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Pageant: Manufactured Beauty, Caitlin Penny

Graduate School of Art Theses

Pageant: Manufactured Beauty explores why the female body is abject and how that body is mitigated through sexually objectifying images. This paper discusses how the female body has been objectified in order to “correct” the elements of the body that are considered abject, through an exploration of psychological studies, philosophy and analysis of contemporary art and popular culture.

The effects of these images on the women who view them is often a desire to conform their own bodies to the images in order to gain social acceptance. Clothing and the decoration of the body, it is argued, are the methods …