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2017 | Book

Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism Read chapter Read first chapter

Aesthetic Labour

Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism

Editors: Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill, Christina Scharff

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Book Series : Dynamics of Virtual Work

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This volume approaches questions about gender and the politics of appearance from a new perspective by developing the notion of aesthetic labour. Bringing together feminist writing regarding the ‘beauty myth’ with recent scholarship about new forms of work, the book suggests that in this moment of ubiquitous photography, social media, and 360 degree surveillance, women are increasingly required to be 'aesthetic entrepreneurs’, maintaining a constant state of vigilance about their appearance. The collection shows that this work is not just on the surface of bodies, but requires a transformation of subjectivity itself, characterised by notions of personal choice, risk-taking, self-management, and individual responsibility. The book includes analyses of online media, beauty service work, female genital cosmetic surgery, academic fashion, self-help literature and the seduction community, from a range of countries.

Discussing beauty politics, postfeminism, neoliberalism, labour and subjectivity, the book will be of interest to scholars and students with an interest in Gender, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Social Psychology and Management Studies.

“This highly engaging, smart, and wide-ranging collection analyzes how, under the self-governing mandates of neoliberalism, the demands that girls and women regulate and control their bodies and appearance have escalated to new, unforgiving levels. A special strength of the book is its emphasis on the rise of ‘aesthetic labour’ as a global, transnational and ever-colonizing phenomenon that seeks to sweep up women of all races, ages and locales into its disciplinary grip. Highly recommended.”

-Susan J Douglas, University of Michigan, USA

the inherited responsibility that remains women’s particular burden to manage.”

-Melissa Gregg, Intel Corporation, USA

“This book incisively conceptualizes how neo-liberalist and postfeminist tendencies are ramping up pressures for glamour, aesthetic, fashion, and body work in the general public. In a moment when YouTube ‘makeup how to’ videos receive millions of hits; what to wear and how to wear it blogs clock massive followings; and staying ‘on brand’ is sold to us as the key to personal and financial success, ‘aesthetic entrepreneurship’ is bound to become a go-to concept for anyone seeking to understand the profound shifts shaping labor and life in the 21st century.”

-Elizabeth Wissinger, City University of New York, USA

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

Aesthetic Labouring

Frontmatter
1. Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism
Abstract
In 2015 the Australian teenager Essena O’Neill quit Instagram and became headline news around the world. O’Neill, who had more than 600,000 followers on Instagram, earned ‘thousands of dollars’ from marketers for each post, she said, but could no longer tolerate the shameless manipulation of her images and the painful costs of ‘self-promotion’. ‘Resigning’ from the site, she deleted 2000 posts and ‘re-captioned’ the remaining 96 to draw attention to the artifice involved in their production—not just the (notorious) use of filters and ‘retouching’, much discussed in relation to magazine and advertising imagery, but also the poses, the happy and carefree attitude, and the fake intimacy involved. Of one image she wrote: ‘see how relatable my captions were - stomach sucked in, strategic pose, pushed up boobs. I just want younger girls to know this isn’t candid life, or cool or inspirational. It’s contrived perfection made to get attention’.
Ana Elias, Rosalind Gill, Christina Scharff
2. ‘Seriously Girly Fun!’: Recontextualising Aesthetic Labour as Fun and Play in Cosmetics Advertising
Abstract
Femininity is work. Theoretical notions of ‘doing’ and ‘performing’ femininity have pointed to the actual labour involved in constituting identity. An integral aspect of heterosexual feminine identity labour in many cultures is beautification or the doing of beauty work. Women, as part of doing heterosexual femininity, are expected to undertake seriously aesthetic labour upon their bodies, which involves time, money, skill, effort, physical discomfort and sometimes even health risks. Beauty as labour is not a novel idea in itself; however, it is taken up within a neoliberal postfeminist culture (Gill and Scharff 2011) in newer ways. Postfeminist culture has intensified the personal aesthetic regime of women, by increasing the scope and scale of working on and perfecting the female body (Negra 2009). Allied with a consumerist ethic, greater diversity and specialisation of personal grooming services have spiralled, demanding ever-intense consumption by women. An intensification of personal grooming has entailed greater self-surveillance and discipline, as no part of the body may escape scrutiny and work. In all this, the neoliberal postfeminist subject, far from being a helpless victim, is positioned as a willing participant, whose pursuit of beauty is unrelenting and self-generated and is actively entrepreneurial in achieving her desires.
Michelle M. Lazar
3. Rethinking Ruskin’s Wife’s Vulva
Abstract
We look at the past through contemporary eyes, understand it from our present, and can use the familiarities and unfamiliarities in what we see as a tool for critical insight—to render strange what has come to be taken for granted. Here I take a particular historical event—the non-consummation and eventual annulment of the marriage of UK art historian John Ruskin and socialite Effie Gray—as the starting point for a thought experiment intended to denormalise and reframe contemporary vulval modificatory practices. I have written about the vulval aesthetics, representation and practice for over 15 years (Braun 2004, 2005a, 2009a, 2009b, 2010; Braun and Kitzinger 2001; Braun et al. 2013; Braun and Wilkinson 2001, 2003, 2005); I now invite you to join my imaginative journey between the past and present, to (re)make sense of contemporary aesthetic female genital labour as genital labour, rather than (just) personal aesthetics and choice.
Virginia Braun
4. Mapping ‘Gross’ Bodies: The Regulatory Politics of Disgust
Abstract
Sara Ahmed said, ‘Emotions should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices’ (2004, 9). Critical feminist scholarship on embodiment and women’s lived experiences of their bodies has resituated and reframed the way that social scientists understand the discipline, control, and regulation of bodies (Foucault 1995). As a malleable site of cultural anxieties (Bordo 2003), personal distress and self-objectification (Johnston-Robledo et al. 2007), pleasure and satisfaction (Fahs 2011b), cultural rebellion (Bobel and Kwan 2011), frank oppression (Owen 2012), or affiliation to various social identities (Hill Collins 2000), the body and its role as a social entity cannot be overstated. More specifically, psychologists, body image researchers, and critical feminist scholars have argued that women mould and shape their bodies to emulate ‘ideals’ of youth, heterosexuality, ability, whiteness, and thinness (Bordo 2003; Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008; Tiggemann and Lewis 2004).
Breanne Fahs
5. The Escalating Price of Motherhood: Aesthetic Labour in Popular Representations of ‘Stay-at-Home’ Mothers
Abstract
The devaluation of domestic, reproductive, emotional and maternal labour has been extensively critiqued by feminist scholars and activists. Women’s domestic labour is normalised as ‘housework’, considered to have no material or economic recognition (Federici 2012), and childrearing and looking after the home are still often equated with ‘doing nothing’ (Crittenden 2010). Many have argued that cultural and media representations play a constitutive role in normalising the devaluation and thus exploitation of women’s productive and reproductive labour. The media legitimise the continuing lack of social, political and economic recognition and reward of motherhood by symbolically naturalising and masking maternal labour, for example, by representing mothers’ work as ‘natural’ and a product of intrinsic maternal love (Douglas and Michaels 2004). Building on this scholarship about the cultural construction of maternity, in this chapter we highlight aesthetic labour as a new(ly) added, previously unrecognised dimension of contemporary maternal labour that has emerged under neoliberalism.
Sara De Benedictis, Shani Orgad
6. Holistic Labour: Gender, Body and the Beauty and Wellness Industry in China
Abstract
There are two beauty salons in the community of Zhangqiu, Shandong Province, where I lived during my summer trips. The one I frequented is on the first floor of an apartment building. Walking into the salon, one sees a front desk decorated with bamboo plants—symbols of growth and good luck. To the left are couches facing each other, and between them is a low table spread with glossy beauty magazines, self-help literature offering ‘chicken soup for the soul’ and booklets on Confucianism and Buddhism proffering advice on how to cultivate yuan (the force to affect and attract people). Near the couches are jasmine plants and mints. Soothing Buddhist music and scents mingle throughout. People living or working in this building can come down for a massage, foot bath or facial. Those working at nearby office buildings also pop in over lunch for beautification or relaxation. The dynamics of this salon seem to take what Meredith Jones (2012) calls ‘lunch-hour’ procedures to a new level, as people willing to consume these services here do not even need to go to the nearest high street or shopping mall.
Jie Yang
7. The Entrepreneurial Practices of Becoming a Doll
Abstract
‘Living dolls’ is a term that emerged online during 2010 to describe a group of women who participate in the practice of appearing ‘doll-like’. Living dolls take part in a number of beauty techniques in order to achieve a doll appearance through, for example, using wide-rimmed contact lenses, hair extensions and corsetry. An online community also holds that the living dolls achieve their appearance through the use of photo-editing technologies (e.g. Photoshop) and/or surgery—including rib removal, eye widening, breast implants and liposuction.
Adrienne Evans, Sarah Riley
8. PhD Barbie Gets a Makeover! Aesthetic Labour in Academia
Abstract
In this chapter, I explore the role of aesthetic labour in academic research through an auto-ethnographic account of aesthetic labour when preparing for and conducting elite interviews. During my PhD, at the suggestion of my supervisor and my sponsor organisation, I worked with a presence coach or ‘image consultant’, who helped me prepare for interviewing elites. I had been recruited to conduct research that addressed the poor representation of women on corporate boards, but I was told that my appearance was ‘not professional enough’, and that to do the PhD I needed to ‘look good and sound right’ (Warhurst and Nickson 2001, p. 2). In this chapter I show how expectations about ‘acceptable’ professional appearance are embodied; how they went from being something ascribed onto my body to something my body had to do (Crossley 1995). As a young, female, feminist academic preparing for interviews in professional environments, my aesthetic labour also reflected social expectations about (acceptable) femininity, the female body, professionalism and what it means to be a good researcher. This highlights how the body can be a site where conflicting discourses play out, and how the boundary between aesthetics and the self can become blurred.
Scarlett Brown

Risk, Work and (Post)Feminist Beauty

Frontmatter
9. The Risky Business of Postfeminist Beauty
Abstract
This chapter explores the risks involved in women’s beauty practice under conditions of neoliberal postfeminism, drawing on a research project on young Nigerian women who fashion themselves in ‘spectacularly feminine style.’ It argues that with the postfeminist intensification of beauty norms, attended by the commodified proliferation of beauty technologies, the pursuit of beauty comes to pose heightened embodied and psychic risks for women. The chapter explores the research participants’ constructions of their ‘choice’ to take on such risk and their strategies to manage and mitigate it. It proposes the new theoretical concepts of ‘aesthetic vigilance’ and ‘aesthetic rest’ as entrepreneurial practices of risk-managing one’s attachments to beauty and its technologies so as to better maintain rather than resist them.
Simidele Dosekun
10. Dream Jobs? The Glamourisation of Beauty Service Work in Media Culture
Abstract
This chapter approaches aesthetic labour from the vantage point of people who earn a living providing aesthetic services. I construct an alternate genealogy of the makeover regime by tracing the rising visibility of salon work in media culture and showing how previously feminised and devalued beauty service labour is now celebrated as creative, glamorous and enterprising.
Laurie Ouellette
11. Skin: Post-feminist Bleaching Culture and the Political Vulnerability of Blackness
Abstract
Skin bleaching/lightening/toning, a transracial multi-billion-dollar global enterprise, involves transnational pharmaceutical/cosmetics companies and local entrepreneurs. About 15 % of the world’s population consumed skin lighteners in 2014, with sales projected at US 19.8 billion dollars by 2018 (Neilson 2014). Japan is the largest market and pills, potions, creams, soaps, lotions, suppositories, injections, lasers and intravenous drips are global lightening technologies. Irrespective of its globality and transraciality, skin bleaching/lightening/toning as pathological sticks to African and African descent women’s skins whether poor ‘bleacher’ or ‘celebrity lightener/toner’ because of colourism and post-enslavement’s skin colour preferences for lightness/whiteness. As consumers, women enter the global market in lightness in a beauty culture which negates the racialised gender power relations and social structuration of colourism, positioning bleached skin as ‘post-Black feminist’. Specifically bleached skin counters second-wave Black feminism’s embrace of Black anti-racist aesthetics’ ideology of ‘naturalness’. This epistemological break challenges hegemonic Black feminist aesthetics as well as denoting a new racialised aesthetic sensibility in the contested ‘post-race’ afterlife of 1970s Black feminism as it comes up against neoliberal discourses on individualism, choice and empowerment (Gill and Scharff 2011). For some, going beyond the politics of ‘natural skin’ reproduces post-feminist Blackness as a site of political vulnerability when skin is devalued by bleaching/lightening/toning. However, I will argue that bleachers’ readings of the global skin trade do not mean that they have fallen prey to white supremacy as they ‘shade shift’. Instead, this change is a critique of existing pigmentocracy enabled by their post-Black feminist self-positionings.
Shirley Anne Tate
12. ‘Being a Better #Freelancer’: Gendered and Racialised Aesthetic Labour on Online Freelance Marketplaces
Abstract
This chapter takes up the heuristic of “body-work” to explain how novice women freelance writers using online freelance marketplaces handle the minefield of gendered paradoxes, and constraints, about their self-presentation online. From choosing an appropriate profile photo to responding to client requests to get positive public feedback, women writers working at a distance engage in largely invisible labors simply to get the marketplace websites to function. These labors include self-surveillance, racialized self-erasure, and deference. The chapter thus names how narratives about “freelancer” as an entrepreneurial subject and web platforms as neutral technologies are achieved through the asethetic “body-work” of freelancers.
Monika Sengul-Jones
13. Seriously Stylish: Academic Femininities and the Politics of Feminism and Fashion in Academia
Abstract
What does one wear to work in the life of the mind? The establishment of ‘seriousness’ as a cardinal academic virtue is reinforced via a series of distinctions between the high-minded concerns worthy of scholarly pursuit, and the materialistic, venal and/or frivolous concerns of secular life. The historical marginalisation of women in academia is also reinforced by these distinctions—despite the mass entry of women into academia over the past 40 years, a masculine hegemony continues to set the terms on which women can be accepted into and succeed within academia, and ‘feminine’ interests and concerns are treated with suspicion and/or contempt (Bagilhole 2002). Yet although the force of male hegemony in the academy is considerable, it is by no means uncontested; for many decades, women have fought against the assumption that academic recognition is contingent on eschewing femininity and have sought to find modes of embodiment that acknowledge the presence of women in academia as women (Showalter 1997). Women in academia thus face a dilemma in crafting and communicating what we might think of as (borrowing from Gill and Scharff 2011) ‘academic femininities’—modes of self-presentation that allow them to simultaneously address the requirement to demonstrate intellectual seriousness, while also refusing to accept the traditional exclusion of markers of femininity from the academy.
Ngaire Donaghue
14. How to Do Feminist Mothering in Urban India? Some Reflections on the Politics of Beauty and Body Shapes
Abstract
This chapter examines some negotiations that self-identified feminist women with daughters engage in the process of mothering. It draws on research conducted in the early 21st century among educated, upper middle class, urban women and asks what it means to be a feminist mother in post-globalisation India. The chapter is based on narratives that engage both feminism and the act of mothering in relation to concerns about body hair, size and colour. I attempt to think through the inevitable contradictions that arise when a feminist politics encounters the fashion-beauty complex in the context of mothering.
Shilpa Phadke

Empowerment, Confidence and Subjectivity

Frontmatter
15. ‘I’m Beautiful the Way I Am’: Empowerment, Beauty, and Aesthetic Labour
Abstract
The early twenty first century has given rise to an ongoing girls’ ‘confidence movement’ (Gill and Orgad 2015). This movement is decentralised, taking place in non-profit organisations, state-funded initiatives, advertising campaigns, marketing, and social media. Hundreds of organisations have emerged globally that focus on the empowerment of girls and women (Banet-Weiser 2015). Corporate culture has also joined the empowerment conversation, creating a slew of campaigns and advertisements shown on television and social media. One after another, companies like Verizon, CoverGirl, Always, and Dove have churned out emotional advertising campaigns, urging us to pay closer attention to girls and the opportunities available to them both personally and professionally. Ostensibly, the varied strands of the girls’ empowerment and confidence movement seek to mobilise publics to collective action and to create a collective subjectivity around the need to be more gender inclusive.
Sarah Banet-Weiser
16. ‘Just Be Confident Girls!’: Confidence Chic as Neoliberal Governmentality
Abstract
In our injurious patriarchal cultures, unconfidence is almost inescapable when inhabiting womanhood. However, recently the promotion of self-confidence has surfaced as the site for expanded, heightened and more insidious modes of regulation, often spearheaded by those very institutions invested in women’s insecurities. This notably includes consumer women’s magazines. Contemporary publications are marked by an intensified preoccupation with taking readers ‘from crisis to confidence’, offering even dedicated sections (e.g. ‘confidence revolution’ and ‘Bye-bye body hang-ups’ in Cosmopolitan UK) and issues—see, for example, Elle UK’s January 2015 ‘Confidence Issue: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Self-Belief’. Clearly, this sector is a fundamental player in the confidence movement-market, bringing together a range of interested parties, not least ‘love your body’ (LYB) advertisers like Dove (see Gill and Elias 2014), and enjoying an extensive audience reach, both in terms of numbers and geography—a reach increased to unprecedented degrees by online versions.
Laura Favaro
17. ‘The Bottom Line Is That the Problem Is You’: Aesthetic Labour, Postfeminism and Subjectivity in Russian Self-Help Literature
Abstract
This chapter explores the ways in which women are called upon to work on and manage their body, personality and sexuality in bestselling Russian self-help literature targeting a female audience. We argue that the aesthetic labour promoted in this literature needs to be understood as intrinsically embedded in the cultural and economic context where it is performed. Growing job insecurity, widespread gender discrimination, insufficient social protection and decreasing employment quality characterise the everyday life of a great number of women in Russia (Adamson and Kispeter 2017; Kozina and Zhidkova 2006). At the same time, the rise of the service sector and the demand for ‘aestheticised’ forms of labour (Walker 2015) have been accompanied by a growing rhetoric concerning the importance of self-presentation and ‘image’ (Cohen 2013) and an increasing emphasis on beauty practices as a crucial part of successful femininity (Porteous 2013). As we show in this chapter, women are encouraged to invest time and energy in aesthetic labour in the hope that mastering ‘the art of femininity’ will allow them upward mobility in a context where channels for mobility are increasingly constrained. We suggest that aesthetic labour is mobilised as a form of tactical agency (de Certeau 1984) to combat social and economic precarity. Through unpacking the elements of this labour we also suggest that this aesthetic makeover entails a profound transformation of subjectivity.
Maria Adamson, Suvi Salmenniemi
18. Look Good, Feel Good: Sexiness and Sexual Pleasure in Neoliberalism
Abstract
A lucrative and ubiquitous sex advice industry, pedalled by ‘experts’ in newspapers, magazines, on television and online, is built around telling us how to have ‘good’ sex. Good (hetero)sex requires that women become knowledgeable, consuming and using tips and products to make their sex lives more pleasurable, exciting and rewarding. Almost every list of sex tips will address the interrelated issues of ‘feeling sexy’, ‘body confidence’ or ‘looking good’. The message of such advice is more than a little contradictory: first, women must undertake various forms of body work in order to look good, which will in turn allow them to feel good and enjoy sex; however, thinking ‘too much’, or too negatively, about looking good is the ultimate sin when it comes to ‘good sex’ and will certainly not lead to women (or their partners) feeling good. How can women expend considerable time and energy on making themselves ‘look good’ in the appropriate ways in order to enjoy sex, only to then almost simultaneously eradicate any thought or worry about how they look during sex? The answer is the ‘mental makeover’: the embodying of feelings of body confidence so that they are deeply felt and ‘known’, liberating women from anxiety and leaving them ‘free’ to enjoy sex.
Rachel Wood
19. The Aesthetics of Sexual Discontent: Notes from the London ‘Seduction Community’
Abstract
This chapter explores questions of sexual desire and gendered aesthetics through a discussion of research undertaken with and among men who participate in the London ‘seduction community’. Recognising sexual desire as an affective and embodied dynamic that is nevertheless irrevocably social, I consider how the sexual desires of heterosexual men are shaped in and through normative feminine beauty ideals. I argue that the naturalisation of aesthetic labour as part of the cultural code of femininity has implications for the manner in which heterosexual men relate to women’s bodies, both real and imagined.
Rachel O’Neill
20. Invisible Labour? Tensions and Ambiguities of Modifying the ‘Private’ Body: The Case of Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery
Abstract
The ‘designer vagina’ is a relatively new phenomenon, becoming part of public discourse only in the late 1990s. Although female genital surgery has a history longer than 150 years, modification has not usually been for aesthetic reasons (Green 2005). Nowadays, cosmetic surgeons promising ‘designer vaginas’ offer to modify all parts of women’s genitals, often to render them more attractive: the labia minora are minimised and made symmetrical (labiaplasty), the clitoral hood is made less prominent (clitoral hood reduction), the labia majora are plumped to make them look more ‘youthful’, and liposuction is available for a ‘fat’ mons pubis (Michala et al. 2012). Normal genital variation among women has been pathologised by describing visible labia minora as ‘hypertrophic’ (Miklos and Moore 2008). Simone Weil Davis (2002) quotes a cosmetic surgeon as telling her that ‘the ideal look for labia minora was not only minimal and not extended but also symmetrical, homogenously pink and not wavy’.
Amy Shields Dobson, Karalyn McDonald, Maggie Kirkman, Kay Souter, Jane Fisher
21. Beautiful Israeli Girls: Between Being in the Present and Future Unpredictability
Abstract
In this chapter I treat women’s beauty as a form of aesthetic labour and ask how it is represented in popular culture. Specifically, and using popular culture’s images and representations of Israeli girls and young women, this chapter identifies a tension between two temporal logics that characterise neoliberal outlooks. On the one hand, entrepreneurial and aspirational neoliberal subjects must be reflexive and always changing and in the process of subjectification or ‘becoming’. On the other hand, they must also act responsibly and render a self-assured personhood and ‘being’. This raises the following question: if projecting beauty, self-aestheticising and excitable self-presentation have become prerequisites for employability, as critical theorists of neoliberalism suggest (see below), how does beauty make visible a person’s inner capacities for simultaneous ‘being’ and ‘becoming’? I will address the tension between personhood (being) and subjectification (becoming) through a brief examination of a 2014 coffee table fashion/art/erotic book entitled Israeli Girls that has provoked an interest in Israeli media. As the Israeli-born photographer Dafy Hagai explained in several newspaper interviews, she hand-picked her subjects according to whether she ‘felt connected to what they projected and to how they look’. Hagai also said: ‘If someone sparked an interest in me and we had a good vibe between the two of us then I took her picture. The outcome is diverse’ (Hagai, quoted in Shalev 2014, np). The photographer thus presents her work as a form of curation of individual singularities. As she describes it, it was through the supposedly authentic ‘appeal’, ‘beauty’, ‘connection’, ‘vibe’ or ‘attention’—the aesthetic labour of being herself that each of the models performed in real life even before she was actually photographed—that the book receives its value as a ‘diverse’ work of art. Specifically, this chapter argues that as a representative of contemporary popular cultural artefacts, Israeli Girls utilises an imaginary space between being and becoming, between local and cosmopolitan Israeliness (a point I shall return to below), and, ultimately, between art and commodified life. In this, Israeli Girls represents the logic of current capitalism, whereby non-work activities are deemed empowering, liberating and non-exploitive and lifeworlds become exchangeable assets for employment.
Dana Kaplan
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Aesthetic Labour
Editors
Ana Sofia Elias
Rosalind Gill
Christina Scharff
Copyright Year
2017
Electronic ISBN
978-1-137-47765-1
Print ISBN
978-1-137-47764-4
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47765-1