Rhetoric of Femininity: Female Body Image, Media, and Gender Role Stress/Conflict

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Rhetoric of Femininity: Female Body Image, Media, and Gender Role Stress/Conflict offers critical and social identity intersectionalities approach to interpretations of femininity among three generations of women for a rhetorical examination of how femininity is made to mean by media and popular culture. Amplified are voices of women across multiple age, ethnic, and sexual orientation groups who shared in focus groups and interviews their perceptions of femininity and feminine ideals. Femininity is explored using theories from communication and mass media, psychology, sociology, and feminist and gender studies. Donnalyn Pompper explores femininities as shaped by cultural rituals and industries, at home and at work in organizations, on sporting fields and arenas, and in politics.

Reviews

Conducting and analyzing rich interviews from three generations of a hundred adult women of diverse social identities provides Pompper with an informed foundation from which to explore femininities and how they have shaped the lived experiences of girls and women throughout history and today. Coupling the voices of these women with prominent feminist theoretical frameworks illustrate the many paradoxes and metaphorical corsets of femininity that constrain womens ability to be authentic in work, sports, sexuality, and politics and negatively impact their health and well-being. This text will be of high interest to scholars and students within the many fields that aim to eradicate social prescriptions that limit girls and women. -- Tracy Tylka, The Ohio State University at Marion
In her highly illuminating Rhetoric of Femininity: Female Body Image, Media, and Gender Role Stress/Conflict, Donnalyn Pompper deploys a creative methodology of selecting 45 representative images from five of the seven sisters US womens magazines, to engage a wide range of women on discussions about femininity. This group of multi-generational, ethnically, class, ability, and religiously diverse women reveals widespread discrepancy between mediated images and womens experiences, ability, and satisfaction with their bodies in relation to those images. -- Angharad N. Valdivia, University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign
Not only is femininity hard to define, but for women of all ages it is difficult to know how to be feminine in a world saturated with conflicting, impossible to achieve media-constructed images. This book offers a much needed interdisciplinary investigation of femininity coupled with a critical component - the voices of multigenerational women. It is a must read for scholars and women of all ages. -- Tia C. M. Tyree, Howard University

Author Bio

Donnalyn Pompper is professor in the School of Media and Communication at Temple University.