Visual Culture - the representation of women in contemporary media

Over the years, cultural images concerning women in society have changed dramatically. Thus, the woman we see in a current newspaper ad is presented totally differently from former times: powerful, more self-confident, energetic, dominant and autonomic are the visual characteristics we get in mind by looking at it. The traditionally typical male or – in this context more interesting - female role model does not seem to exist in our world anymore. There is no longer a clear distinction between the passive, soft, sensitive and very feminine looking woman on the one hand and the dominant, masculine, powerful and dynamic man on the other in these pictures.

The paper at hand will try to analyse these phenomena and show the development from a symbol of a happy family life and a caring housewife to the representation of a powerful and individual human being by regarding the representation of women in advertising in the past. But first, to illustrate this, it will be helpful to describe the term visual culture and how it works by including Roland Barthes´ ”The Rhetoric of the Image”. To show the great importance cultural images have in our lifes, how they are created to appear as realistic as possible, and how difficult it becomes for us today to distinguish between reality and illusion, I want to refer to Susan Bordo´s Twilight Zones. Some examples like women in sports advertisements, heroin chic or the computer-generated artificial “reality” we are confronted with by glamorized visual images of perfection will try to give a more detailed insight into illusions which we consider to be reality. In the final subchapter then it will be discussed if the sum of these created images could be described as “power feminism”, as Susan Bordo names it or if it is just a superficial trend.