Culture As A Site Of Contested Meaning Essay

Culture as a Site of Contested Meaning
For years, the modeling industry's perception of what beauty is only consisted of super thin and super skinny women. Their idea of beauty, thereafter, influenced and shaped what our culture’s idea of beauty is as well. Recently though, the meaning of beauty is being challenged. I recently read an article on Fox News' website discussing how magazine publishers were hiring “fatter” models and were also airbrushing pictures of thinner models in order for them to look “fatter”. This shows the clash our culture is having between past and present perceptions of beauty. This article is a good illustration of the idea the culture is "a site of contested meaning." It demonstrates that we are not just recipients of meanings by cultural industries, but we are also the producers who constantly challenge and negotiate those meanings.
I thought that these women and only women that looked like them were considered beautiful in the eyes of others. People did anything possible to look like the images I saw in the magazines. Based on the article, we see a shift in the cultural meaning of beauty. The article wrote about how women now are being vocal about seeing “healthier” looking females on magazines and on the runway. Photographers and magazine companies are hearing this change in preference and are responding to it by hiring models with different body types and even photo shopping thinner models to make them look “fatter” now. Granted that the change is from a size 0 model to about a size 4 (size 4 is no way "fat"), it is still shows that we as a culture put meaning to a word and constantly change those meanings as