Fat, black, and that’s all right: encouraging female thai students to challenge destructive beauty ideals.
1
Issued Date
2008
Resource Type
Language
eng
Rights
Mahidol University
Suggested Citation
Rush, Edward (2008). Fat, black, and that’s all right: encouraging female thai students to challenge destructive beauty ideals.. Retrieved from: https://repository.li.mahidol.ac.th/handle/123456789/35033
Title
Fat, black, and that’s all right: encouraging female thai students to challenge destructive beauty ideals.
Author(s)
Other Contributor(s)
Abstract
Mass culture in Thailand creates idealizations about female beauty which cause many women to engage in destructive behavior such as starvation dieting and forced vomiting. In this presentation I describe efforts to
develop awareness among a group of predominately female students at a rural Thai university about the ideological purposes of these idealizations.Using a CD based multimedia research template, the students reported the "common sense" beliefs which help create the beauty ideal and the effects of these beliefs on their own lives and the lives of other women. The major finding of their research was that mass culture creates beauty
ideologies to maintain social stratification, in that those women who are made to feel "ugly" because they do not resemble the white skinned underweight ideal tend not to be members of the elite social class which
has the resources and time to achieve these ideals. The significance of the project lies in the emancipatory effects that it produced; although a Critical Discourse Analysis showed that the students continued to assimilate some of the values and interests which they had identified as "oppressive", they also demonstrated to varying degrees that they had
ceased to think and behave in ways which had caused them mental and physical damage in the past.
Description
The 23rd Annual Western Australian Institute of Education Research Forum at Edith Cowan University, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia.