LGBTIQ from 2001-2003, and the International Society for Education Through Art (InSEA) as executive secretary of the World Council from 2002-2005, World Councilor from 2005-2007, and she currently serves as elected Vice President.
Kilbourne, J. (2011). Beauty..and the beast of advertising. Media and Values, 49, Retrieved from http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/beautyand-beast-advertising
This article addresses the concerns of advertising images contributing to the creation of a climate in which the marketing of women's bodies--the sexual sell and dismemberment, distorted body image ideals and the use of children as sex objects--is seen as acceptable. It claims that many women internalize these stereotypes and learn their "limitations," thus establishing a self-fulfilling prophecy. By remaining unaware of the profound seriousness of the ubiquitous influence, the redundant message and the subliminal impact of advertisements, we ignore one of the most powerful "educational" forces in the culture -- one that greatly affects our self-images, our ability to relate to each other, and effectively destroys any awareness and action that might help to change that climate.
Jean Kilbourne is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on alcohol and tobacco advertising and the image of women in advertising. She is the creator of several award-winning films, including Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women, Calling the Shots: Advertising Alcohol, and Slim Hopes: Advertising & the Obsession with Thinness. Her book Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel won the Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology. She is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women
Knight, W. B. (2007). Entangled social realities: race, class, and gender- a triple threat to the academic achievement of black females. Visual Culture & Gender, vol(2), pp.24-38.
This article is a succession of fragmented personal stories the author uses to describe blatant forms of individual racism, sexism, and classism. Knight urges that a significant obstacle to teaching about racism, sexism, and classism is the belief by some that discrimination based on race, class, gender or some combination of them is a thing of the past. Compounding the problem is that art teacher education programs are remiss in preparing teachers to see the subtle, unintentional but nevertheless damaging race, class, and gender bias that continue to prevail in various teaching and learning contexts These concerns are significant when conceptualizing issues related to Black females as racist, classist, and sexist systems of oppression and inequality shape school experiences and outcomes, and are triple threats to academic achievement. The idea of triple threat implies that Black females inherit three major entangled social realities that are assessed negatively by the larger society—being Black, being female, and being poor.
Wanda B. Knight, Ph.D., is assistant professor of art education in the School of Visual Arts at The Pennsylvania State University.
McClure Vollrath, M. (2006). Thank heaven for little girls: girls' drawings as representations of self. Visual Culture & Gender, vol(1), pp. 63-78
This article considers ways in which young girls’ self-initiated drawings reveal how they negotiate meanings and construct sometimes-contradictory selves through their production of visual images. This inquiry is developed from the authors experiences as a young woman teaching elementary art. In their drawings, girls’ representations of self serve as both repositories of pleasure and desire and as projections of possible and multiple identities. The drawings disclose aesthetic preferences, make social relationships visible, and challenge the dominant positioning in visual culture of girls’ identities as inevitable. Through their production of visual images, young girls position themselves as social agents and as producers of visual culture. This study interprets the use of girl icons, looks at expressions of social relationships, and consider whether the girls’ gaze is a form of agency in three artworks: (a) childhood make-over drawings, (b) a drawing of a first communion, and (c) a reinvention of a popular television show, Survivor. The author problematizes the methodology for this study with the concept of girls’ private space referred to as bedroom culture, and the dichotomy between the public and private spaces of girls’ lives and productions.
Marissa McClure Vollrath is a Ph.D. candidate in Art Education at The Pennsylvania State University and concurrently, a full-time art teacher at Grant Wood Elementary School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Her research focuses on the multiple ways in which constructions of childhood shape art education pedagogy. She is also interested in the ways children make meaning through their relationships to and with many forms of visual culture. As an educator and researcher, she is particularly concerned with relationships between theory and practice, and in relationships between children and educators.
Mitchell, W.J.T. (2002). Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture. Journal of Visual Culture, vol 1(2pp), 165-181.
This essay attempts to map out the main issues surrounding visual studies as an emergent academic formation, and as a theoretical concept or object of research and teaching. After a survey of some of the resistances encountered by visual studies in fields such as art history, aesthetics, and media studies, and a suggestion that visual studies is playing the role of ‘dangerous supplement’ to these fields, the essay turns to a discussion of some of the major received ideas that have seemed foundational to both negative and positive accounts of visual studies. These received ideas or myths include notions of the de-materialization of the image, and the erasure of boundaries between art and non-art, or visual and verbal media. They also include notions such as the very idea that there are such things as distinctly ‘visual media’. The political stakes of iconoclastic criticism (e.g. the overturning of ‘scopic regimes’) are also questioned, and an alternative (Nietzschean) strategy of ‘sounding the idols’ is proposed. The essay concludes with a description of pedagogical strategies in the teaching of visual culture, centered on an exercise the author calls ‘showing seeing’.
W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. Under his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago's prestigious Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.
Robinson-Cseke, M. (2009). Becoming plastic: don. Visual Culture & Gender, Vol 4, pp. 39-47.
This paper platforms the popular film, Mean Girls (Michaels & Waters, 2004), to demonstrate how construction of the subject takes place. Deleuze’s political courses of molar, molecular, and lines of flight are used to explore subjectivity through his concept of becoming. How a product of visual culture can be used to explore the subjectivity of adolescent females is demonstrated as the film characters enter continuous states and stages of becoming animal, monster, and woman. The idea of a self that is a shifting identity, influenced by body, mind, and affective response, is defined by Deleuze’s Body without Organs. The Body without Organs is guided by desire and, in fact, is desire. This desire is revealed through meanness. Becoming mean is explored, as an additional stage of becoming that can be particularly visible with girls, in the micro-society of the school.
Maria Robinson-Cseke is currently a doctoral student in art education at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include artist/teacher post-identity, art teacher education, visual culture, and arts-based research. Maria spent fifteen years as a visual art teacher in the high school setting and is currently teaching at the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Canada.
Tavin, K., & Hausman, J. (2004). Art education and visual culture in the age of globalization. Art Education, 57(5), 47-52.
This article addresses that art educators have a responsibility to understand and respond to the impact of globalization on their lives and the lives of their students. The authors suggest that art teachers should join forces with others who share concerns about ideas and values that pervade our culture. Art education offers a means to examine what is happening in our visual culture, and what we do in our classrooms should make sense in this age of globalization.
Kevin Tavin is Assistant Professor and Director of the Master of Arts in the Teaching program at he school of the Art Institute of Chicago. Jerome Hausman is visiting Professor at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago.