Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism

Beauty surveillance: The digital self-monitoring cultures of neoliberalism

“…These questions are foregrounded in critical analysis of postfeminist culture, which draws on a long tradition of feminist scholarship concerned with the body and appearance, highlighting the force of bodily discipline for women (Bartky, 1990;Bordo, 1993). It is striking to note that in this postfeminist moment this has intensified rather than diminished, albeit wrapped in discourses that highlight pleasure, choice, agency, confidence and pleasing oneself, obscuring the extent to which aesthetic labour on the body is normatively demanded (Elias et al, 2016). The body and intimate relationships remain sites of profound asymmetry, suffused by power relations (O'Neill, 2015).…”

“…In addition to looking critically at the rise of aesthetic self-tracking and modifying apps, then, we seek to begin a dialogue between the small but growing body of critical work on self-tracking technologies, and a different corpus of work concerned with the 'psychic life' of postfeminism and neoliberalism (Elias, Gill and Scharff, 2016;Gill, 2016;Scharff, 2015). We will suggest that there are a number of productive parallels in these bodies of work, both of which are deeply informed by Foucaultian ideas.…”

Post-postfeminism?: new feminist visibilities in postfeminist times

“…In two formulations that have been influential within feminist media and cultural studies, postfeminism has been characterised as a "gender regime" (McRobbie, 2009) and, in my own terms, as a "sensibility" (Gill, 2007), deeply enmeshed with neoliberalism. According to this perspective, postfeminism is a critical analytical term that refers to empirical regularities or patterns in contemporary cultural life, which include the emphasis on individualism, choice and agency as dominant modes of accounting (Thompson and Donaghue, 2014); the disappearance -or at least muting -of vocabularies for talking about both structural inequalities and cultural influence (Kelan, 2009;Scharff, 2012); the "deterritorialisation" of patriarchal power and its "reterritorialisation" (McRobbie, 2009) in women's bodies and the beauty-industrial complex (Elias et al, 2016); the intensification and extensification of forms of surveillance, monitoring and disciplining of women's bodies (Gill, 2007); and the influence of a "makeover paradigm" that extends beyond the body to constitute a remaking of subjectivity -what I have recently characterised as a central part of the "psychic life of postfeminism" (Gill, 2016). Crucially, as Angela McRobbie (2009) among others has argued, postfeminism is involved in the undoing of feminism.…”

“…The kind who likes hot pink and boys; oh, I like boys! I like boys so much…" (Vernon, 2015, 13) Aside from the relentless championing of heterosexuality, fashion-love and consumerism that pervades "hot feminism", this rebranded version -which shares much of its content with the women's magazine culture from which it developed -is notable for both its affect policing (resolutely not angry i ) (see Gill, 2016) and its contentlessness. It starts from the obviousness that women are as good as men, but proceeds with:…”

“…Where earlier discussions focussed predominantly on media, the term now animates debates about work (Kelan, 2009), education (Ringrose, 2013), organizations (Lewis et al, forthcoming), peer culture (Winch, 2013Ringrose et al, 2013) the cultural and creative industries (Scharff, 2015), masculinities (Gwynne, 2013;Hamad, 2014;O'Neill, 2015a) and the body and sexuality (McRobbie, 2015;Elias et al, 2016). Far from receding or losing analytical relevance the notion seems to be gaining prominence as a way of engaging with some of the distinctive gendered features of contemporary neoliberal societies.…”