Jennifer Lopez' Body

By incorporating the the Rey Chow's theories into analyzing the way that Jennifer Lopez' body was advertised we attain a view of the difficult situation she found herself in because of the image that she was trying to sell of herself, that also ended up hurting her as well. In the readings it is mentioned how her butt became the object of many jokes, but before this she was attempting to sell the image of a woman with a large butt that could use it to become successful. It worked and she gained a lot of recognition because of how open she was about talking about her curves and her body, but in the end that is all that people thought of her as. They automatically associated Jennifer Lopez with a large rear-end, and I do not think that this was the image of herself that she was trying to cultivate. All though it is true as Chow mentions that some of these association may indeed help use become visible, for Jennifer Lopez it seems that it was the wrong kind of visibility. She became like the caged animal that Chow uses as a metaphor to refer to people that are trapped by certain ethnic identities that are associated with them. In the case of Jennifer Lopez she trapped her self into an image that for the U.S. was not taken very seriously and she had to find a way to rid herself of it and become more of the American ideal in order to achieve success. She had to rid herself of this identity that she forged for herself because the associations that came with it eventually became a type of cage for her, and people could not see past her butt to the many other things, that as a person she had to offer.