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This paper will explore how young people appear to be employing more sophisticated ways of thinking about popular media icons that transcend more dichotomous understandings reflected in the literature. It appears that typically popular media icons are conceptualised in the literature in terms of a dichotomy: they influence young people in either negative or positive ways, never both. Young peoples’ ways of thinking about these icons, however, appear to transcend these binaries, and even hold such binaries together in paradoxical ways. As a ‘for instance’ of these new understandings, the paper draws on recent research conducted by the author about the fashion model. The paper examines more specifically how young girls conceptualise the fashion model body in ways that hold together the typically dichotomous ways of thinking about fashion model reflected in the literature. Whereas the literature sets up a discursive binary about the model body as either ‘fatal’ or ‘fun’, young girls draw on more erudite ways of thinking about the model body as both fatal and fun. In light of this, the paper highlights the need to move to more ironic theoretical tools in order to better understand young peoples’ engagement with popular cultural icons in ‘new times’.

Item Type:	Refereed Conference Paper
Keywords:	young people, young girl, thinking, popular media, icon, fashion model, negative, positive, discursive binary, irony, new times, conceptualise, engagement
Research Division:	Language, Communication and Culture
Research Group:	Cultural Studies
Research Field:	Culture, Gender, Sexuality
Objective Division:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Group:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Field:	Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society
Author:	Dwyer, AE (Dr Angela Dwyer)
ID Code:	106779
Year Published:	2005
Deposited By:	Social Sciences
Deposited On:	2016-02-19
Last Modified:	2016-03-01
Downloads:	0