Faculty/Staff Detail

Kathleen Lawrence, Communication Studies Department, had her paper, “Get It While It’s Hot: A Rhetorical Examination of The Use of Female Images to Pimp Beauty, Sexuality and Vulnerability as Commodities in Contemporary American Advertising,” competitively selected for presentation at the national American Popular Culture Association Annual Conference held in April in Boston, Mass. Lawrence used stylistic tropes to examine and identify a variety of images incorporated into print advertisements to suggest overt sexuality and promiscuity. Other images offer beauty products aimed at exacerbating the viewer’s sense of vulnerability and inadequacy. Lawrence focused her rhetorical analysis on the combination of pressures inherent in an emphasis on purity while stressing the desired expectation of blatant sexuality from women. In addition, she illustrated the paradoxical dilemma created for contemporary female consumers and argued that this practice can create a backlash effect.