[8-2] “The Body Issue”: What can a graphic novel teach us about global and historical perspectives of the ideal female body?
Presentation language：English
The Body Issue: What Global and Historical Perspectives of the Ideal Female Body Can Teach Us About Our Own Present-day Bodies is a graphic novel that explores the cultural and social factors influencing female body image and aims to be an educational, entertaining tool for teaching history and medicine. Drawing from historical and contemporary sources, as well as personal experience, the author tries to understand the overemphasis on women’s physical appearance. The graphic novel narrates the stories of four different historical societies: Tang Dynasty China, the Efik people, Victorian England, and Sparta, and invites readers to consider bodies as a means to individuality instead of assimilation, acknowledge how social and cultural factors can impact body image, and recognize that no perfect female body exists.
Poor body image is a worldwide public health crisis disproportionately affecting females. Physical bodies are social bodies; beauty is linked to perceptions of health, wealth, power, and overall success, which affect women’s overall views of their capabilities, strengths, and worth. History can help expose ideals of women’s beauty as arbitrary, suggesting fluidity and subjectivity of the notion of perfection. The Body Issue aims to help readers value self-validation over social validation with respect to their bodies.
Poor body image is a worldwide public health crisis disproportionately affecting females. Physical bodies are social bodies; beauty is linked to perceptions of health, wealth, power, and overall success, which affect women’s overall views of their capabilities, strengths, and worth. History can help expose ideals of women’s beauty as arbitrary, suggesting fluidity and subjectivity of the notion of perfection. The Body Issue aims to help readers value self-validation over social validation with respect to their bodies.