Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Societal Beauty

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Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Societal Beauty Abigail Bukky May 3, 2015 SOC 3223 Dr. Richard Ellefritz In her book Bossypants, Tina Fey (2011) writes about the expectation of beauty for women, “Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits." According to the symbolic interactionist approach, society has defined beauty in such a way because individuals have collectively decided that these are the physical characteristics of a beautiful person. Symbolic interactionism is "the study of how people negotiate the meaning of social life during their interactions with other people" (Rohall, Milkie, Lucas 2014:30). George Herbert Mead, the often credited founder of symbolic interactionism, stated that through our interactions we create meanings that we attach to people, objects, and ourselves over time. Once agreed upon, these meanings become our social reality. Individual women have attached the adjectives "beautiful" or "perfect" to the women in the pictures they have seen in the magazines or on television and so over the course of time it has become the social reality that these women are the standard of beauty for society. There are however deviants, those who do not fit the societal standard of beauty, and there is inequality and discrimination due to beauty standards as well. Research using qualitative methods could be implemented to study the effects of beauty on society. Symbolic interactionists define society as the "network of interactions between people"(Rohall et al. 2014:28). This concept of society means that the individual and society are intertwined together in a

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