A Study of The Woman’s Image in the Cover Design of Taiwan Men’s Magazine

• Main Authors: Wan Ying-Chun, 萬盈君
• Other Authors: Yao Tsun-Hsiung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/27086700257434202009

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 視覺傳達設計研究所 === 100 === Female images have been constantly applied to designs in Taiwanese mass media and commercial films. This research assembles female images on male magazine covers for further understanding the mass culture’s outlook on the manipulation of these images on male magazines’ cover designs, and observing the cultural atmosphere which has established them. By analyzing changes in “femininity” and the “techniques of visual representation” of these images, this research interprets the female manners and significances exposed in visual context, and studies the cultural atmosphere which has constructed these female images, along with the mass comprehension of them. The research is processed by collecting samples within its scope in the first place, selecting appropriate adjectives with questionnaires. The samples are further categorized and termed by the K.J. Team and, having the female images’ symbolic significances and connotations analyzed with theories of semiology, they are then built into a visual listing. The final stage compiles the visual items’ occurrences in the female image style; the results of which are used to study if the manipulations of female images on cover designs of different male magazines have escaped from the public’s stereotypes or aspects of objectification on females, and the society’s “ideal beauty” of female appearance and figure. The research indicates that female images on male magazine covers are featured as follows. First, they produce different scenarios with the symbols from “body language,” “clothing language,” “camera language,” and “space and object language,” achieving the purpose of making the viewers fantasize. Second, they present “a good-looking female” and “objectified, codified target of sexual fantasies” by following the vision of male gaze. Third, they “make female bodies sharp instruments for business marketing.”