'Ugliness' around the world

On September 28, 2006 American audiences were introduced to Betty Suarez, the protagonist of Ugly Betty, which is one of the most popular adaptations of Fernando Gaitan’s Colombian telenovela Yo Soy Betty La Fea. This American dramedy was produced by Salma Hayek and aired for four seasons on ABC. Ugly Betty is just one of the 19 official adaptations of Gaitan’s dramedy narrative. This is why we have decided that for this week’s blogpost we would examine how Gaitan’s narrative of a young woman with prominent eyebrows, thick framed glasses and braces working in the fashion industry, has transgressed national borders and captured the heart of so many around the world - for example in China, where the show received the extra dimension of marketing tool in a beauty related campaign.

We find this case study to be interesting in relation to Thussu’s paper on ‘Cultural Practices and Media Production: The Case of Bollywood’ which discusses media globalization and how this phenomenon is a result of institutional as well as technological developments that have allowed global markets to open up to new knowledge, cultures and communication technologies (119). This media globalization results in what Thussu calls “contra flows.” Colombia’s Yo Soy Betty La Fea interestingly illustrates these contra flows, or reverse cultural export, in which peripheral cultures start to actively export their culture back to the center (visible in America’s Ugly Betty).

This case study will also illustrate how the cultural homogenization theory is no longer valid in today’s global media, by showing how both centers and margins are actively selecting, adapting, and consuming glocalized (a term coined by Roland Robertson, which refers to the coexistence of the global and the local) versions of western cultural symbols. The exportation and transnational adaptation of the Colombian soap opera Yo Soy Betty La Fea exemplifies these complex cross-cultural flows in global media. This is interesting especially in relation to the “cultural revolution” proposed by Hall, which is addressed in Berghahn and Sternber’s paper ‘Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe.’ This cultural revolution entails the embracement of hybridity and the act of the margins coming into representation. The prominent presence of Gaitan’s telenovela, which forms part of the non-core producing industries and television genres, illustrates that different cultures are actively coming into representation through their adaptations of Yo Soy Betty La Fea (Hesmondhalgh).

We could argue that the worldwide popularity of this super genre is attributed to the “potential for universality” that allows it to be “all things to all people” (Mattelart qtd in Hermosndhalg 282). In the case of Gaitan’s Yo Soy Betty La Fea, it presents the “ugly duckling turned swan” narrative in a melodramatic yet comical manner. Every adaptation is a representation, reaction and problematization of the proliferation of dominant Western beauty ideals that homogenize women all over the world. This is an interesting aspect that will be further explored in this blog.



Before we can assume TV's long years of stereotypical beauty representation and their prevalence in the media, we need to have a more precise understanding of what a stereotype - such as the stereotype of ugliness - is. For some cognitive psychologists, stereotyping describes a mechanism that creates categories and enables people to manage the swirl of data presented to them. This is a necessary process since the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as generalities, is exhausting to our brain. (Berg, 2002) Therefore, there is a degree of psychic comfort in categorizing other people in this way.

In the media context, stereotypes are part of a narrative strategy that facilitates this psychological mechanism to identify roles and distinguish characters. The stereotype of Ugly Betty, for example, can be best defined as the ugly girl in the aesthetically-centered world of fashion. A representation of “the ugly duckling which has yet to become a swan” essentially based on her body image. The popularity of this storyline can be attributed to the highly recognizable pattern of aesthetic pressure experienced by women throughout different societies.

But beyond the existence of type construction in TV shows, the image of Ugly Betty exists as a part of a larger discourse on Otherness. In an attempt to define the boundaries of ugliness throughout the world, Kathryn Hughes (2015) argues that anyone in wrong contexts can become ugly, or, to borrow a term from anthropology, “out of place”. Lining up behind Umberto Eco, who has also written extensively on the subject, she suggests that beauty is dull because it is closed, finished and always the same. Ugliness, by contrast, can be infinite and everywhere.

Television dramas, like Ugly Betty, are characterized by the conjunction between identification and distancing. Huat notes that “foreignness” is a large part of the reason for and the viewing pleasure of watching foreign television dramas.

In sum, translated and dubbed dialogue domesticates the film/drama to facilitate identification, while the visual exotic foreign raises obstacles to identification. Taken together, watching imported tv dramas is a fragmentary process of intermittent moments of identification and distancing, rather than one of sustained and unwavering identification with what is on screen. (Huat 2011: 230)

The preferred identification with the on-screen character can be resisted by the audience. It is but one of the many viewing spaces that an active audience can take up. In resisting the preferred viewing position, one would be distancing oneself from the character and, therefore, from the message. This principle is not only applicable to television series: we see the same happening in the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty (2004). Over a four year time period Dove used realistic attainable looking models instead of the typical models, as a part of the Dove movement for Self-Esteem. In America and Europe the advertisement was successful: women identified themselves with the models and believed in the message Dove wanted to distribute: natural beauty. However, the campaign completely flopped in China.



Advertisements with bigger models and no digital enhancements did not appeal to Chinese customers. According to Michael Czinkota, professor International Bussiness, Marketing and Strategy, Chinese women believe that the ‘perfect look’ is in fact attainable.  They thought that using this product is supposed to help them attain this particular look. This is the reason why Chinese women did not respond well to an advertisement with models that are not typically considered beautiful. The advertisement constituted of too much “foreignness” which became an obstacle for identification (Huat, 2011). Their awareness of the “foreigness” facilitated distancing instead of identification.

The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty did not achieve the same success in China as in the United States and Europe. However, the campaign did prompt a multi-media reaction that included the adaptation of Betty, La Fea towards the Chinese (consumer) television market. Unilever, the company Dove is part of, realized that there was a perception gap between their advertisement and the local market. Their presence is critical in growing markets like China, so they approached the Hunan TV broadcast network with the idea of creating an ‘Ugly Betty’ television series in China. Unilever would get the right to exclusive ads and product placements during the show, as well as a script built around the company’s Chinese reformulation of the Campaign for Real Beauty. This resulted in a multilevel brand integration, and Ugly Wudi, or ‘The Invincible Ugly Woman’(丑女无敌) was created. In one episode in the first season, the ad agency Wudi works for is pitching for the Dove account and this turns into a whole debate about real beauty: the product placement could not be any more explicit... The success of the series relates to why Dove’s Campaign failed: it overplayed the stereotypical perception of beauty by dressing the main character with glasses, braces, frizzy hair and mismatched clothes. It decoded the conventional codes of beauty in order to get the ‘Real Beauty’ message across. Nevertheless, the adaption of Ugly Betty would not be readily comprehensible if it was left totally unmediated.

Broadcasted by the Chinese media, and portrayed by Chinese stars, Ugly Wudi became more local. The Dove Campaign lacked models that related to the local Chinese culture, but Ugly Wudi did. It merged both the exogenous culture inherent to the format and the local dynamics input by the local producers (Zhang and Fung, 2014). Not only the appearances of the actors changed, the series also downplayed the theme of homosexuality and eliminated the ethnic issues in order to fit within the Chinese ideological context. The format of Ugly Betty got a “cultural code translation” which made not only Ugly Wudi but also Dove’s Campaign this time a great success in China.

So, what were the results of Ugly Wudi for Dove? A survey by Dove at the end of the first season shows that their product placement worked: the awareness grew with 44% among the target consumers. The TV series increased the ‘cultural proximity’ of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. Through the adaptation of a worldwide successful glocal TV-series, Soy Betty La Fea, Dove translated the “foreignness” of their campaign into a more identifiable approach, making use of the stereotypes of beauty and ugliness. Ugly Wudi, thus, represents a form of cultural hybridization that modified some indicators of western modernity and presented a new form of local modernity (Fung and Zhang 2014). It can be considered as a de facto cultural bridge for bringing global lifestyles and western values of sexuality, ethnicity, new social norms and political culture to China (Fung and Zhang 2010).

AH-MW-MS-GV-SH

Thesis: Is there such a thing as a global concept of ugliness for women? And if so, can you think of any other examples in which ugliness is capitalized by the media?


Work Cited

Daniela Berghahn & Claudia Sternberg (2010), ‘Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe’, in: Daniela Berghahn & Claudia Sternberg (eds.), European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe. Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 12-49.

Daya Kishan Thussu (2012), ‘Cultural Practices and Media Production: The Case of Bollywood’, in: Isabelle Rigoni & Eugénie Saitta (eds.) Mediating Cultural Diversity in a Globalised Public Space. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 119-134.

Hesmondhalgh, David. The Cultural Industries, 3rd ed. London: Sage, 2013. Print.

Gaitán, Fernando. Yo Soy Betty La Fea. RCN TV. 1999-2001. Television.

Berg, Charles Ramírez. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance. University of Texas Press: 2002.

Ryan, Erin L. Is Ugly the New Beautiful? An Investigation of Perceptions of Beauty by Young Female Viewers of Ugly Betty in the US. J. Mass Communicat Journalism: 2013.

Thakkar, Jonny. The Ugly Truth. Aeon: 2014

Fung, A. & X. Zhang (2010) ‘The Chinese Ugly Betty: TV cloning and local modernity’, in: International Journal of Cultural Studies, 14(3): 1-12.

Zhang, X. & A. Fung (2014) ‘Formatting of the Chinese Ugly Betty: An Ethnographic Observation of the Production Community’, in: Television & New Media, 15(6): 507-522.

Loverde, M. (2013) ‘The ‘Ugly Betty’ of China’. WM-China Initiative for Film and Media. http://chinese.blogs.wm.edu/2013/07/26/the-ugly-betty-of-china/ (accessed on December 4, 2015).

Bush, M. (2009) ‘Dove Finds Perfect Match in China’s ‘Ugly Betty’. AdvertisingAge. http://adage.com/article/media/festival-media-case-study-dove-china-s-ugly-betty/136902/ (accessed on December 4, 2015).

Levins, H. (2009) ‘China’s ‘Ugly Betty’ Is One Long Product Placement’. AdvertisingAge. http://adage.com/article/video/china-s-ugly-betty-long-product-placement/136874/ (accessed on December 4, 2015).

Fowler, G.A. (2008) ‘Unilever Gives ‘Ugly Betty’ a Product-Plug Makeover in China’. The Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123051038411338387 (accessed on December 4, 2015)