The relationship between language and image provides us with the means to seek the roots of our own ideas. In the essay, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision", written by Adrienne Rich, she uses varying images in her poetry to describe women and the voice open the window into her self-perception and how cultural ideologies change. John Berger writes in, "Ways of Seeing" that the relationship between the image and the person is an individual interpretation. "Hunger as Ideology," by Susan Bordo, tells how the image is used to show cultural ideologies, especially for women. In art, literature, and in the media, images that are perceived visually or through the images produced by language are used as a form of expression that quite unavoidably reflect cultural ideologies that impact us in intentionally strong and deliberate ways. Cultural ideology affects how we perceive images; both visual and those produced by language. These images impact our perception of reality. The images that infiltrate our lives appear to focus on maintaining the status quo or the norms of society. They are designed to show what is expected in life. Berger states, "Images were made to conjure up the appearance of something that was absent"(107). Berger argues "images" are "conjured up" or imagined to represent what is "absent" or what the individual wants to see as reality. There used to be a tendency to over exemplify the way in which women were thought to be, but "today, that opposition no longer seems to hold quite as rigidly as it once did (women are indeed objectified more than ever, but, in this image-dominated culture, men increasingly are too)" (156). Regardless of society's attempt to be politically correct, and despite the changes that have occurred in rigid gender identity, our society still maintains many of the old stereotypes that have always been a part of established culture. In order to assist in the destabilizing of images Ric...
