Feminists have argued that women’s bodies, appearance, and subjectivity are formed through a multitude of regulatory dispositif and disciplinary apparatus. One such disciplinary technique has been “looking”, evidenced in work on the male gaze, disciplinary power, misrecognition, objectification, and indirect social aggression. But there remains a significant gap in the role of women’s looking in subject formation, particularly within the context of a postfeminist sensibility. To address this gap a poststructuralist informed discourse analysis was performed on interviews with 44 white heterosexual British women (aged 18–36). Four discourses deployed by the participants when talking about looking between women were identified. These discourses were as follows: judgemental looking between women is pervasive; judgement is consumption oriented; women’s looks are prioritised over men’s, foregrounding a female gaze; and appearance is the vehicle to recognition. We conclude by highlighting the importance of a postfeminist gaze for understanding women’s subjectivities, and how looking works in a postfeminist context to maintain regulation, anxiety, surveillance, and judgement.
This article reflects on the findings of the interdisciplinary 'TransForm' project, which ran between 2012 and 2014 and aimed to explore how reading and writing digital fictions might support young women in developing frameworks for more positive thinking regarding their body image. The project comprised the following stages: (1) a review and compilation of digital fictions thematizing and/or problematizing female corporeality; (2) a series of cooperative inquiries with three groups of young women (aged 16-19 years) over a period of five weeks, examining participants' responses to a selection of the previously compiled digital fictions, as well as the challenges these young women face in relation to body image; and (3) an interventionist summer school in which participants aged 16-19 explored body image issues via writing digital fictions. This article reports on the main observations and findings of each stage, and draws conclusions for future research needs in this area.
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