Images of anorexia: a reflexion from Art Education

• Main Authors: Ana María Nevado Álamo, María Del Río Diéguez, Joan Vallès Villanueva
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad Complutense de Madrid 2014-10-01
• Series: Arte, Individuo y Sociedad
• Subjects: Imagen; TCA; anorexia; mass-media; Fotoinvestigación Educativa
• Online Access: http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ARIS/article/view/42391

Our goal is to analyze the images to try to deduce what are the social and cultural patterns that persist in our society and which hold ideas associated with anorexia (creating a visual cultural criticism focused on the visual forms of the body and of the photographic ones of the mass-media, that allow us to certain clues in the social construction of these physical stereotypes), in an interpretative approach, from which it derives a qualitative methodology and of Photography-Based Educational Research (allows to debate and evaluate the possibilities of the images in the research activity). The image constructed about the own body by a person evolves during the whole vital cycle, then, in the configurations elaborated in the early stages of life, is fundamental to influence in some competences that allow children properly interpret visual messages provided by the sociocultural environment. Art Education could play a significant labor in the development of individual skills relating to the interpretation of such messages: increases the capacity reflexive and critical toward the images that the everyday constantly gives us, and would allow to ponder these messages as cultural constructions that work symbolically at different levels, making us conscious of its ambiguity and scope.