Fulbright Proposal

For ten months, I have examined how mass media affects beauty, body image and femininity in young women in Nepal. Through my documentary research, I have sought to understand the ways mass media consumption has affected Nepal's changing standards of beauty.

I have read and clipped countless newspaper articles and advertisements, watched television shows aimed at youth, and looked critically at every billboard, poster and label I've seen that either uses or targets women with their advertising. Beyond that, I have spent many, many hours with a few young women who have opened up their lives to me, to better understand how they formulate their own ideas about beauty and body image. Additionally, I have talked to many other women about their ideas regarding beauty and femininity. I have read texts and papers related to modernity and the construction of the feminine. This website is the culmination of all of that work.

Existing sociological research has provided a fascinating look at the relationship between the media and body image, which is the perception of one's own body and attractiveness. Much of this research, completed largely in Western cultures, has shown that mass media significantly impact cultural standards of beauty, often with adverse results among adolescent girls and young women, such as depression, eating disorders and a general discontent with one's own body. Very little of this research has been undertaken in Nepal, which, with its rise in democracy, rapidly changing media landscape and changing cultural values among youth, is ripe to be studied.

While Nepal's media landscape has changed, so too have the ways in which Nepalis, particularly teenage and young adult, express themselves. Although female virtue in Nepal had traditionally been expressed by keeping one's shoulders and legs covered, young Nepali women are now increasingly eschewing the traditional kurta surwal (a long tunic over baggy pants), and opting to wear more body-baring Western clothes, such as tight jeans, low-cut tops and short skirts. The Nepali institution of arranged marriage used to confine women to the roles of housewife and mother, but with 'love' marriages on the rise in urban areas, and more women working outside of the home, physical characteristics like fair skin and thinness have become more important, whether to find a job or a husband. Where plumpness was once historically desired as a sign of health, prosperity and fertility, and extreme thinness was a mark of poverty, young women now talk about dieting and being 'too fat,' and they describe others pejoratively as 'fatties.'

While Western media has long affected Nepali culture, I argue that it is the rise of domestic mass media, with their Nepali purveyors of standards of beauty, that now affect body image in young Nepali women. I hope the work I have undertaken will have important global implications for measuring the effect of mass media in emerging democracies and cultures that do not have a colonialist past. I further hope that exhibiting my research online will make the work accessible to anyone with an internet connection and allow both Nepali and Western audiences to understand these changes among Nepali culture.