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Content archived on 2024-05-28

Towards a comparative sociology of beauty The transnational modelling industry and the social shaping of beauty standards in six European countries

Objective

This project studies how beauty standards - perceptions of physical beauty in women and men - are socially shaped. It will focus on the transnational modelling industry, an institution centrally concerned with the production and dissemination of beauty standards. The project aims to develop a comparative sociology of beauty. By comparing beauty standards both within and across nations, it will identify central mechanisms and institutions through which such standards are developed and disseminated. In 4 subprojects this study investigates 1. How standards of female and male beauty are perceived, shaped, and disseminated by professionals in the transnational modelling field; 2. How female and male models perceive, represent and embody beauty standards in their work; 3. How female and male beauty has been portrayed by models in mainstream and high fashion magazines from 1980 till 2010; 4. How people of different backgrounds perceive female and male beauty, and how their beauty standards are related to the images disseminated in modelling. Each project will be done in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey and the UK. This project is innovative in several ways. It is the first comprehensive study of the social shaping of beauty standards. The 4 subprojects will result in an extensive account of production, products, and reception of a contested cultural industry. Moreover, this project draws together in novel ways theories about media, cultural production and taste formation; gender and the body; and globalization. The project will make a major contribution to the study of globalization: it studies a transnational cultural industry, and its comparative and longitudinal design allows us to gauge the impact of globalization in different contexts. Finally, the project is innovative in its comparative, multi-method research design, in which the subprojects will follow the entire process of production and consumption in a transnational field.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Topic(s)

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Call for proposal

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ERC-2009-StG
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-SG - ERC Starting Grant

Host institution

UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
EU contribution
€ 1 202 611,00
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

No data

Beneficiaries (1)

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