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The risky business of postfeminist beauty

chapter
posted on 2023-06-09, 02:56 authored by Simidele Dosekun
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.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Publisher

Palgrave McMillan

Pages

272.0

Book title

Aesthetic labour: rethinking beauty politics in neoliberalism

ISBN

9781137477644

Department affiliated with

  • Media and Film Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • No

Editors

Christina Scharff, Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill

Legacy Posted Date

2016-09-19

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