Analyse af 'Scalpel perfects Venezuela's production line'

Analysis of Scalpel perfects Venezuela’s production line Beauty queens

This text is an article. We can see this since the text is from a newspaper and informs the reader about the Venezuelan Beauty Queens. The text tells the reader about how beauty queens from Venezuela get all kinds of operations to make their body better for the contest. It could be removing unnecessary fat from the contestants’ body, or getting their teeth fixed. I think that the theme of this text is perfection and how everything needs to be perfect before you can show yourself on stage. There is a real writer and a formal writer in this text. The journalist who writes the text is the real writer and the publisher is the formal writer, which is The Sunday Times.

The language used in the text can be hard to understand if English isn’t your primary language, since it starts in medias res and the first two words are capitalized. The text is split into columns, which make it even harder to read and understand properly. There are also many dashes, which easily can confuse the reader.It is worth noticing that the word “Venezuela” gets repeated throughout the text, since the text itself is about Venezuelan Beauty Queens.Although the journalist tries to be neutral in the text, he secretly expresses his opinion about Beauty Pageants. We can see this in the text where he says: “But such triumphs come at a cost.” Therefore, he isn’t directly saying that he is against beauty pageants, but you can sense it throughout the text. There could also have been a lot of girls who liked his beauty academy but the writer chooses to leave it out of the article so it would sound more negative. There are two pictures in this text. The first one from 1996 where Alicia Machado from Venezuela becomes Miss Universe. We see what could be two other contestants standing beside her. The second picture is the 1991 winner named Ninibeth Jimenez.Both pictures are very relevant to the text, since the article is about these kind of beauty contests.In the text, we hear about a man named Osmel Souza. He owns a beauty academy, and tries to find beautiful young girls in the streets of Caracas, so he eventually can make them into beauty queens. This isn’t as easy as it sounds though. The girls need to have a lot of adjustments to their body, before they’re allowed to enter a beauty pageant. This includes fixing their teeth, getting a liposuction and so on. A doctor by the name of Alberto Pierini claims that it’s just small repairs and that it’s better than putting on make-up or using a push-up bra. The author of this article is a man named Jake Keaveny. In my opinion, he wants to inform us about the price you have to pay if you want to be a beauty queen. It’s not a dance on roses and you have to do what you get told to. I wouldn’t say that the text is outdated although it’s seventeen years old by now. It’s still very relevant for the beauty pageants in 2013. For example does some academies still require operations and such, if you want to be accepted. I actually find this text unreliable. As I’ve mentioned before, our author doesn’t give any examples of women who have enjoyed being at Souza’s academy. I’m not saying that almost all women enjoyed the academy, but he doesn’t include a single example of women who have, and that makes the text unreliable to me.