Formative sexuality from fashion photography and its ethical complexity

Abstract

This paper’s main focus is the ethical complexity of advertising content linked to fashion and to which young people are continually exposed through streaming, internet, print, or traditional media; advertisements promoting sexuality that at the same time are related to gender, social role, socioeconomic status, as well as structuring the thought about bodily self-perception linked to personal and social acceptance or rejection that merges with exposed propaganda stereotypes, mainly in the fashion photos and videos. For the analysis, the ethical complexities will be exemplified with a fashionable image of Lady Gaga by photographer Terry Richardson that contains certain graphic elements that put ethical and moral judgments, formal and informal education in perspective through mass media. The methodology used is a technique for the analysis of fashion photography called “pentapod”, amalgamated with an autoethnography method that clears, through theories, the robustness of the problem as well as the performance of teachers as main axes of teaching critical analysis of mass media, the priority of philosophy and ethics in conjunction with a visual literacy to decentralize the importance of fashionable images in the corollary of the body and sexual self-conception of adolescents.