April 11, 2002

• Special Report: Spring into action and discover the campus
  Fitness, summer camps, outdoor adventures, the Penn Relays—the campus springs into action with the warmer weather. How about you?
• Current staff picks recreation favorites
• Camps for good sports
• New ideas shape campus health club expansion
• Outdoor adventures
• Penn Relays: The oldest, the biggest, the best in the nation
• Salute to a Penn Relays trailblazer of Olympic stature

• Heads up for health care plan changes
• Future lawyers brief Supreme Court early
• Record-setting gift goes to bioengineering

• Research: Truth and deception—the brain tells all
• Staff Q&A: Isabel Mapp occupies a unique staff position that links volunteers to people who need their help.

• Ask Benny: The readers weigh in on Addams house
• EU is facing identity crisis
• Safer bikes through research

• Event Listings
• Editor's Pick: Docufest comes of age
• Conference Call: A Children's Festival first
• People's Choice: Spring cleaning tips from the pros

• News Briefs
• Bookquick from the University Press
• Quoted Recently
• At Work with... Stefany Jones
• Campus Buzz

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BOOKQUICK/New from the University Press

“Measuring Up: How Advertising Affects Self-Image”

BY TRINH TRAN

Vickie Rutledge Shields
224 pages, 20 illustrations, $19.95 paper

The mute gestures of advertising images are frozen for posterity by photographers and illustrators, gestures that, for better or worse, perpetuate a certain aesthetic and eventually become emblematic of a period.

Today’s images display the values of a society that has more interest in the body than the mind. They represent unattainable appearances that leave women and men feeling horrified, estranged and restricted by unrealistic, silent mandates.

“Measuring Up” looks at advertising as more than just a way to extract money from unsuspecting people but as a vehicle for conveying the larger views of a confining, body-obsessed culture.

By weaving theoretical and textual insights from feminist and cultural studies with the voices of real women and men, “Measuring Up” offers a unique analysis of the effects of repetitious exposure to advertisements of perfect bodies in our everyday lives.

Shields examines a particular, complex relationship between the idealized images of gender we see in advertising and our own thoughts, feelings and behavior in relation to these images. The study is unique in presenting audience reactions in terms of ethnographic data, not in presenting textual interpretations alone.

“Measuring Up” engages with and informs current theoretical debates within these sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory literatures: feminist media studies, feminist film theory, critical social theory, cultural studies and critical ethnography. This important work explores the forms and channels of power used in one of the most insidious and overt means of mass influence in popular culture.

—University of Pennsylvania Press