Research Symposium

BIO

I'm Jaelyn Rex, and I'm from St. Cloud, Florida. As an Editing, Writing, and Media major, I am on the pre-law track, and I plan to attend law school upon graduation. As far as my personal interests go, I am very interested in health and fitness.

Visual Representations of Women

Abstract

My study is a descriptive analysis of negative visual representations of women in postcards. I specifically focused on cards with cartoon drawings because, in them, artists made specific choices about how to visually represent women to exaggerate features that lead to objectification and body shaming. I began by identifying a range of cards in which women's bodies were represented by an artist. Through an inductive coding scheme, I developed categories around the themes of objectification and body shaming. The cards could be coded as one of these, as both, or as neither. Overall, I coded 18 cards. I conclude that through humor and exaggeration, postcard artists engaged in these sexist practices in a way that was socially acceptable despite the negative social consequences of these visual representations.

Keywords: digital archive, postcard, sexism, objectification, body shaming