Question: Media products often challenge the social and cultural contexts in which they are created.

The women in general are dressed appropriately unless there is specific reason to not be. An example of this is the page of the plus size model, Megan, who is promoting body positivity. They present a radical representation of women in the sense that on the front cover, the woman is wearing natural makeup, unlike most magazine front covers where the woman is posed in a lot of makeup and displaying her body to attract the ‘male gaze’.

The front cover also entails words such as ‘power’, ‘hard-won’ and ‘strong’ which is oppositional to the ‘normal’ woman as it is stereotypically the men who are labelled as ‘strong’ and ‘powerful’ rather than women.

The woman on the front cover is being humanised rather than objectified which applies to Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze in the sense that it goes against her thesis and completely contradicts her ideas. The magazine doesn’t allow any application of the male gaze. The only thing that could be connected to ‘the male gaze’ is the fact that she is a female model who is the dominant signifier on the page and she is posing.

Links to Butler’s theory as it questions the belief that certain gendered behaviours are natural. She also created the theory of performance which links to this CSP in the way that the women in the magazine use their gender to feed the audience ideas about confidence and body positivity. It could be argued that these women could be over-exaggerating their beliefs to encourage others to agree with their optimistic view of life.