Sites and Topics

The intention of this section is to offer a further clarification of the A2 courseworksites and then to provide starting points for the first sets of chosen topics. Assuch, and unlike the other sections in this coursework part of the book, its focusis on doing the course rather than doing the assessment, on exploring the pos-sibilities rather than bringing them to some kind of conclusion. Of course thesefinal sites do carry a synoptic function so there is a sense of a course being brought(finally) together but this section is about where that process begins. It will beconcluded elsewhere.

Of course you have something of a starting point in the form of the Topic Guidefor each topic area which includes ‘Titles and Issues’ and ‘Possible StimulusMaterials’. However, given the task is initially to explore an area, going straightfor the issue seems to miss a stage out. What we hope to do here is to providean outline for that otherwise missing stage, a route from ‘early A2’ to being in aposition to select a topic, maybe even an issue. In doing so we can also provide a clearer reading of the sites and their significance and function.

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THE HOW AND WHYOF A2 COURSEWORK

SITES AND TOPICS:: ‘Sites’ are the landscapes of the course and‘topics’ are significant features within those landscapes

continued

Module/Options Site One Site Two Site Three

COMM2 Communication, Cultural Contexts N/ACulture and the and PracticesIndividual

‘Site’ is an extremely useful critical term that describes ‘places’ where meaningis generated and contested: physical ‘places’, ideological ‘places’. This is how theterm is used in the C and C specification and in simple terms, the sites identifiedin three of the four modules (and by implication all of them) are simply ‘places’where these modules happen or can happen. Where there are no sites given (inCOMM1) there is an implication that the sites are a matter of choice.

‘Topics’, on the other hand, are options within identified sites and again are implicitor explicit in all modules. Sometimes your choice is limited and sometimes youhave a broadly free choice. For example, working within Site One (the place where‘Communication, Culture and the Individual’ ‘meet’) in COMM2 (the AS course-work) you are offered a choice of three topics (Personal Language, Taste, andClothing). You are then given a vast choice of texts, whereas working within thesite ‘Places and Spaces’ in COMM3 leaves the choice of topic (e.g. DomesticHousing, Public Buildings, Hospitals) and text up to you.

In a simple way, if the sites are a way of saying where each module is ‘happening’,these final A2 coursework sites are attempts to sum up where the whole coursehas been ‘happening’. Also they are our last attempt, for convenience’s sake, toseparate the inseparable: the person and the practice. To those familiar with theold Communication Studies they are not a million miles away from the old desig-nations of ‘personal’ and ‘cultural’ communication. In ‘the Person’ and ‘CulturalPractice’ we merely have emphases which might be crudely assimilated as ‘inte-rior’ and ‘exterior’ though they cannot be mutually exclusive. ‘The Person’, we areinformed, is “explicitly concerned with the construction and maintenance of ourpersonal and social identities and the ways in which these are communicated”:

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Sites and Topics in the 2009–10 Communication and Culture specification

Module/Options Site One Site Two Site Three

TOPICS Personal Language Pop N/ATaste ShoppingClothing Personal places

COMM3 Places and Spaces Fictions Objects of desire

TOPICS Free choice Free choice Free choice

COMM4 The Person Cultural Practice N/A

TOPICS Body Modification Cinema Going N/ACelebrity Holiday (2011)

Cultural Practice is described as “an exploration of the ‘Meanings and Practicesof Everyday Life’”. Even the topics cannot really belong on one side or the other.Again they are merely subjected to a treatment by being identified on one side orthe other. This is the reason why, for example, media texts like films or TV pro-grammes can easily function as resources across more than one topic. Since wecannot be defined outside of a cultural context/practice this will always be so andshould not be seen as problematic.

Communication and Culture is principally concerned with developing an intellectualresourcefulness, a flexibility and an engaged critical attitude. Working out yourresponse to the topics challenges all of these. The topics, and ultimately the titles,do provide a discipline, which for most people is more productive than ‘Do anyproject you like’, but they are still principally enabling. They remove the need (andperhaps the temptation) to look too closely at what students have done in thepast by regularly refreshing the focus points but they still leave massive scope foryou to bring your own ‘stuff’ to the table.

Ultimately you will have three to four topics from which to choose within which sixissues are identified. Take the following ‘starter for ten’ as an aid to deciding whichyou should follow up. Hopefully they will also show you that there are many placesto start: from the outside or the inside, via an overview or the consideration of adetail. Either way we are looking for a way to see what there is to see, be whatthere is to be.

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ASIDE

“Such stuff as dreams are made on”

So much of C and C is about bringing your stuff to bear on the issues anddebates of the course. In addressing the meanings and practices of everydaylife we are necessarily addressing the very fabric of our realities and ourattitudes to them and theories about them.

BODY MODIFICATION: Meeting the metaphorIn Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale, a knight is taught a lesson/redeemed/punished in the following way for what seems fairly unequivocally to havebeen a rape. He is given the stock fairytale year and a day to find out whatwomen want. He travels around and gets some fairly obvious answers:money, possessions, fidelity, sex. None of these satisfy the expectations

continued

4A2 COMMUNICAT ION AND CULTURE

generated by this particular ‘fiction’. Finally, and Imean at the eleventh hour, he happens upon (as ifanything in art happens by chance) a strangefairytale hag, old and ugly and promising very little.She offers to cut a deal since she knows whatwomen want and it is so late in the story that bothaudience and Knight are convinced she’s tellingthe truth. The deal is, I guess predictably, that hegets the answer only if he agrees to return to thehag and be her ‘companion’. Now Chaucer cranksup the dilemma by describing her in these terms:“A fouler wight (person) ther may no man devyse”.(you couldn’t invent a more horrible person)

Of course the Knight accepts and returns to thequeen with his answer. He is brought before herwith great ceremony and delivers, in medievalterms, quite a blow for women’s rights.

“Women desiren to have sovereynteeAs wel over his housbound as hir love

Women, then, in simple terms want control over their husbands and theirlove. In effect they want the right to make their own decisions and in sayingthis, the Knight accepts the logic of his words and surrenders himself to thequeen’s judgment. At this point the hag appears to claim her reward and theKnight begins to have second thoughts: I know I agreed to this, he says, butchoose another reward:

“Taak al my good and lat my body go!”

In fact, though she admits she is “foul, and oold, and poore”, for the hag it’slove or nothing! Most unchivalrously he curses his luck and most reluctantlytakes her off to bed. There he wails his woes until his smiling new wife askshim what is wrong and promises to ’amend’ it. He ungraciously makes refer-ence to her looks and great age which sparks a long speech from her aboutbeing noble coming from actions not position – in other words it’s how youbehave that counts. Finally she offers him a deal:

EITHER: have me “foul and old” and true and obedient

OR: have me “yong and fair” and take the consequences

The Wife of Bath from theEllsemere Manuscript ofThe Wife of Bath’s Tale(early fifteenth century)

The Chaucer story is interesting and useful in many ways. It is classically ideo-logical in the sense that it clearly reveals a system of representation that isdominant and comfortable. It also seems safe to say that Chaucer’s medievalaudience would have responded to this story very differently to the ways in whichwe might. The very fact that Chaucer is able to raise the questions ‘What dowomen want’ might in itself reveal the progressive humanising character of genius,though it is ‘hidden’ within the fictional narrative of a larger than life character (theWife of Bath, who has survived five husbands!). Arguably the question wasn’tasked again in literature for four hundred years and certainly not answered soclearly perhaps until the twentieth century. This is partly, of course, becauseliterature’s Canon spent most of that time as very largely by and about men.

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In fact he chooses neither but rather, in keeping with the ongoing themes,lets the hag decide:

“My lady and my love and wyf so deereI put me in your wyse Govemance

Again predictably (which here means much the same as ‘psychologically real-istically’) she goes for young and fair and the Knight’s journey is complete.

ASIDE

Which would you choose? What is your gut reaction?

ASIDE

What should she choose?

ACTIVITY

The wife of Bath (who tells the tale) has been described by one critic asan arch-Feminist. What might a feminist make of the ending describedhere?

However, what we’re here to consider is ‘Body’ and the meaning of its intentionalor unintentional ‘modification’. In Chaucer the modification is total, a trans-formation, the most extreme of extreme makeovers and a beguiling blueprint forthe aspirations of many people (and perhaps all of us to some extent). This issomething you may have touched on in AS so let’s not dwell on it. Crudely, medicalscience has significantly closed the gap on the relationship between being contentwith how you look and an idealised ‘magical’ (i.e. painless) transformation. Thishas significantly moved the goalposts both philosophically and psychologicallysuch that the activity below is both problematic and meaningless. You can answerthe questions of course but you shouldn’t since by doing so you are immediatelytaking up positions which hardly function hypothetically. These are questions whichonly become active in particular contexts.

Of course much of the issue here lies in the problematic ‘improve’ which suggestsmoving from somewhere (‘lower’ in the paradigm) to somewhere else (presumably‘higher’) and implies that some appearances are, crudely, better than others.‘Crudely’ is the right word here, since the argument is often joined with broadgeneralisations that for example it must be better to look like George Clooney (ifyou’re male) than Pete Bennett and Jerry Slater (the couple of ‘ordinary’ lookingblokes who wrote the A2 book). Even though you haven’t seen either Peter orJerry, you are inclined to accept a sort of fractured logic which relates to the mythof George Clooney’s attractiveness and the probability in the face of this kind ofdemocratic beauty that neither Pete nor Jerry will out-George George!

At least two important issues are raised by this line of argument. First, we registerhow sensitive and personal ‘attractiveness’ is as an issue and thus how mucheasier it is to talk about ‘attractive’ than ‘unattractive’, though one presupposesthe other. In this context George Clooney is a very safe example since few males,it is supposed, would suffer trauma from being thought less attractive than thefilm star. In this sense then, semiotically, his attractiveness is a ’myth’, a generallyheld connotation, its force coming from an accumulation of response. Also Georgedoes not have to be pictured because he is well known and well known for beinghandsome. However this ’process’ brings us to the second ‘issue’ the somewhatdangerous tendency to assume that a general agreement about something sosubjective makes it effectively objective, in other words “accurate, unbiased andindependent of individual perceptions”. George is not objectively attractive he is

6A2 COMMUNICAT ION AND CULTURE

NON-ACTIVITY:If you could change one part of yourself what would it be?

Given the resources would you like to ’improve’ your body/appearance?

How important is it for us to be content with our ‘given’ unaltered appear-ance/body?

’merely’ subjectively attractive to very large numbers of people. This may notmatter much to George since he is also talented, rich and recognisable (all factorswhich add to his attractiveness) but if we are to consider the dominant ideologicaldefinitions of beauty, we need to get a good deal closer. These definitions, afterall, lead many people to spend up to a third of their income aspiring to meet their‘standards’.

‘Celebrity’ is too influential a factor to be useful here (as we’ll see later) but it’sonly one of many that make theories of human beauty difficult. Recent work,looking biologically and mathematically for the so-called ‘golden mean’, facesmade ‘perfect’ genetically as part of an evolutionary process, has encountered anumber of contextual factors which switch attention from beauty to the beholders.Females, for example, reacted differently to different images of men dependingon their own levels of fertility. They also responded more positively to men whowere pictured being admired by other women. When men were asked to rate theattractiveness of the same males, they rated the admired males lowest.

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Figure 1 George Clooney at the 33rd Deauville American Film Festival. Photo by Efloch.Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Understanding these contexts, this crossfire of factors which are predictably amixture of ‘natures’ and ‘nurtures’ is important if we are to be able to respondrationally to the claims of various interested parties. The point is that none of uscan do without a theory of beauty, whether implicit or explicit, and the downsideof theories, as we have seen, is that they tend to have a life of their own. Apersonal aesthetic is a product of rationality, experience and desire/attitude andmore importantly is something we prove by living by it. Thus those who put littlestore by appearance will not be overthrown by research that suggests that onaverage the beautiful earn 5 per cent more and the ’below-average lookers’ 9 percent less. In the same way we can contextualise the account below which talksabout the genetic/biological basis of attractiveness.

The fact that beauty is big business means that beauty is also news and we areregularly offered arguments as well as legions of the conventionally beautiful beingjust that in a number of poses and functions. The philosopher Plato thought beautya sign of goodness, though moral not genetic value was his concern. Pythagorasworked on the ‘golden mean’ (sometimes called ‘the divine proportion’) the mathe-matical basis of proportion within the human body and in nature. If the beauty ofnature had pattern, it suggested, why not the beauty of people? A contemporaryplastic surgeon Stephen Marquadt has used the golden mean and decades of workon human beauty (practically) to construct what he calls a ‘beauty mask’, a modelof loveliness. Marquardt claims that this intricate plotting of the proportions ofthe beauty depicts the facial proportions of the most beautiful face irrespectiveof race. In fact closer inspection shows a clear European bias and the shockingimplication that some racial populations have greater proportions of beautifulpeople than others.

However on Marquardt’s website http://www.beautyanalysis.com/index2_mba.htm, which details the research, evidence and conclusions, in a section entitled’You and the Mask’ is the following:

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ACTIVITY

Female heads and male torsos

Search the internet for a selection of contrasting images of the male andfemale body.

Try to predict how the other gender might rate these images in terms ofattractiveness. Then simply find a rank order for both sets and provide aclarification of your thought processes. Discuss your perceptions as a group.

How important is gender then to the recognition of beauty?

What other factors influence our perceptions?

It is the scientific/medical basis, by which I mean ’context’ which gives this pieceits casual authority. In this context “evaluating your face for facial surgery” seemsa rational response to a model of beauty which seems unimpeachable. Argumentslike Marquardt’s are based upon symmetry and proportion and this has led someto argue that logically these are qualities that should be passed on by naturalselection, the genetic process whereby ’successful’ features are privileged inheredity. Much scientific work has been done in regard to this evolutionary theorythough what we get almost always tells us much more and less than ’proper’science allows itself. Take the story below from the Daily Telegraph ’Why beautyis an advert for good genes’:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3341719/Why-beauty-is-an-advert-for-good-genes.html

The first line, ‘Beautiful people are healthier and live longer, according to a studyof sex appeal’ seems a final rubbing salt in the wounds for those of us who do notconsider ourselves beautiful. Not only are these ’beautiful’ people, well ’beautiful’,but now they’re healthier and will live longer! However, cross-referencing this story

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USES OF THE REPOSE FRONTAL MASK:

You can overlay the Repose Frontal Mask (also called the RF Mask orRepose Expression – Frontal View Mask) over a photograph of your ownface to help you apply makeup, to aid in evaluating your face for facialsurgery, or simply to see how much your face conforms to the measure-ments of the Golden Ratio

Copyright © 2001–2005 Marquardt Beauty Analysis, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Figure 2

on this research with the NHS Knowledge Service’s Behind the Headlines, aninternet database which provides background on medical stories, we get a slightlydifferent picture.

Actually the research was into the relationship between facial symmetry andgender perceptions and found that faces that were significantly and appropriatelymasculine or feminine were those that displayed higher symmetry. This is a longway from beauty, though it is connected with mating since these were the qualitiesin other studies which were seen to attract mates especially at times of greatestfertility. Whilst estrogen and testosterone clearly have a part to play in attraction(and procreation) they are less relevant to our discussion about visualisations ofthe perfect body. This might encourage us to go back to cultural factors and thinkinstead about what we are shown to be perfect and the nature of the discourseabout beauty in all aspects of our life.

One of the obvious places that this is going is also one of the most problematicin mass media texts. The problematic is that this is a world of fantasies which hasa peculiar hold on our realities. Areas like fashion photography for example offer

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Facial symmetry and gender perception

Beauty is an advert for good genes, reports The Daily Telegraph today.It says that “research conducted across cultures and species”, has foundthat not only are symmetrical faces regarded as being more attractive,but that they also may indicate good genes, health and long life.

The newspaper story is based on research which investigated whetherfacial symmetry is linked to how feminine or masculine a face is con-sidered to be. However, this research has not investigated or suggestedthat increased facial symmetry, or “beauty” as the Telegraph describesit, is linked to better genes and that asymmetry is linked to lessfavourable genes. These are evolutionary theories that have been pre-viously been suggested, mainly in the context of animal mating patterns.The first line of the news article that “beautiful people are healthier andlive longer” may or may not be the case, but as this research did notinvestigate this, it cannot add any evidence either way.

© Behind the Headlines, NHS Choices

Read the full article here:

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2008/05May/Pages/Facialsymmetryandgenderperception.aspx

a consciously distorted version of,particularly, female beauty simplybecause it is not their job to providerole models but rather to ’dressclothes’. ’Glamour’ in this context ismanufactured in any way it can be:airbrushed or computer-enhancedlike Keira Knightley’s breasts on theposter (but not in the film) for the filmKing Arthur. The extensive use ofbody doubles for anything from handsto bottoms in Hollywood films furtherdistorts our hold on perfection. In thecult British horror film The WickerMan (dir. Robin Hardy, 1973) havingrefused to do a nude dance scene,actress Britt Ekland was surprised tofind that a stripper from Glasgow hadbeen discreetly brought in to doubleup. She reports being regularly askedby fans for autographs on stills fromthis iconic scene and having to refusewhen what she is being asked to signis not her own. More famously andperhaps deflatingly is the revelationthat the legs in the even more iconic

poster image above belong to model and body double Donna Scuggins and notMs Roberts!

However this conversation Hollywood has with beauty has a more sinister sidewhen we consider the parts played by those lacking ’perfection’. Not only dopeople with disabilities feature very little in mainstream Hollywood films, save inspecific contexts (autism in Rain Man, the implications of combat injuries in Bornon the 4th of July) but the ancient store of metaphors which equate beauty withvirtue are still going strong. For while TV and film are significantly lacking realisticportrayals of the afflicted, there is no shortage of deformity and madness when itcomes to the symbolic realms of fiction and fantasy.

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Figure 3 © TOUCHSTONE/WARNERS

Research has suggested that attractive people are viewed as honest and helpfulwhile unattractive people are rude and unfair. However “rude and unfair” you findthis, hopefully now you’re beginning to understand that this is a complex business.Crudely, people with facial disfigurements have to operate in a world where facialdisfigurement is commonly used as a way of representing moral disfigurement,where ’imperfection has far reaching semantic implications’. In the context of themedia’s ’escapist’ function it would be so much more challenging to deal withdisfigurement in any other way. In the same way it was (and is) much more accept-able to tell stores in which old hags are transformed into beautiful young womenthan to contemplate the needs and integrities of hags.

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ACTIVITY

Heroes and Villains

Are there films which reverse this polarity or even deviate from it?

Even in the middle ground there is a clear pecking order which makes iteasy to pick heroes and villains. Try these film posters:

Figure 4 © Relativity Media / Universal / © LUCASFILM/PARAMOUNTPICTURES / © NEW LINE.

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ACTIVITY

Metaphors of health

Consider the ways in which the following ’conditions’ are used repre-sentationally within media fictions. To what degree are each of these’imperfections’ deviant to conventional ideas about beauty?

■ baldness■ blindness■ being ‘mute’/unable to speak■ being wheelchair-bound■ having a disease of the skin (e.g. psoriasis)■ having prosthetic limbs■ having a mental illness■ being obese