While the readings for this week were very interesting regarding the past history of crossover and stardom, I found that the ideas were yet to be discussed in terms of the present day and current society. Therefore, I want to expand these ideas to 2018, answering Beltran’s questions, “Does crossover necessarily involve containment; must it ultimately be a hegemonic process that keeps nonwhite stars in their place? Was this the case for Jennifer? Or could her publicity more accurately be viewed as stretching of the status quo or of an increasingly multicultural media mainstream?” (Beltran).
To summarize and contextualize these ideas, it is important to understand the points made in the readings from the week. In the Negron-Muntaner reading, Jennifer’s role in the movie Selena is discussed with significance. In her time, Selena was a powerful figure of Latina beauty and power, so much so that she was practically worshipped. Casting Lopez to play her in the movie not only identified Jennifer as a strong actress, but created a platform for another curvy Latina woman to form new Hollywood beauty standards. Her publicity in the movie centered around her body, and she gladly talked about her curves and her butt in interviews. Jennifer would comment repeatedly that in the past, she felt that wardrobe departments had tried to hide her body, especially her behind. Her unapologetic nature shows an assertion of a non-white beauty standard.
In fact, in 1998 her body was recognized as an ideal in Entertainment Weekly (Beltran). To Latino audiences, Jennifer’s display of her body could be seen as “nothing less than positive - a revolutionary act with respect to Anglo beauty ideals generally reflected and perpetuated through media images” (Beltran).
Yet western culture has also been very demeaning to the body of other races and cultures, raising the question of whether media attention is really a form of objectifying and containing a star from another culture, rather than celebrating her talents and appearance. The African American body, for example, historically was over-sexualized and women were demeaned into the idea of a Jezebel. Fascination with the curvy, black body even led to narratives that blamed African American women for always asking for sex, starting a vicious idea that they could never truly be raped. Through colonization, “Latinas historically have been enslaved, raped, and otherwise constructed similarly through narratives of colonization as available and accessible sex objects” (Beltran 81). Therefore, as the media objectifies the bodies of stars like Lopez, there is a “fine line between crossover success and exploitation” (Beltran).
What has happened? Has time told us whether Jennifer’s body was a passing fad or whether in contrast, she “upset the primacy of whiteness inherent in the Hollywood star system?” (Beltran)
The Beltran article raised concern that Lopez had gone through a body transformation since her appearance as Selena, one that made her hair blonder and her butt and body thinner and smaller. Yet when we see Lopez today, I believe we see a different narrative.
Now, more than ever, it seems that Lopez is able to display her real body and exist as a beauty standard in Hollywood. As someone born in 1996, I was hardly aware of the stick-thin body images that were idealized in the 1990s. Rather, the celebrities' bodies I look up to have a variety of shapes. And furthermore, I would say that the curvy woman with a large butt is THE most prominent beauty trend at the moment. Since Jennifer’s rear-displaying magazine cover, we have seen this happen with celebrities like Kim Kardashian. The top female stars that I can think of today generally have Lopez’s curvy body type and are not strictly white women. Furthermore, these women are carving out huge empires in the music, performance, makeup, and fashion worlds, showing themselves to be businesswomen as well as beauty icons.
The media attention surrounding Lopez, focusing mainly on physical assets, seems to have shown itself to be an overall empowering force rather than a racial, fetishizing gaze. While all female stars struggle with how much they should display their bodies and use their body to their advantage, Lopez seems to have successfully used hers to exalt a new body type in Hollywood. Just today, on the Cosmo Snapchat story, there was an article about how to workout to have a bigger butt -- and while we are still striving for a beauty standard unattainable by some people, I think that our society has dramatically moved toward accepting women of all shapes and encouraging physical fitness and exercise for any size woman, from any race or culture.
No comments:
Post a Comment