Postfeminism is a neoliberal sensibility that locates femininity in the body, thereby imploring women to constantly labor on, monitor and discipline their bodies. This aesthetic labor is presented to women as freely chosen and empowering. Brazilian waxing is exemplary aesthetic labor directed at the self. Academic literature on aesthetic labor in general, and Brazilian waxing in particular, looks at white and middle-class women, as this category of women is considered the putative subject of postfeminism. Little attention is paid to racialized women from the global south who perform aesthetic labor on other women’s bodies in the global north. In this paper, I draw on my ethnographic study of two beauty salons in London run by South Asian women to argue that these South Asian beauticians are postfeminist subjects as well. The aim of challenging the putative subject of postfeminism, using the example of Brazilian waxing, is not merely to include South Asian women in the discourse, but to advance a transnational theorization of postfeminism. Such theorization, I demonstrate, leads to a better understanding of how postfeminism is implicated in global structures of power as well as the affective qualities of postfeminism including intimacy and disgust.
This study focuses on the question of beauty standards defined by scientific methodology in terms of face symmetry and averageness. This definition correlates with art history and the human faces depicted in a large set of artworks. Recent research in evolutionary psychology and neuro-aesthetics suggests that the attractiveness of a face can be conceptualized as the sum of a varied set of distinct features. These aspects are described in terms of averageness, symmetry, sexual dimorphism, pleasant expressions, and youthfulness. First we collected a dataset of more than 120,000 paintings and then applied industry standard face recognition algorithms to extract facial traits. Then we studied how portraits of faces could be considered more or less beautiful across time and lastly, we noted when beauty trends evolved. Our study focuses on 18th century painting styles such as Rococo and Neoclassicism, which adhere to strict conventions of symmetry and realistic depictions of the human anatomy. It extends until the Impressionist and the Avant-Garde eras that broke with these conventions. Our analysis reveals a particular decline in face averageness and symmetry that demonstrates a shift in artistic styles over time. It evolved from a naturalistic representation of the human face, which is to say, from bearing resemblance to the natural human anatomy to an abstract representation that deconstructed facial features, such as in Picasso's paintings. A face averageness graph exhibits a sharp decline in averageness and symmetry from the 18th century onward indicating that beauty conventions and standards regarding the representation of the human face in art varies greatly. The early 20 th century marks a complete break in facial representation in portraits. This analysis also reveals a change in beauty perception and conventions arising at the beginning of the 20th century that expressed a newfound preoccupation for discovering and depicting facial features.
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