Beauty and the Body: Gendered Representations of the Digitally Altered Image

This work aims to explore how normalized gender representations in images are heightened through the use of digital manipulation technologies and how that influences a spectator’s relationship both to the image and to their own body. After constructing a theoretical understanding of the ways in which images influence and create a normative beauty ideology, a critical case study analysis of the ways celebrities are photographed and digitally altered provides for a grounding of theoretical material