I'm so excited to see a real live audience. This is really special. My name is Patricia Sloan white and I'm the chair of Women and Gender Studies. I want to welcome you to an event that is really very special in our department, our annual Carter lecture this year is special for two reasons. One is that you're here in person for the first time. We haven't been able to have the lecture for two years in person, and this feels great. Thank you for coming. I know it's hard to choose among all the events that are on schedules that UD and I'm honored that you chose to came to come today. The other reason that today is so special is because starting today and continuing through next fall, Women and Gender Studies at UD is celebrating its 50th anniversary. And that's really remarkable. We are one of the first, one of the oldest, and therefore one of the strongest departments of Women and Gender Studies anywhere. 50 years ago, in 1973, UD was one of the very first universities to respond to the feminist movement by offering courses which focused on the topic of women and feminist approaches. It may not seem so now, but that was revolutionary in 1973. But we wouldn't be here today without one woman's powerful voice and equally powerful activism for women on this campus. The Carter lecture. The reason we're here today, is named after that woman, may Carter. We call McCarter the mother of Women's Studies at UD. It was her vision and later her financial support that has given us so much in partnership with her very feminist husband, Robert Carter. Carter. She supported us. She guided us and taught us to imagine an enact social change for women at UD. As we launch our 50th year events today. And this is a look you should be looking for for the next three semesters. We do so in honor of this great University of Delaware woman, may Carter. But today I can think of no better person than to tell you more about ME, Carter, then our beloved and brilliant Margaret stats. Margaret is the main Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities. And I'm asking Margaret to come up and tell you more about the mother of Women Studies at UD. May Carter. Thank you, Patricia. Thank you, everyone for being here today. Before there was a department of women and gender studies. There was a department of women's studies. Before there was a department of women's studies. There was a women's studies program. Before. There was a women's studies program in 1973. There was a women's studies committee and a few Women's Studies courses. Before that, there was May 3D Carter working in the office of the president of UD. E Arthur true bond, after whom this building, this theater is named. And she helped to make everything happen. The flyer for today's lecture, may Carter is described as the mother of women's studies. But mother isn't the word that I would use for me to other titles come to mind. General and architect. That is a military campaigner and a visionary builder. She was a mother in the literal sense of two daughters, both of whom went on to distinguished careers in education. She was a wife as well, born in 1921 and married in 1944. In the 1950s, she did what women often did. She moved when her husband's career took him from one state to another. And that meant in her case, leaving California and coming to Delaware. It was just about the last conventional thing she ever did. Unfortunately, her husband, Robert Carter, who was always known as Bob, was every bit as progressive, supporting her in all the choices and political commitment she made, including the one most important to her, a feminist commitment to advancing the lives and status of women. When she took the job of assistant to President Trump, Bagchi began playing her role as a general, a military strategist, working behind the scenes and in public campaigning. On behalf of women at UD, she was determined not only to benefit students, but faculty and staff, creating commissions and administrative offices to study and improve their situations and to offer new opportunities to ensure fairness and equity where it hadn't existed before. But she also took on the role of an architect, envisioning and building an academic program, a permanent degree granting women's studies program, which could keep growing and eventually become a department. She was no means alone in these efforts. She was a great collaborator and she worked with many people to make all of this come to fruition. But she was also a builder in another sense, for she understood what it is that makes universities sit up and pay attention to calls for justice and inclusion and then institute something new. I mean, money. With her husband Bob. She set out to provide the financial underpinning the solid foundation on which feminist research and teaching could be constructed. There's no question that without maze, incredibly generous and forward-looking creation and funding of scholarships for Women's Studies students and Fellowship awards for faculty researching women's issues. As well as my own professorship in women's studies, along with so many other feminist projects. The advances that are current department of women and gender studies will be celebrating throughout 2020. 2.20, 23 would have come much more slowly and might not have happened at all. It's not just that we have much to thank her for. We really have everything to thank her for. When may Carter died in 2020, just a few months before what would have been her 100th birthday. She's still seemed remarkably young because she retained the kind of determination, optimism, and forward-looking spirit that we associate with youth. In tribute to that always youthful belief that she could help to make the future better, especially for women. I'd like to recall an old nursery rhyme for children, the House that Jack Built. But in my version today, there is no Jack. There is only May. And I'll read that to you now. This is the house that may built. These are the voices eloquent, clear. And these are the people cis, trans, straight and queer. Each race class ability has a home here. For this is the house that may Built. This is the house that may built where we learn how to advocate, forge a career. Use power for good, organize, volunteer. A place for research where the truth is held dear for this is the house that may built. This is the house that may built a space for support, a defense against fear, where new dreams and achievements will always appear. Let the 50th be our most wonderful year. For this is the house that may built. And I will end with a message from her daughter, Christy Carter sue on behalf of Mays family, quote, we are sorry, we could not attend in person to honor and support the vision and accomplishments of May and celebrate how the members of the department have continued to work towards the same goals. We thank her. We think may Carter's family. And I thank you. Margaret. You're always a hard act to follow. I think you as Dr. stats said, Women and Gender Studies is the very privileged beneficiary of the May and Robert Carter endowment money does matter. This fund allows us every year to financially support one UD faculty members research on women. This year, we are delighted that we were able to give support to Dr. Sophia joke is Bradley, formerly an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain studies. Although she regrettably left Judy last summer, and this is brain drain of the highest order. She's come back today to share her research with us. Let me tell you a little about her in a moment. She's the Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies socio-cultural influences on the mental health of teens and young adults. She looks at how social media affects young people's body image, their mental health, and their gender identities. Today she'll be sharing with us her very current, her very important research on how young black women navigate, what social media tells them about their bodies, and how they respond to media messages that both appropriate critique and strengthen them. Please welcome Dr. Sophia, joke is Bradley talking about her research. Thank you so much for the warm welcome and that wonderful tribute to make Carter. How's my volume back there? Great, Thank you. It's an honor to be back at the University of Delaware and to be here with you all today to share a preliminary work that was generously funded by May Carter's fund. And I will be talking to you today as we just heard about body image and gendered racial identity among black women with a focus on social media. I first want to share it just a little bit about my own background. I'm the Director at Pitt of the teen and young adult lab. I'm an Assistant Professor of Psychology and the developmental, clinical and social psychology areas at the University of Pittsburgh. And I'm affiliated with pits on gender, sexuality, and Women's Studies Program. We do not still have a department. So it's incredible that your department of Women and Gender Studies has been here for 50 years. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. And as we just heard, I was here from 2020 until last summer and partially for dual career reasons when my wife and I had an opportunity to go back to Pittsburgh, we left recently. I also want to acknowledge something important. This is always important for psychology researchers to acknowledge our positionality, our identities and our lived experiences, and how those affect the work we do and the way we interpret our work. It's especially important because I'm a white women, white woman presenting to you today some data focused on the lived experiences of black women identify as queer and cisgender. I'm able bodied and I use she and her pronouns. Most of the talk today will focus on this piece, the prior theory and research that led to this project. I will be focusing on body image and adolescents and young adulthood and the role of social media and body image specifically. And I will talk to you about prior theory and work, especially from black women scholars focused on gendered racial identity development and body image among black young women. And I will then share preliminary data from Project rows, which was the project that was funded by the Carter award. Rose is an acronym that stands for racial identity, objectification and sociocultural experiences. And we are conducting ongoing qualitative interviews with black young women aged 18 to 24. Thus far, we've completed ten interviews and I'll show you those preliminary data. Our overarching research question, which is too big to give to fully address today, is how gendered racial identity, gendered Racism, and objectification of fact black young women's body image, sexual relationships, and mental health. I will be focusing today on the role of social media and beauty norms and body image and how those affect black young women. One piece of this study, I really have been so privileged and honored to be able to work with these two incredible scholars who identify as black women. Bree lad, who was my lab manager at University of Delaware and is now a graduate student at the University of Maryland, working with Dr. Gianni Lewis, who is an Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Maryland and a leading expert on gendered racial identity development among black women. And they are the two co-leaders of this project. I also think my lab, the lab teen and young adult lab at Pitt slash UD. And we've also had help on this project, specifically from Annie May hue and Savannah Roberts to doctoral students in my lab who just moved with me from UD back to pit. And Rohan Hunt who is a doctoral student at the University of Louisville specializing in eating disorders. I want to know a few things that are really important to keep in mind throughout the talk. First, defining what adolescents means when it starts and when it ends is one of the weirdly most complicated things about the work I do. There's no consensus about what an adolescent is and what an adolescent is not. I am roughly referring to ages 11 to 25 when I use the term adolescent. I also want to note that while a great deal of my research focuses specifically on the lived experience of trans and non-binary folks, as well as the experience of cisgender men. This talk focuses primarily on the experiences of cisgender women. Both because on the research participants who have completed our interviews so far all identify as cisgender black women. And because we still know very little about the experiences of trans and non-binary folks when it comes to social media and body image. Although we're actively collecting data in separate projects on those questions within my lab. And I also want to know, I've said this, but just want to make sure it's clear that most of my talk will focus on the background that led to this project rather than data from the project itself. And this is because qualitative psychology research takes a lot longer than a year. So I was so grateful to have this funding to get started with the project. But recruiting participants, human participants, to participate in these interviews, conducting the interviews, which are each about 2 h long, transcribing those interviews and then conducting a rigorous qualitative analysis and interpreting the data is a tall order. The findings today are preliminary. And I also want to know I ask that you save questions and comments to the end to make sure I can get through the key points that I want to convey. However, there will be time at the end for questions, and I will also be here at the reception to talk one-on-one or in small groups with you to answer any questions that I haven't addressed in the talk or in the Q&A. And I also want to note that as a white woman doing this work, I will almost surely misstep. And if there's anything I say in this talk that you'd like to give me feedback about, I would more than welcome that either in the public Q&A or at the reception on. And just want to be clear that this is a work of love for me. And I don't have lived experience as a black woman. And I'm so grateful to work with black women, women on this project and in other aspects of my work. So I will go into a bit of background about what body image is. At a very basic level, body image refers to how a person feels about their physical appearance. And this can take a number of different domains. So when I talk about physical appearance, this can include shape and weight. So aspects of one's body, and it can include satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one's face, one's skin tone, or other aspects of one's skin, different aspects of one's hair, and a whole range of specific body parts. And we'll talk about how social media has created an environment in which young women often report dissatisfaction with almost every part of their bodies, which is historically a rather new phenomenon, even though body dissatisfaction has always existed among young women in the United States. This is also a time when I was delighted that the Merriam-Webster definition of body image is surprisingly helpful. Sometimes the definitions don't align very well with how we think about things in psychological science. But the definition in the Merriam Webster Dictionary is body image refers to a subjective picture of one's own physical appearance, established both by self observation and by noting the reactions of others. And this is a concise but actually very nuanced depiction of what body image refers to. Because body image is shaped by our interactions with others, it's shaped by interpersonal interactions and by the broader socio-cultural and historical contexts in which we live. For awhile, body image research in adolescence was considered to be a rather niche field. Unfortunately, that's changing. There's increasing awareness that there are a number of reasons we need to understand body image, to understand well-being, identity, and mental health among adolescents. First of all, body image concerns are very common. So I'll show you some unpublished data, not from project rows, but from another study in my lab focused on US adolescents. When asked how much adolescents agree with this statement, or rather how often they experienced the statement of, I wish I looked better. Over three-quarters of cisgender teen girls said they sometimes often or always wish they looked better. And we saw this for the majority of cisgender teen boys and gender minority teens in this study as well. When asked about the item, I worry about the way I look. 69% of cisgender girls said they worry about the way they look. Sometimes, often or always. Half of cisgender teen boys and almost three-quarters of gender minority teens. Body image concerns are very common. Body image concerns are also linked to lower well-being. Appearance concerns. I've found across many studies in my lab and other scholars have found this as well. Body image concerns, appearance concerns, and I use those terms interchangeably, are linked to lower self-esteem, higher depressive symptoms, appearance related health risk behaviors, e.g. I. Found links between body dissatisfaction and tanning among white women and women of color will sometimes do skin lightening procedures were used, skin lightening products, um, and that's linked to appearance concerns. And disordered eating is a very common outcome of body image concerns. Body image concerns are common and they are concerning from a mental health and well-being standpoint. It's also important to note that we really need as, as the field of psychology and other fields studying body image, a more inclusive and modern understanding of body image. Historically, the primary focus within research on body image has been on Wait. There's been an increasing focus, not just on weight, the number on the scale, or BMI, which is a controversial measure related to height and weight. But there's an increasing focus on shape and I'll be talking about that a lot today in upcoming slides. There's an increasing focus on the need to understand not just desire for thinness, but desire for specific body shape and for muscularity. But what the field is still really lacking even as we move toward a more comprehensive understanding of body image that's not just about thinness. We still lack this focus on culturally relevant assessments of appearance and conceptualizations of body image. And black young women's unique lived experiences related to body image have historically been both underrepresented and undervalued in body image research. And that was the key motivator for me in seeking out this funding from the MacArthur award and for doing this research more broadly. Furthermore, I'm really passionate about understanding the role of social media and body image. Social media may be changing both beauty ideals, standards for beauty and body image. I did not mean to write body shape there, that should say body image, but body shape is a really important part of body image for many young women. And you'll see there on the bottom this above the fold front page, Wall Street Journal article, it may be hard to see, but last year was the first time, to my knowledge, that teen girls body image received such mainstream media attention with the release of the Facebook files and this story called Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls. Comma research shows, or rather it's research shows. So this was based on the internal research of Facebook, now known as Meta. There's increasing public awareness related to increasing research on the role of social media in body image among young women. At the same time that the Facebook files and this increased public attention were happening. I had been working for several years with my graduate students and my colleague Jacqueline EC, to develop this developmental socio-cultural interdisciplinary framework for the role of social media in young women's body image. And we call this framework somewhat tongue and cheek, the perfect storm. I do believe that the features of social media intersect with other features of adolescent development and gendered pressures to create the perfect storm for body image concerns for many young women, adolescent girls, and young adult women. And our model proposes that gendered socio-cultural pressures related to appearance, which I'll elaborate on in the next few minutes, intersect with adolescent developmental factors that increase risk for body image concerns and specific features of social media. To predict body image, cognitions and concerns. I'll define those momentarily. And that in turn, those experiences of negative body image cognitions and concerns, increased risk for mental health concerns. And specifically, I have focused in my research and in this theoretical paper that was published a few months ago on depressive symptoms and disordered eating. So I'm first going to deep dive into the adolescent developmental factors. Why is adolescence is a time of heightened body image concerns for young women? First of all, biologically for cisgender girls, the transition from childhood to adolescence is accompanied by weight gain. Weight gain brings cisgender girls further from the ideal body for women. And so biologically, right at the time that girls bodies are becoming larger and there's a higher ratio of fat to muscle. Van is experienced by male body people or by younger children. We see this increased attention among adolescent girls to cultural gender-related pressures. So e.g. teen girls become acutely aware of advertisement messaging that increases dissatisfaction with one's body, with the goal of encouraging the individual to buy a product to fix that dissatisfaction after creating a problem that wasn't there in the first place. We also see, I'll talk more about the cultural pressures in a moment, but this is a period of life when peers become extremely important for sense of self, more important than at any other time in life. And it's also the period of life when individuals initiate dating and sexual relationships on average. And peer relationships increase, individuals focus on physical appearance. Attractiveness by arbitrary cultural standards of beauty is one of the strongest predictors of popularity in the peer network in high-school. And dating relationships can also increase attention to physical appearance, particularly if individuals are initiating sexual relationships and are exposing more of their bodies to other people. Objectification theory is a very key theory that is related to these gendered socio-cultural pressures. It was proposed by Barb Fredrickson and Tommy John Roberts in the nineties. And this theory states that in a culture that sexually objectifies women's bodies, girls and women learn to engage in self objectification. Self objectification encompasses a number of different processes, including thinking of oneself as an object of others gaze and other sexual desire. And thinking of one's value as a person, one self-worth as being determined by physical appearance, physical attractiveness, and sex appeal. And many young women will report that they remember in the elementary school years being a subject of their bodies, being able to e.g. play on the playground or in similar contexts and not think about how they looked to just be, to be subjects in their own bodies. And many, many women remember a time when they transitioned from childhood to adolescence. And suddenly we're acutely aware of how other people view them and of their attractiveness relative to others. The problem with self objectification is that it's linked to all kinds of negative outcomes, including lower self-esteem, higher body dissatisfaction, depressive symptoms, and disordered eating and abroad range of other negative outcomes. Another key model introduced in the nineties. And note that objectification theory in this model, the tripartite influence model, sometimes called the sociocultural theory, were introduced prior to the advent of modern social media. So these theories are still relevant, but they need to be updated to account for the whole new world that social media is when it comes to body image among young women. The tripartite influence model refers to how three major influencers, parents, peers, and the media, transmit beauty norms. And this theory states that body dissatisfaction can result through one of two pathways. And for most young women, both of these pathways are relevant. One is through internalization of the thin ideal. The thin ideal is, as the name suggests, a beauty ideal that promotes the NUS and frames the pursuit of thinness as a goal that all women should be working toward it all times. And social comparisons, social comparisons are rooted in a theory from the fifties by Festinger on social comparison theory which states that we compare ourselves to others whom we aspire to be like, and we compare ourselves to those we consider to be peers. So two main reference groups as messenger referred to them as include peers, similar others and those we aspire to be more like. I'll just comment more on social comparison in a moment. Recently, my lab published a study in a paper that integrated social media influences in addition to mass media influences and the muscular ideal in addition to the thin ideal, into this model. And showed that both are relevant and both statistically predict meaningful outcomes above and beyond the traditional parts of this model. But even more recently, there's increased attention to this new body type called the slim thick body type or the slim thick ideal. And I'm guessing that every undergraduate and no one above the age of 40 has heard of the slim thick ideal, but we'll be talking about it a lot today. This study from a common Mills did an experimental manipulation where young women were exposed either to images of models that showed very thin bodies or the slim thick bodies. And I'll define that and show you an example in a moment. And the slim thick ideal was more predictive of negative body image outcomes than the thin ideal. As for social comparison before we get back to this limb thick ideal and other aspects of internalized beauty norms. Social comparison is a natural process, and I usually show a video here, but I didn't want to jinx myself with tech difficulties. So there's an amazing video of two monkeys who are being fed either cucumbers or grapes. And one monkey is totally satisfied with being paid for research task with a cucumber. She loves her cucumber until the moment that she sees the monkey to her left being paid with a grape, which is far superior. And the moment she sees the other monkey get a grape, She becomes enraged and chucks the cucumber right at the experimenter. And what I love about that is it shows that we all compare ourselves to others, not just all people, but even non-human animals compare ourselves to others. And we're only satisfied with what we have relative to what others around us have. But although social comparison is a natural process, it can lead to a lot of distress if we are engaging in upward social comparisons. The metaphor being, if you're okay with the cucumber until you see the better grape or in the world of body image, if you might be satisfied with your body, if you are not bombarded with images of other people at hearing. More to the cultural standards of beauty. This, the problem is that these upward social comparisons make us feel bad about ourselves. And they're extremely common in adolescents and young adulthood when it comes to body image. Long before the advent of social media, there was a, there was extensive research showing how social comparison with mass media leads to body dissatisfaction. And Cindy Crawford is famous for saying, I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford just in case there are people in the audience who are too young to know who Cindy Crawford is. She was one of the most famous and wealthy supermodels of the eighties and nineties. And what she's conveying here is she doesn't look like the image we're seeing here. That's not a real image. And she would compare herself to this idealized presentation of her and feel dissatisfied with her body. Not even Cindy Crawford can look like Cindy Crawford. We'll come back to this idea when we talk more about social media. But another developmental phenomenon I want to highlight is the imaginary audience. During adolescence, kids are extremely attuned to what their peers think of them. And they feel like they're in a spotlight where everyone is uniquely concerned with what they look like and what they're doing. And this will again come up when we talk about social media as I argue that the imaginary audience is no longer so imaginary. So let's go into the features of social media. Social media represents the intersection of peer influences and media influences. Adolescents and young adults are exposed to images themselves, of their peers, of traditional celebrities, such as models, actresses and singers. And to a new type of social comparison groups, social reference group called influencers, who are individuals who become famous through their social media presence alone and make a great deal of money from their posts on social media. And I argue that in this context where at any moment a photo or a video can be taken and posted online. That this idea of the imaginary audience, what used to be a social cognitive phenomenon where adolescents felt like others were looking at them all the time. This is in fact the reality. Adolescents are looking at images of themselves and other adolescents all the time. Alongside these images of social media influencers and traditional celebrities, my colleagues jacqueline nice, sie mich, Princeton and I have proposed a model called the transformation framework for how social media may affect interpersonal relationships. And I've since extended this to body image. We argue that the specific features of social media that differentiate it from in-person interactions can create fundamentally different interpersonal experiences. So e.g. the visual illness of social media content, the focus on photos and videos can really increase the emphasis on body image and attractiveness. 24-seven, availability of social media creates a world in which individuals don't have to be face-to-face with other people to be exposed to their every move and to be able to socially compare all the time. Interactions are public, content is permanent and there's an absence of cues that would ordinarily helped to mitigate some of the harmful effects of these experiences. Another hugely important feature is quantify ability. So adolescents, now, they've always been interested in things like how many Valentines that I get and how many invitations to get to a dance. But on social media there are actual counts available all the time where adolescents can see how their numbers of likes, followers, and friends compare it to other people. In our original paper in 2018, we were not yet attuned to a hugely important feature of social media, which is its algorithmic nature. When people are interacting with peers on social media, they're not having genuine, authentic interactions. They're having interactions that are mediated by algorithms which are programmed to make social media companies more money via advertisement. And as I've gone forward in this field, I'm trained as a psychologist and I haven't received any training and marketing or other aspects that would, other fields that would help me understand these phenomenon, phenomenon. But I've become more attuned to the role of capitalism and money in everything that I'm studying related to body image. The algorithmic nature of social media can create situations like those publicized last year when the Facebook files were released, where e.g. an adolescent looking for makeup tips or beauty advice can quickly be taken to pro anorexia content. And the reason for that is we, as humans are naturally drawn to more extreme content. So if we are shown PRO eating disorder content, we're more likely to click on it. Then if we're shown something more benign and less extreme. And the algorithms are therefore programmed to lead to more and more extreme content to keep our attention and keep money rolling in. This brings us to some of the specific ways that social media can affect girl's body image. There's an increased focus on other people's appearance due to social comparison with these idealized images that we're bombarded with. And it can also increase our attention to physical appearance by creating ever-changing beauty standards. And I'll show you some examples in a few moments. Social media also can increase the focus on one's own appearance through a set of processes and experiences that I've called appearance related social media consciousness. As for the comparison to images of other people in the increased focus on other people. Social media encourages social comparisons that are upward, upward social comparisons like we talked about before, the cucumber and the great. So we have cucumbers and we're seeing a lot of grapes. We are engaging in upward social comparison with unrealistic images and sometimes images that are just unreal. Here we see an image on your left of a person who is not used any filters to change your appearance. And then on the right, the image of her after changing her hair and makeup and then using a filter to further change her skin and other aspects of her appearance. Images that adolescents see online are carefully chosen and curated. They're edited with filters, with blemish characters and with reshaping and resizing tools that can actually change the shape and size of one's body. I recently did a study using eye tracking technology to try to understand how exposure to idealized images affects adolescents gaze when using social media. So eye tracking technology can allow us to show stimulator participants and see when you're exposed to these different images, where do you tend to fixate with your gaze? This is just a pilot study. I've applied for federal funding to do this research with a much larger sample. But the main finding across our different trials is that adolescent girls and these, I should say, were girls 13 to 18, so younger than the participants in project rows, which I'll focus on later in the talk. When girls were exposed to two images, one of which in this case, the image on the right, had been rated as being more attractive based on societal standards of beauty. They spend much more time looking at that attractive image, as shown by the red where vision and gays are concentrated. And even when the competing image is an adorable golden retriever puppy, adolescent girls still spend more time looking at the attractive peer. Social media, as I mentioned, can also transform how adolescents experience their own appearance, not just the appearance of other people, by not just through looking at photos of others. So I mentioned this construct I've developed and tested in my lab over the last few years called appearance related social media consciousness, which I sometimes refer to more colloquially as being the idea of being camera ready, feeling like at any moment of photo or video could be taken of me and post it online. This idea's very objectifying view of the self, of wondering how I might look to social media audience. And through a series of studies over many years, my colleagues and I developed a scale in psychology when we're doing quantitative research. So e.g. recruiting large samples of participants and giving them surveys, we need validated questionnaires. So in this case, we developed in working directly with adolescents and then tested these different items that tap into experiences that are now really comment on social media. E.g. when people take pictures of me, I think about how I will look if the pictures are posted on social media, even when I'm alone, I imagine how my body would look in a social media picture. And I zoom into social media pictures to see what specific parts of my body look like. I'll note that it's really hard to do good research and social media because the gap between when we collect research or collect data and when we can actually present the data and publish it is often a long time. And so since developing this scale, of course, TikTok, TikTok has risen in popularity and is now one of the most commonly used platforms among adolescents and young adults. And so I've changed the scale to incorporate video as well as pictures. But when I give these items to adolescents and young adults, the vast majority of individuals of all genders endorse at least some of these items as being relevant for them. And the problem is appearance related social media consciousness and other social media related body image concerns, predict depressive symptoms and disordered eating. And I know there are people from all different fields. When I say predict, I mean, there's a statistically significant relationship between experiencing these body image concerns related to social media and experiencing these mental health symptoms, depressive symptoms and disordered eating. Another fascinating aspect of social media is that it is promoting this increasingly strict and increasingly homogenized across race and ethnicity. Set of beauty standards related to all different aspects of one's appearance. So e.g. when I credit Amanda Macias, who works at the organization media girls for introducing me for the first time to these ideas. And since then, whenever I have asked young adults to describe what is the ideal body for a woman, they will bring up these same features. So you can see it's not just weight or shape or muscularity, but there's an emphasis on big eyes, big lips, but a small nose, a pointed chin, prominent high cheekbones, dramatic eyebrows. Young women today, as undergrads in the room will know, spend a lot of time and often money working on their eyebrows. Thick, long, shiny, wavy or straight hair, skin that is perfect and a number of different ways. Then this idea of the slim thick body type, which sometimes it's called the hourglass figure, although it's a little bit different. It refers to a large bust, small waist, large hips, and usually thicker, larger thighs. The ideal body for women is currently considered to include a toned and muscular body, but not too muscular. And then there are these competing ideals related to legs were legs are supposed to be long and maybe thin enough to have a gap between the thighs. Or maybe the thighs should be thick. And this is an example of how these beauty standards are arbitrary. They are socio-culturally constructed. They've changed rapidly over time. The ideal body when I was an adolescent. Entirely different from these features. In one experiment which focused on a predominantly white sample. In the Netherlands, adolescent girls were exposed to images where either the images were as they had been presented on Instagram or images the same images that had been edited by the experimenters to align more with societal standards of beauty. And you'll see in each panel the image on the left is the one that was not edited and the image on the right was retouched and in some cases reshaped. And what the researchers found is that adolescents who are in the edited photos condition preferred the photos they saw and did not know that the photos had been altered digitally, but reported immediately worse body image than girls in the condition where they were shown images on the left that had not been manipulated. So this is an experimental study that shows us that when you randomly assign adolescent girls to these conditions, they do show these immediate body image effects after being exposed to images, even though they're not aware that they're being exposed to edit images that are negatively affecting them. I mentioned before that I'd become more and more tuned over time to the role of money and capitalism and all of this. And I highly recommend this book thick by trustee McMillan caught him who is a professor of sociology at UNC Chapel Hill. And she says Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender. It costs money and demands money. It can never be fully satisfied and it is not useful for human flourishing. So sometimes people will say, We have sight, we are naturally drawn attractive images. So what's the problem with a focus on appearance? And the problem is it demands a lot of money and attention without furthering people's development in ways that can actually improve their happiness and well-being. She also talks about the idea of preference because beauty standards will affect individuals, reports and perceptions of their own personal preferences. And we will all think that our preferences come naturally from within us, even while they're being actively shaped by societal standards that change over time. So she says Beauty can never be about preference. If beauty matters at all to how people perceive you, how institutions treat you, which rules are applied to you, and what choices you must make, then beauty must also be a structure of patterns, institutions, and exchanges that eat your preferences for lunch. Social media is a double-edged sword in that it can perpetuate harmful beauty standards. And it also can depict greater diversity in beauty ideals. And so we're going to deep dive into body image among black women and how social media might affect black women's body image. Body image research in the field of psychology, as I've mentioned before, has predominantly focused on white women and girls and on Eurocentric beauty ideals such as thinness. And there's been a lack of attention to the cultural construction of beauty ideals or to the specific body image experiences of women of color. And I want to note that there are many black women scholars who have been working on related ideas, not specifically about body image, but about black women's lived experiences and intersectional identities. For many years, legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw developed intersectionality theory. And she developed this theory based on a legal case where a company had quotas for the number of women who had to be employed and the number of black people who had to be employed where she realized that black women were being left out of these quotas. White women were being hired, black men were being hired, but not black women. So she developed this theory which emphasizes the importance of understanding how individuals, multiple intersecting identities across social categories, e.g. gender and race, how that affects lived experience. And she emphasizes moving away from additive models, which I'll explain more soon. Other black scholars including Patricia Hill Collins, who is a sociologist and a Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland, emphasize understanding the intersection of identities in relation to privilege, power, discrimination, and oppression. And when I talk about identity, experience is not being additive and experiences with privilege and oppression not being additive. What I'm referring to when it comes to black young women, It's important to think about how the experience of being a black adolescent girl, a black young woman, cannot be understood based on dividing up and adding up the experience of being black and the experience of being a girl or a woman. We can't just look at sexism and racism separately and understand the lived experiences of black girls and women. Rather identities combine to create unique experiences. And this work is grounded in earlier work from the black radical feminist collective, the coma He River Collective, which was founded just before the UD, Women and Gender Studies Department. And they wrote a statement in 1977 in which they said, it's difficult to separate race from class, from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. And I highly recommend this book by Qian Gua Yamashita Taylor from 2017, where she talks about the history of the Columbia he collective and how it still relevant today, how these ideas still are important for how we think about race and gender and the gender and racial experiences of black women. In thinking about unique experiences, it's really interesting and troubling to read accounts of the fight for voting rights, the fight for suffrage, and to see how much black women are left out of those narratives. The fight for voting rights is often framed as a race for voting rights between black people and women. But if you think about what that means, if black people get the right to vote, but women don't have the right to vote or if women get the right to vote, but black people don't have that right. Black women are left out regardless. And this happens in our culture still today across a variety of different domains. Black women are often left out of dialogues about what it means to be a woman where the assumption is the default woman as white and black women are often left out of narratives about the experience of being black in the US where the default black individual is often assumed to be a man. They're also unique stereotypes of black about black young women. I'm dating back at least to the 1800s. During which time Sarah Bateman, who is, you might have heard about for any undergrads who are in women and gender studies classes, you may or may not have learned about her life and the importance historically. But her body was objectified based on its shape. And she was forced to perform for the gaze of white men, primarily slaveholders. And stereotypes related to her body type persists today in the form of the decibel stereotype, which is a unique stereotype applied black young women and not to women of other races and not to black men, which refers to an overly sexualized individual. And so these are just two examples of how we need an intersectional framework, not just an additive one. More modern scholars have really focused on understanding black young women's gender and racial identity and body image. And on how black young women navigate body image in the context of complex cultural environments. And how body image is influenced by the socio-cultural contexts, including a context marked by gendered Racism. A socio-cultural contexts involving mass media and social media images that perpetuate harmful stereotypes and ever-changing beauty ideals. And the social media aspect is what we'll focus on when we look at the preliminary results from project Rose. Both Gianni Lewis, I'm privileged to work with on project rows and Linnaeus, Avery and other scholars today are really focusing on understanding how intersectional gender and racial identity development affects body image, sexuality, and mental health. And I have learned a great deal from their work. Going back to caught him and her incredible book thick for a moment, she gives this anecdote from her own life that I think really highlights on the arbitrary nature of changing beauty standards and how they can affect Black Girls. She talks about being in her high school English clash says later we watched the musical Greece in the final scene when Olivia Newton John Sandy shows up at the carnival in shiny skin tight pants, all the black kids deterred. She looked funny. There was so much space between her legs than a white boy shouted, my hot day, I'm Miss Newton John. And I've left out some of the texts, but the teacher winks at him. She's a white teacher and endorses that idea. Caught him says I remember the scenes so clearly because that was when I got it. A whole other culture of desirability had been playing out just above and beyond my awareness. Sandy, that strange creature was beautiful. And this really highlights how her natural inclination was to think that this thin white woman looked strange. Her natural preference was not toward this body type. But within one brief interaction, she internalized that this is actually what beauty is. And many black girls and women report memory, remembering similar moments of realizing that their body types might not be prioritized. But then social media is introducing some, some interesting cultural appropriation ideas that we're about to get to. I very recently. At the same time that I've been working on project rows, have been working on this study with Briana lad, who's also a co-leader of project rows and grad students, any McEwen, Savannah Roberts also investigators on rose to understand the importance of asking black adolescent girls and boys about culturally relevant appearance areas. So in a very large sample of high-school aged adolescents, we asked kids to report their dissatisfaction or satisfaction with their hair and their skin and other culturally relevant areas of appearance, rather than just relying on measures developed by and for white folks focused on thinness. And we found that when black adolescents, both girls and boys, reported more dissatisfaction with these culturally relevant areas that was linked to higher depressive symptoms and self objectification. But among black adolescents with higher levels of ethnic racial identity commitment, a higher level, a higher sense of feeling that one's race and ethnicity is central. This was protective against some of these effects. So this is a preliminary study we'll be building on over time. So as I said, the majority of the talk focuses on the background leading to this project, but I want to show you a few preliminary results and in coming years will be continuing to collect more interview data and analyzing the interviews. So these interviews involved semi-structured interviews. That's a psychological term that refers to an interview protocol where we have specific questions, but there's flexibility in our follow-up questions based on what participants say. They were semi-structured interviews conducted via Zoom by Briana lad. And I will note that breed did say at the beginning that her identity is as a black queer woman and she is out as queer. This was part of a larger study on black women's gender and racial identity development. But for this talk, I'm focusing specifically on preliminary analysis on data specific to social media and the qualitative themes I'll show you from these data were themes that I developed through my initial analysis in consultation and collaboration with Bree lad and Dr. Lewis. But we will be continuing to revise these themes in an iterative way over time. Participants were recruited through social media and e-mail listservs. We welcomed anyone who was living in the US and identified as a black fem, 18-24 years old. By black fem, I mean that individuals who identify as trans women were very welcome to apply for this or rather to participate in the study. Thus far though, all of the participants identified as cisgender women and other participants were 22-24 years old. So we're excited to collect data from some younger participants, from participants who don't identify as cis. So, so far we have conducted these ten interviews. And there's a range of sexual orientations and identities within the sample. So for women identified as straight, for identified as mostly straight and to identified as lesbian and or queer. Hear examples of some of the questions that were most of interests on for the current talk. What are examples of standards of beauty ascribed to women that you see in the media, including social media. What standards of beauty are ascribed to black women specifically? What does the ideal body look like for black women? And do you think it's possible for someone to meet all these descriptors? Because normally when we would ask what does the ideal body looked like, we would get a very long list like the one I showed you of all these different aspects of appearance that needs to be checked off the list. And then what behaviors do you engage in to change the way you look in photos or videos posted on social media, if any. I conducted a thematic analysis in collaboration with Briana lad and Tony Lewis. We conducted a thematic analysis with an inductive approach. A thematic analysis is an iterative process involving reviewing transcripts of the interview data, identifying themes and revising the themes and refining the themes over time. And the inductive aspect refers to how we used a bottom-up data-driven approach, not a top-down approach by that, I mean, we didn't come in with their own preconceived notions about what we might find and then look for those themes. We let the data tell us. We let women's lived experiences tell us what the themes were. And the key themes we found, which I'll show you examples of our beauty standards being affected by social media. Critical awareness of unattainable beauty standards, Critical Resistance to beauty standards, appearance dissatisfaction linked to those beauty standards. And then one clearly positive theme, which is increased diversity of body representations through social media. And thus far, we haven't seen clear differences in frequency of endorsement of the themes between queer and straight women. But as we collect more data from queer women and trans women have a larger sample, will see if different patterns emerge. So to give you examples, this first theme about beauty standards being affected by social media. A key theme that emerged was this limb thick ideal that we see an example of here. So many participants describe that in their lifetime, they had experienced these changes in beauty standards from a focus only on thinness in their middle school and high school years, they remembered being exposed to beauty ideals that showed a thin body and working hard to attain that thin ideal. But now they experienced this pressure to pursue the slim thick figure that's been highlighted on social media in recent years. And some women reported feeling that this slim thick idea was positive because it looks more like. Their body shape is black women, whereas others reported that they find it even more challenging to attain the slim thick ideal than to attain the thin ideal, because the slim thick ideal does require a thin waist, which requires dietary restriction and exercise for most female bodied people. Here's an example of a quote showing this theme of the slim thick ideal. When this woman was asked to describe the ideal body that she sees on social media and in mass media. Definitely thinner but more recently, last couple of years ish maybe this more like Slim thick thing is like nice more like an hourglass. Hourglass but thin like your thin hourglass in a way if that makes sense. And I've left in all what we call in research, the vocal fillers, where they're on the use of light and the going back and forth and thinking through what one wants to convey. Because it shows how for young women these beauty ideals are internalized and it can be hard to articulate them in part because they're almost impossible for most people to attain. The second theme was cultural appropriation. Several participants described how black women's bodies and beauty standards that have traditionally been considered to represent acrocentric features have been culturally appropriated by white women and especially white women social media influencers and showcased on social media in recent years. So e.g. one woman said, just like weird when like you'll see like a white woman like getting praised for having like big lips. It's like that kind of herbs me about social media and society. Many women described the Brazilian butt lift or PBL as being something that they feel pressure to consider, which is a surgery that increases the size of the buttocks. And one woman said, I don t think of black women when I think PBL, I think of other people trying to look like a black woman. Many participants showed critical awareness of unattainable beauty standards. They directly acknowledge or indirectly acknowledged that the beauty standards they were exposed to were not realistic and attainable. So especially women reported that the beauty standard shown on social media seem to be unattainable. So e.g. this woman said, but influencers will try and pretend like they haven't had surgeries. And that is what bugs me, is like people they have like fitness accounts. So your abs are not from your workout plan. People will actually never, never, never look like you. So she's conveying that there are many influencers who make money from showing their fitness routines, but their body type is actually attained through surgery. And so they're in a way, selling a false product and falsely advertising what is needed to attain these new standards of beauty. Other women showed not only critical awareness, but Critical Resistance to unattainable beauty standards. So a few participants described actively resisting these unattainable and shifting beauty standards, e.g. in this quote, which is a lengthy one, but I'm gonna read you the whole thing because I think it's a really clear example of how this affects women. I feel like when back when I was super skinny, the ideal image was so skinny, like so crazy skinny. And then I tried to get so skinny. Then all of a sudden it was like, Oh, you should actually be thick. Now. It's like, well, now I worked so hard to get skinny. It seems to be like it never stops changing, so dynamic and fluid and so yeah, I definitely feel like it's made me feel dizzy just trying to keep up. And so eventually I'm just like fuck it, like I'm not going to keep up anymore. So that's active resistance to the norm saying, I can't keep up with these changing beauty standards. I'm not going to try. Several women reported dissatisfaction linked to these unattainable beauty standards. So the last participant was saying she's not going to try anymore. But many women reported that these beauty standards they see on social media lead to dissatisfaction with specific body parts. And especially what came up the most was dissatisfaction with one's hair, ones but, and accompanying the dissatisfaction with ones but was the rise in popularity and perceived pressure to pursue a Brazilian butt lift, a BBM based in part on social media influences. An example, quotations, I guess I don't feel like I fit the perfect black woman standards according to media. Like, I don't know. Like maybe my butt isn't as big as someone might assume for black women, which is fucked up. But then she trailed off. Another woman said, I really don't really do my edges in a way I'm like, Gosh, should I be doing them as a black woman? Media makes me feel like maybe I should, but I don't. And so she also trailed off and edges came up a lot. It refers to the edges of one's hair, one's hair line. Several women also discuss the pressure for black women in particular, not just women generally, but black women in particular, to look perfect or like a ten at all times with quotations such as, It's like don't go outside if your natural hair is not perfect kind of thing. Or when a woman was asked, what is the ideal beauty standard for black women, she said, always just looking like a ten. The positive side of things is this increased diversity of body representations via social media. So several participants discussed how social media creates more exposure to images of black women. And along with the increased exposure to images of black women in general, was a broader range of body types being shown. So e.g. one woman said, like for Serena Williams and how strong she is like, That's awesome. I'll never look like that either. That's referring to this is another beauty standard that can't be attained. But I'm like, wow, because she's so beautiful, like dense and strong. So it was a lot of different types of bodies that are good for different things. So this is acknowledging that even if the image is shown aren't necessarily realistic or attainable. At least they're more diverse in terms of race of the individual being shown and body size and shape. And then several participants discuss how social media allows for more exposure to content created by and for queer and trans women. So e.g. one woman said, I follow a lot of the LGBTQ plus community because it's like everything in there. And one woman said, I have a lot of TikToks of trans women in particular, and trans women of color. I think it's nice. I just, I love my TikTok feed for the most part. So some women reported these positive sides of social media exposure. So collectively thinking about the work that led into this project and then preliminary findings from this study. We see how social media may affect black emerging adult women's body image in complex ways. Some social media experiences may be specific to gender and racial experiences, such as this cultural appropriation of black women's bodies and beauty standards by white women and particularly white women influencers that we heard some quotes referring to. But we absolutely need more research on black emerging adult women's unique lived experiences. And we need research that uses this sociocultural, developmental and intersectional framework that's grounded in black feminist thought. Rather than relying on conceptualizations of body image created by white women scholars for white young women participants. As our next steps, as I mentioned, this work takes longer than a year. And Briana lad, who was in my lab as a lab manager and is now I'm working with Dr. Louis as a graduate student, will be working closely with Dr. Louis to continue interviews at the University of Maryland until we reach the Maddox saturation, which is a qualitative research term that refers to when the interviews aren't yielding a significant number of new themes. We're seeing the same themes that we've seen in prior interviews. And the focus will be on recruiting queer and trans women. And we also hope to get some younger participants. As I mentioned, everyone who participated was 22-24. And we will also be analyzing data from questions that I didn't focus on in this talk. And I just want to show you as we wrap up examples of other interview questions that we didn't cover in the talk today. So we asked a number of interview questions about black young women's experiences with objectification. E.g. asking about salient or memorable experiences where one was sexually objectified as a black woman and other forms of objectification that black women report that are unique to black women, such as non-consensual hair touching. And we asked women to discuss how these experiences affect their well-being, both psychologically and spiritually, as well as their ways of coping with these experiences. Then much of my research outside of project rows focuses on sexuality and sexual experiences and relationships. And we asked a number of questions related to sexuality and sexual relationships that will soon be analyzing. So e.g. we asked during sex, do you ever find that you were thinking about your body and how it looks to your partner. If women identified as BY or queer or lesbian or if they reported any prior partners who were female bodied. We asked you feel different about your body during sex, when having sex with someone of the same sex versus the other versus another sex. And we also asked how does being a black woman shape your experiences with sex and dating broadly. I really appreciate your attention today. I am so grateful to my research team, to the women who participated in our study and absolutely to the University of Delaware Department of Women and Gender Studies and the MAY and Robert Carter endowment without which I could not have done this work. Thank you so much. We'll open it up for Q&A.
Carter Lecture 2022 “Black Women’s Lived Experiences of Body Image”
From Robert Diiorio November 04, 2022
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The October 2022 Carter Series Lecture features Speaker Sophia Choukas-Bradley, University of Pittsburgh, “Black Women’s Lived Experiences of Body Image”
The Carter Series presents lectures focused on outstanding research on women, including the annual Faculty Research Award Lecture, funded by the Mae and Robert Carter Endowment in Women's Studies and presented by the University of Delaware's Department of Women & Gender Studies.
The Carter Series lectures are intended to provide an opportunity to explore varied topics addressing contemporary feminism and to foster an environment in which feminist ideas may thrive. Presenters include faculty, staff, and current and former students addressing topics and issues affecting women's lives.
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- October 20, 2022
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