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Multimodal Communication pp 13–53Cite as

Slim Arms, Waist, Thighs and Hips, but Not the Breasts: Portrayal of Female Body Image in Hong Kong’s Magazine Advertisements

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Abstract

This chapter examines slimming and breast-enhancing magazine advertisements produced by the burgeoning industry of beauty parlours in Hong Kong. Typically, these advertisements configure the human body as a physical resource amenable to extreme makeovers. By displaying before-and-after pictures of female celebrities who are hailed as their ‘spokespersons’, the beauty centres advertise the potential to modify female bodies to match an idealised mental image. The visual semiotic framework of Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London and New York: Routledge, 2006) is employed to reveal this act of manipulation of perceived body image. Specifically, this chapter addresses how the choreography of image and text operates in a social and cultural climate that increasingly values thinness and ample breasts, and how this climate concurrently normalises intervention in physical appearance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These lifestyle magazines comprise ten local publications including East Week, Face, Jessica, Ming Pao Weekly, Next Magazine, Oriental Sunday, Sudden Weekly, Sunday More, Three Weekly, and TVB Weekly as well as two localised international publications Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire, all of which are written in Chinese.

  2. 2.

    For copyright reasons the images discussed in this chapter are not reproduced here, only represented as diagrams.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of English, University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong

    May Wong

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Wong, M. (2019). Slim Arms, Waist, Thighs and Hips, but Not the Breasts: Portrayal of Female Body Image in Hong Kong’s Magazine Advertisements. In: Multimodal Communication. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15428-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15428-8_2

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