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Resisting Beauty? Examining How Women Negotiate and Respond to Contemporary Beauty Ideals

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Resisting Beauty? Examining How Women Negotiate and Respond to Contemporary Beauty Ideals Resisting Beauty? Examining How Women Negotiate and Respond to Contemporary Beauty Ideals Jamie Pei Fen Khoo PhD University of York Centre for Women’s Studies September 2019 Abstract This thesis examines how women discursively respond to and resist beauty ideals through their talk. From conducting qualitative group and individual interviews with 42 women in Malaysia, Singapore and UK, I employ a discourse analysis to study how women make sense of beauty pressures in complex, contradictory ways that often reinforce these ideals as much as resist them. I first challenge taken-for-granted notions of dominant media influence by examining how women, as both media content producers and consumers, conceptualise and construct their own and other imagined audiences’ interactions with media-perpetuated beauty ideals. I then move to study other repertoires and discourses that women engage and ‘translate into’ (DeVault 1990) – namely health, professionalism, and personal development – to negotiate their relationship with and resistances against beauty/ideals. Through my discussion, I demonstrate how previous concerns for fulfilling physical bodily ideals have now evolved into a preoccupation with securing ideals of successful enterprising, self- determined selfhood instead. This thesis argues that ostensible assertions of resistance against beauty are thus often redirected to fulfilling yet another ideal – the neoliberal, postfeminist demand for “compulsory individuality” (Cronin 2000) and confidence, which increasingly places responsibility on individuals to overcome beauty oppression and attain bodily contentment, while eliding the systemic inequalities that create and sustain these pressures in the first place. I also explore how these manifestations of resistance to beauty are enacted in specific ways by cosmopolitan women of a “global sisterhood” (Chen 2009), who possess class privileges, resources and cultural capital that enable and encourage them to employ a particular range of discourses. Finally, recognising the interactive moments of discussion, debate and reflection in my interviews, I suggest that the interview space itself (and other discursive events like it), offers potential for women to exercise agency, resist and talk back to dominant discourses around beauty. 2 List of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. 2 List of Contents ................................................................................................................. 3 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... 7 Author’s Declaration ........................................................................................................ 9 Chapter One Introduction: Let’s Talk about Beauty ................................................. 10 1.1 My Body, My Stories ................................................................................................... 10 1.2 Beauty Talk .................................................................................................................. 12 1.3 Resisting Beauty Ideals ................................................................................................ 15 1.4 Working through Beauty Oppression: Chapter Outline ............................................... 18 1.5 Summary ...................................................................................................................... 21 Chapter Two Revisiting the Beauty Myth: A Critical Context ................................ 23 2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 23 2.2 The Beauty Policing of Women’s Bodies .................................................................... 31 2.2.1 Whose Body Is This? The Discursive Body and/or Embodied Self ....................... 31 2.2.2 Manufacturing Beautiful Feminine Bodies ........................................................... 36 2.2.3 Femininity ............................................................................................................. 42 2.2.4 The Self-Policing of Women’s Bodies ................................................................... 45 2.3 The Psychic Life of Beauty: A Neoliberal and Postfeminist Context.......................... 47 2.3.1 A Brief Discussion of Neoliberalism ..................................................................... 47 2.3.2 Post-, Popular and Neoliberal Feminism ............................................................. 49 2.3.3 The Increasing Demands of Aesthetic Labour ...................................................... 54 2.3.4 Negotiating Class and Beauty in Neoliberal, Postfeminist Contexts .................... 58 2.4 Beyond Beauty? Negotiating Agency and Resistance in Our Beauty Practices .......... 62 2.5 Summary ...................................................................................................................... 65 Chapter Three ................................................................................................................. 67 3 Addressing Discomfort and Uncertainty with a Feminist Reflexive Methodology ... 67 3.1 What I Did: A Brief Outline ........................................................................................ 67 3.1.1 Focus Groups and Interviews ............................................................................... 67 3.1.2 Autoethnography ................................................................................................... 68 3.2 Deeper Reflections on What I Did ............................................................................... 69 3.2.1 Women ‘Like Me’: The Participants of My Research ........................................... 69 3.2.2 Rethinking Focus Groups and Interviews ............................................................. 72 3.2.3 Beauty Stories and Beauty Dialoguing ................................................................. 75 3.3 Theoretical and Analytical Perspectives and Tools ..................................................... 75 3.3.1 Grounded Theory and Thematic Analysis ............................................................. 75 3.3.2 Discourse Analysis ................................................................................................ 77 3.3.3 Acknowledging the Limitations of a Discursive Focus ......................................... 78 3.4. Honouring the ‘Everyday Knowledge’ of Women: A Feminist Approach ................ 80 3.5 Writing With/Through Autoethnography .................................................................... 83 3.5.1 Who Am I and Who Am I Doing This Research For? Locating Myself within My Fieldwork ....................................................................................................................... 83 3.5.2 The Self/ves in My Research: Practising Autoethnography and Reflexivity ......... 85 3.6 Using Discomfort and Intuition as a Resource ............................................................ 88 3.6.1 Discovering Difference: How My Friendships Created Discomfort .................... 88 3.6.2 How Discomfort Drove Me Forward .................................................................... 92 3.7 Summary: Making Room for Agency .......................................................................... 96 Chapter Four Who’s Afraid of Vogue? Re-examining the role of the Media on Women’s Responses to Beauty Ideals ........................................................................... 98 4.1 Introduction: What Role does the Media Play for Us Today? ..................................... 98 4.2 Women’s Conflicted Relationship with Glossy Magazines ....................................... 101 4.2.1 “It’s Everywhere”: The Ubiquity of Media Influence ........................................ 101 4.2.2 “I Hold Myself Up to Chrissy Teigan!”: Negotiating the Tension between Magazine Fantasy and ‘Real Life’ ............................................................................... 103 4.3 Negotiating (the Possibilities and Threat of) Media Influence .................................. 109 4.3.1 “I Believe [Our Readers] Are Quite Smart”: Constructing the Intelligent Reader ..................................................................................................................................... 109 4 4.3.2 “It’s Your Instagram! It’s Your Space”: Considering the Process and Pleasures of Women’s Media Engagement .................................................................................. 119 4.4 Attempting Resistance ............................................................................................... 125 4.4.1 How Resistance to Beauty Ideals Reinforces Neoliberal Pressures ................... 125 4.4.2 How Magazines Reinforce these Neoliberal Ideals ............................................ 134 4.6 Summary .................................................................................................................... 137 Chapter Five Beauty Talk: Repertoires and Discourses of Beauty ........................ 140 5.1 Introduction: Finding a “Language of Physical Self-Appreciation” .......................... 140 5.2 Drawing from Beauty Repertoires ............................................................................. 143 5.2.1 Girly Girls and Xiao Mei Meis: The Repertoire of Beauty as Frivolous and Excessive
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