Women's MySpace Photos Don't Self-Represent a 'Hetero-Sexy' Ideal?

Among this weeks required readings, I took issue with Amy Shields Dobson’s text “The Grotesque Body’ in Young Women’s Self Representation on Myspace.”  It may very well be because I have a familiarity with art history, but Dobson’s work relies entirely on the work of Mikhail Bahktin’s 1965 work - which contrasts ‘grotesque bodies’ in  the carnivaleque setting, and ‘classical bodies’ in Renaissance statuary.  When realizing Dobson’s work rests upon the shoulders of this obscure work, the entire legitimacy of her paper is called into question for me.  (While this blog post could easily turn into an art history lesson, I will not let it go in that direction.)  Let it be sufficient to say, that life and art are two separate entities, and reality seldom matches ideality.  Even in contemporary depictions of women in the media, we are aware of a patriarchal male influence, and the submissive and idyllically-attractive female is more often present than not.

For Dobson to wager that there are strong ‘social and political underpinnings’ to a handful of Myspace photos is laughable.  Academics have a tendency to read into everything, and on occasion extrapolate on something that may barely even exist.  I completely doubt women’s ‘grotesque’ self-representation as a method of feministic subversion of gender stereotypes is the intention of young girls when sticking out their tongues in profile photos.  (More ‘unfeminine’ behaviors are also listed.)  But moreover, the sample of 45 MySpace pages of Australian girls between 18-25 is a small niche sample, which Dobson deliberately sought as examples for her paper.  The author has found specific photos simply to fit her thesis.  Additionally, it would be interesting to question some of these girls, to ask if they had any conscious  intention, or what their intentions of self-depiction were.  I wager that these 18 to 25-year-olds likely didn’t have the charged ‘social and political underpinnings’ the author seeks.  Additionally, one questions who was the photographers were in these images - which may be relevant in terms of gender and representation.

Women living today as well as in the Renaissance don’t often walk around in public with the sole purpose of embodying a ‘hetero-sexy’ ideal as Dobson says.  If one was capable of taking photographs of real life with ease in any era, this statement would probably hold true.  When a 1950s housewife is spending time with friends or family, she probably had no intention of looking like the Venus of Urbino (

).  So for Dobson to find profundity in the lack of ‘traditional femininity’ and lack of mainstream heterosexual pornographic aesthetic - (which she defines a s large artificial looking breasts, high heals, excessive make-up, revealing clothing or clothing which draws attention to sexual and erogenous zones) - is laughable.  

Misalignment of this aesthetic and female Myspace choices of self-representation goes without saying.  What a male sculptor in Renaissance Italy chooses to depict and what a teenage girl of present day depicts of herself, would no doubt differ.  On top of this, coining terms such as ‘hetero-sexy,’ and a certain amount of academic unprofessionally exists in the Thesis title “Bitches, Bunnies, BFFs and Badass Chicks: Feminist Representation or New Masquerade?  A feminist performance theory analysis of young women’s self representation on Myspace.”  If anything in particular can be drawn from Dobson’s work, perhaps it is the significance that women today even have an opportunity to negate patriarchal representation (whether it is in contemporary advertising, or Renaissance statuary) - through social media.

Justin Tuma