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I love this video, and I hope you will both enjoy it and get out and vote!
FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY • POSTING IS SMALL & BLURRY DUE TO FILE SIZE LIMITATIONS BY VOX!
COME TO THE EXHIBIT TO SEE THE VIDEO! (details a few posts below)
Safiya Umoja Noble
Artist Statement
Video short: Consuming Women in Urban Advertising
Since 1997, I have been engaged in a series of dialogues with marketing and advertising professionals that cater to urban audiences about the impact of Hip-Hop culture. My graduate work at San Jose State University in the late ‘90s was focused on how rap music videos affect girls and women. This research interest was personally driven by my declining sense of power and esteem when watching rap videos, knowing they were in plain view of the public. I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the image of women in Hip-Hop culture in the workplace and among friends and family. People want to understand or are at least titillated by the blatant misogyny directed at women of color, particularly Black women. And, I too seek understanding about why women participate in and support activities that contribute to negative perceptions about our values, our contributions and our worth. This project is the beginning of an examination of an important distribution channel of Hip-Hop culture and image: urban media.
“Consuming Women in Urban Advertising” is an attempt to foreground how women are featured in advertisements placed in Vibe, a popular U.S.-based, urban youth magazine. I have included random advertisements from over ten years of issues. The content of the ads fall into a few main categories: beauty, products and services, fashion brands and classified ads. I’ve also included select fashion spreads, which I’ve entitled “fun fashion spread (eagles),” which illustrate the provocative edge used in urban couture fashion photography. I highlight ads representing every major category, reflecting the type of messaging and imagery used to market to Vibe readership – urbanites 18-30, skewing younger. Not every issue and every ad is included due to installation time constraints. Record release, TV and film ads are largely excluded and will be the subject of another study.
Further installments of this work, which I hope to pursue in graduate work at the University of Illinois, will include a look at the representations of women in urban magazines in contrast to magazines like Vogue or Maxim. Recent studies suggest that reading fashion and lifestyle magazines can negatively impact self-esteem, confidence and aspirations in women and girls. Few studies are dedicated to understanding the impact of the media and how girls and women are harmed by racist and sexist ideologies buttressed by popular culture and urban media. This body of work is my effort to increase our awareness, provoke thought and pursue a public conversation.
I spent more than a decade working as a marketing professional for blue chip corporations that sell their products and services to women, youth and multi-cultural consumers. I am now attempting to deconstruct the collective impact of over twenty years of multicultural marketing fueled by Hip-Hop culture. My hope is that this project will contribute to a growing body of work that examines women’s identities and the ways that our aspirations and both empowered and eclipsed by our representations in popular culture and urban media.
Comments and criticisms are invited.
I wrote this article a while back, and am glad to see that it is ranked 5 of 37, which isn't so bad, eh? Check it out when you have time.
Consuming Racialized Beauty
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Krannert Art Museum, Lower Level
December 6, 2007 • 6pm - 9pm
Free to the public and wheelchair accessible
Many of you know that I am spending the future of my career deconstructing advertising, after having spent ten years in the marketing and advertising industry. I hope that you will watch this and share it with you kids, to help them get a better handle on the ways that we are all alientated from our authentic beauty through an industry that distorts reality.
Oct. 24, 2007
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Women are 16 times more likely than men to report weight discrimination in the workplace, according to a Michigan State University-led study that provides the most dramatic evidence yet of the weight bias working women face.
The study, featured in the October issue of Journal of Vocational Behavior, is the first to use a nationally representative sample to look at gender differences in reported weight-related employment discrimination, said Mark Roehling, MSU associate professor of human resource management and the project’s lead researcher.
As employers search for ways to reduce health care costs, obesity has become an issue. The prevalence of obesity in the United States increased from 13 percent to 32 percent between the 1960s and 2004, according to a recent Johns Hopkins University study.
Michigan is the only state with a law prohibiting weight discrimination in the workplace. But the new research indicates overweight women who face employment weight bias could be victims of sex discrimination, Roehling said.
“What this research indicates is that we have different standards for men and women. We are less accepting of overweight women,” he said. “If women are experiencing workplace discrimination based on their weight 16 times more frequently than men, employers ought to be very concerned about valid sex discrimination claims.”
Researchers randomly surveyed 2,838 current and former workers in the United States. Forty percent of respondents fell within the “normal” weight category, while 60 percent were overweight, obese or very obese, according to the body mass index. (BMI is calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by height in meters squared.)
According to the study, weight discrimination is the most common form of workplace bias among very obese white women (more so than discrimination based on age, sex, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion or disability). It is also the second most prevalent form of workplace discrimination among obese white women (after sex discrimination).
Among all groups of black women, race or ethnicity is the most frequent form of employment discrimination, according to the study. Roehling said previous research has shown that overweight black women are evaluated less harshly than overweight white women and that blacks are “more accepting of large body types.”
“A large black woman is likely to think of herself as a black woman before she thinks of herself as a large person,” Roehling said.
The research team also includes Shaun Pichler, a Ph.D. candidate at MSU, and Patricia Roehling, psychology professor at Hope College in Holland.
Contact: Mark Roehling, Labor and Industrial Relations: (517) 355-3335, roehling@msu.edu; Andy Henion, University Relations: (517) 355-3294, cell (517) 281-6949, henion@msu.edu
Links
University of Illinois’ blo...
Consuming Racialized Beauty A Student Art Exhibit Explori...
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