(Re)dressing Cinderella: an exploration of women’s engagement with and experience of makeover culture

© 2017 Dr. Esther Jane PollardMakeover is the self-imposed and self-directed action of the ideal neoliberal citizen. The body, the most visible expression of self, has become a fundamental tool of social acceptance; and work to normalise and perfect the body seems a logical choice to ensure validity and authenticity in society. The enlightened citizen of makeover culture acts on the demand for improvement directed at citizens through the transformational vehicle of the makeover media. Through qualitative interviews and media readings, this research engages with contemporary body and gender theory and investigates current media and consumer practice within makeover culture. It investigates the everyday experience of a group of tertiary-educated, middle-class women, surrounded by the hyperperfect images that makeover media produces; a group often excluded from social sciences research for their very ordinariness, and yet a key target demographic for the makeover industry. Framed by a discussion of the shift from beauty culture to makeover culture, this thesis asks how contemporary makeover culture differs from earlier modalities of beauty culture. It considers the emergence of makeover culture alongside postfeminism, neoliberalism and media culture and suggests that it is the convergence of these three that has allowed makeover culture to thrive. A hypothesis that this move is marked by a continuing focus on the body but is now discerned by three key differences—technology, perfectibility and contemporary femininity—is presented. The thesis argues that makeover culture forms a key site for the production of contemporary womanhood and femininity and explores how these key tenets contribute to a new regulatory frame for women and to experiences of contemporary womanhood as always already implicated in makeover culture