Kilbourne, Jean

Jean Kilbourne (1943–) is a widely recognized and highly regarded feminist scholar, lecturer, and media activist who is dedicated to raising awareness about the relationship between gendered media messages, notably advertising, and a variety of public health issues, including the connection between sexualized female images and eating disorders as well as violence against women and addiction. Kilbourne began voicing her critical perspective against the objectifying representations of the female body in advertising in the late 1960s, before many other scholars and critics had begun to understand the [Page 189]complex relationship between media messages and audiences' conceptions of the social world. The connections Kilbourne first saw between her personal experiences and the impact of advertising messages launched her lifelong crusade to raise awareness about the effect of media messages on society, especially the ways in which society thinks and feels about women. Her work has contributed to mainstream awareness of the impact and power of media as well as a national movement intended to foster media literacy.

Kilbourne's crusade to raise awareness began when very few people took the impact of advertising seriously. She started sharing her findings by lecturing mainly on college campuses about the ways women were portrayed in the media, especially in advertising, and she began to alert audiences to the public health problem posed by media. This aspect of her work was recognized when Kilbourne was named the top campus lecturer in the country for two years in a row. Kilbourne then expanded her lectures to film through the production of educational videos. Her first film, Killing Us Softly, produced by the Media Education Foundation in 2000, became one of the best-selling educational videos in history, exposing thousands of students across the country to her critiques of the advertising industry's representations of gender. Kilbourne has periodically updated her groundbreaking film to keep her analyses and examples current. Killing Us Softly IV: Advertising's Image of Women was released in 2010.

Kilbourne and her cultural examination have also inspired the production of other educational films, including her early films Slim Hopes: Advertising and the Obsession With Thinness (1995), which examined the connections between advertising images and the epidemic of eating disorders among women in America, as well as Pack of Lies (1992), which examined the tobacco industry and its misleading advertising techniques targeted at girls and women. In addition to these, Kilbourne has been featured in films critiquing the advertising practices of the alcohol industry, including Advertising Alcohol (1991) and Spin the Bottle: Sex, Lies, and Alcohol (2004). Kilbourne also hosted the film The Killing Screens: Media and the Culture of Violence (1994), a critical analysis of the relationship between mediated images of violence and their impact on society with cultivation scholar George Gerbner.

In addition to her lectures and films, Kilbourne's work has also expanded into the realm of print. Her first book, Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising (1999), was first published in hardcover and then rereleased in paperback as Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel (2000). This adept critique of the advertising industry considers the methods advertising messages use to make audiences feel as though they have connections with various products and the ways in which these relationships leave consumers feeling unfulfilled and empty. Her second book, So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids (2008), was coauthored by scholar Diane Levin and combines Kilbourne's earlier analyses with the work of Levin to extend into the arena of girlhood and the ways in which media messages socialize young girls into today's highly sexualized and commercial culture.

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