Poster Session I
Project Type
Poster
Faculty Mentor’s Full Name
Hillary Powell
Faculty Mentor’s Department
Psychology
Additional Mentor
Cara Braune
Abstract / Artist's Statement
Queer and feminist theory explore the concept of the “male gaze”, referencing the social expectations placed on women’s bodies to conform to the socially constructed expectations of how women should look and act to be more “appealing” to men. Queer theory discusses the way that Lesbian and Bisexual women “de-center” men in their lives and move away from this expectation to conform to the male gaze. In turn, this distance from the male gaze allows for more diverse representation of appearance in body size, clothing, and age as they reject the concept of needing to appeal to men.
This qualitative study examines and compares diversity of body image and appearance in the top 25 most followed Lesbian/Bisexual women and the top 25 most followed Heterosexual women on Instagram. Using Visual Content Analysis, we will identify and code themes and patterns of diverse representation in the gathered images from the subjects’ social media. This coding structure will be tested in an original subset of the images and evaluated for inter-rated reliability.
The project serves to gather further information related to the assumptions made in queer theory about the increased representation and acceptance of people of all appearances within women-loving-women culture and analyze images for evidence for or against this widely accepted theory.
Category
Social Sciences
Testing Queer Theory: Body Image Diversity in Lesbian/Bisexual and Heterosexual Women’s Social Media Content
UC South Ballroom
Queer and feminist theory explore the concept of the “male gaze”, referencing the social expectations placed on women’s bodies to conform to the socially constructed expectations of how women should look and act to be more “appealing” to men. Queer theory discusses the way that Lesbian and Bisexual women “de-center” men in their lives and move away from this expectation to conform to the male gaze. In turn, this distance from the male gaze allows for more diverse representation of appearance in body size, clothing, and age as they reject the concept of needing to appeal to men.
This qualitative study examines and compares diversity of body image and appearance in the top 25 most followed Lesbian/Bisexual women and the top 25 most followed Heterosexual women on Instagram. Using Visual Content Analysis, we will identify and code themes and patterns of diverse representation in the gathered images from the subjects’ social media. This coding structure will be tested in an original subset of the images and evaluated for inter-rated reliability.
The project serves to gather further information related to the assumptions made in queer theory about the increased representation and acceptance of people of all appearances within women-loving-women culture and analyze images for evidence for or against this widely accepted theory.