Through the mirror of beauty culture

INTRODUCTION

Feminist Issues positions women's issues at the forefront of Canadian concerns. Authors explore the range and diversity of contemporary feminist perspectives as seen through the lens of race, class, sexuality, disability, and poverty. Each chapter addresses questions and social problems that have received little attention in writing.

This assignment is a summary, an evaluation and a self-reflection on the article, "Through the mirror of beauty culture" by Carla Rice. The article addresses how the standard and desire created by society and different culture on appearance contribute to different ways for women to achieve the "acceptable beauty" (Carla Rice,2017, p.

147).

The main evaluation of this article is to whether or not the author has clearly provided a persuasive argument on questions like whether body and appearance modification is the only solution towards sexism and racism for instances when women do not satisfy the socially desirable look (Carla Rice, 2017, p.

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166), or consumer capitalism (Carla Rice, 2017, p.163) blocks out their own choices on appearance while keeping them chasing the goal of "desirable look" (Carla Rice, 2017, p.147).

My main insights from self-reflection is that there is no "perfect appearance" in any society, and chasing "acceptable beauty" (Carla Rice,2017, pg.149) should not be the only answer to sexist, racism, and social gaze, there is a lot of practices that can solve this problem.

Annotation

This article is about the norm of women in chasing "desirable looking and perfect appearance" due to the judgement from society towards beauty. In a lot of society, there are different notion and standard that have been settled down about beauty towards different women in different race in terms of skin, size, hair, breast (Carla Rice, 2017, p.151). Once women are physically not meeting the acceptable standard among these categories, they would encounter the feeling of dissatisfaction with their current look and therefore have a pressure to be desirable by changing their body through ways (Carla Rice,2017, p.150-151). The main argument from this article is whether or not women's status, social mobility and freedom are linked to their appearance and body (Carla Rice,2017, p.161), or is the commercial society utilizes the stereotype towards women (like pallor skin is linked to superior social status, women with attractive look that men look for can improve their image in society) to make profit by promoting the "desirable look" in society and makes other people to chase.

The methods that Carla Rice used to construct this research is collected by different scholarly essays and researches (Carla Rice, 2017, p.169-174) and different participants she found for her researches. Carla Rice provides different quotations from her participants about their experiences and how they feel under the norm of desirable bodies. In this article she both used her original researches and other researchers' articles.

According to this article, the reason why women would like to have body modification is because they want to improve their social status and also avoid sexism and judgement from the society from their own natural "unacceptable" body. The social standard has already been established for what is "desirable" for popularity (Carla Rice, 2017, p.152). By stating different evidences about how women change their body in terms of weighting, eating, skin, hair and breast, author shows that women would do different cosmetic surgery in order to meet the social standard of all these categories above (Carla Rice, 2017, p.167). While women are doing a lot of appearance work in order to avoid the isolation as an Other (Carla Rice, 2017, p.166), cosmetic companies used this opportunity to make women consume the cosmetic products as much as possible by differentiating what is "ugly" and what is "beautiful" and suggesting that these products could help them achieve desirable look (Carla Rice, 2017, p. 158), which intensified the stereotype on sexism and racism toward different women from different colour.

The two most important of the key, distinctive concepts that the author uses to build arguments are the concept about racial stereotype and "Material Culture of Beauty" (Carla Rice2017, p. 147). Racial stereotype is significant in this article because black women are traditionally stereotyped as an "Other" (Carla Rice, 2017, p.161) since their natural physical characteristics always do not match the beauty ideals that are defined by culture, and they are being targeted by advertisement and persuaded to chase the norm of beauty. The concept o"Material Culture of Beauty" (Carla Rice, 2017, p. 1147) helps people to realise the fact through this article that the standard of beauty has been utilized as an excuse in this material society when people are persuaded to chase the standard by keeping consuming certain products, and make women think they could change their lives and social status by consuming.

Critical Evaluation

Carla Rice did a very nice job on providing persuasive argument on the issue that whether body modification is the only solution towards social gaze on "not acceptable" appearance towards women (Carla Rice, 2017, p.166). For example, when Carla Rice argues that "unacceptable" hair would cause social prejudice. She used a clear example in following, 'The presenter told a women's luncheon at a Wall Street law firm that Black female attorneys should avoid wearing"political" hairstyles like dreadlocks or Afros, because these styles were seen as unattractive and unprofessional' (Carla Rice, 2017, p.161). From this quotation, I am persuaded to think that changing appearance might avoid these problems, because the author uses a real footage from a presentation called "The dos and don'ts of corporate fashion" unprofessional' (Carla Rice, 2017,p.161) rather than some dialogues from unknown individuals that their experiences and reasons of encountering body modification might be affected by other factors such as their prejudice toward some group of people and their emotional feeling instead of just appearance. Another strong evidence is being provided is through an advertisement which directly prove another key argument that how commercial culture affect their choice on appearance. 'For instance, one"face bleach" ad claims to "turn the skin of a black or brown person four or five shades lighter,and a mulatto person perfectly white' (Carla Rice, 2017, p.158), this quotation clearly showing the key concept that how cosmetic company promote white skin colour as superior than blackand one another for making more people consuming this kind of skin colour modifying products by having quotations that could be interpreted alphabetically, which makes the readers easily to understand clearly the concept. These are some persuasive evidence that the author use to explain the argument in clear way. However, there are also some arguments that cannot be proved persuasively and I also see some errors on them. For example, when Carla Rice wants to argue that the norm of hairlessness is an example how commercial culture negatively create the standard of "acceptable look" for women(Carla Rice, 2017, p.163), she states, "Consumer capitalism combined with the growing availability of free online pornography and demand for body-baring fashions have influenced where and how often women today depilate" (Carla Rice, 2017, p.163). This quotation displays a mistake of hasty conclusion because the author does not provide any strong evidence and data before she sums up that capitalism and online social media affects women choices on body modification. Also, when Carla Rice argues that changing personal looking could lead to enhancing social status, personality and mental strength (Carla Rice, 2017, p.149), she already makes a hasty conclusion, "In this way, a women's appearance came to be read as a prime measure of her self-esteem, feminine essence, and mental health" (Carla Rice, 2017, p. 149), because she only provides some advertisement as a evidence which is very weak to prove this state compare to other evidences, and I also think this statement involves her own stereotype towards beauty as traditionally, a beautiful appearance could be interpreted as happy and living good. There is also a statement which she claims that "early entrepreneurs brought to advertising the idea that women could improve their social situation through personal transformation" (CarlaRice, 2017, p.149), however, the evidence she uses is not clear and also weak to explain this idea. The evidence she uses suggests that the successful entrepreneurs try to attract customers by telling them the story of themselves of how to be successful (Carla Rice, 2017, p149), while a person's success is mostly determined by how much hard work he or she does while other people cannot suffer, instead of having a nice transformation on bodies, and the story that the entrepreneurs want to tell maybe the story of hard work instead of changing bodies for upgrading social status. The claim in here is not substantiated by a strong evidence as well. Aside from these possible errors above, Carla Rice also does not clearly support her claim on how changing their living environment could help to improve appearances (Carla Rice, 2017,p.167). I could not find many evidence to support this idea. In general, most of the evidences are good and clear to support her arguments. However, she should find more different women from different race in order to avoid the suspect that she has racial stereotype towards certain colour women as many or most of her participants that she interviewed for this article has been indicated they had black and brown colour. It would be more persuasive on this argument if she could find more participants from different races to make this article.