Smooth bodywork: the role of texture in images of cars and women on consumer magazine covers

This article examines the role of texture, specifically smoothness, in commercial communication, specifically magazine cover imagery. It takes as its empirical focus images of women and cars on the covers of magazines aimed at the male market in order to argue that smoothness is an important semiotic resource, embedded in stereotypical and heteronormative conceptions of gender. This argument is framed and introduced through a review of the connotations held by various smooth surfaces in western culture, and a discussion of questions of affect and ideology that underlie those connotations. Analysing two examples of each magazine genre, the paper then illustrates how smoothness is a semiotic resource in which consumption-oriented superficiality interfaces with ideologically gendered images of women and cars on magazine covers. It concludes by raising questions for the future study of smoothness in the media.     

Performing Post-feminist Wealth: The Intersectional Aesthetics of Irene Major’s Instagram Profile

ABSTRACT

How is wealth communicated visually and how might a post-feminist sensibility intersect with wealth? This article examines the Instagram profile of Irene Major, a self-styled social celebrity and an apparently super-rich woman living in England. Born in Cameroon, Major migrated to the U.K. where she worked as a fashion model before marrying Sam Malin, a Canadian oil tycoon. Major’s online profile presents us with a fascinating figure who celebrates extreme wealth via a spectrum of social media communications. This performance of wealth is relevant to broader debates about the links between race, gender, class and wealth not only in the U.K., but also to those regarding these links in a globalised and mediated world. The article traces three key narrative themes in the @irenemajor Instagram profile with particular reference to critical thought on the intersection of race, gender and class in the self-representation of super-wealth. It concludes by considering how a post-feminist sensibility intersects with the visual mediation of wealth.