Love our bodies, love ourselves: the politics of beauty in consumer and digital cultures

This project examines the relationship between feminism and media culture over the last century. It concentrates on the emergent “love your body” discourse in consumer culture, and how women utilize digital media to negotiate its messages. To illuminate the meanings and practices related to this discourse, I provide textual analyses of celebrity Kate Moss, the reality television program America's Next Top Model, and the integrated marketing campaign, The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. To consider women’s online participation in relation to this discourse, I engaged in observation of three online communities that center on appearance, weight, and health: fat acceptance, wannarexics (women who want to “be anorexic”), and weight-loss surgery patients. A cultural history of the strategies employed by beauty brands around corporate-sponsored empowerment provides a backdrop for understanding these six sites. This multi-method and interdisciplinary research revealed what I have termed a “self-love subjectivity” that occurs through women’s online communication about beauty. These subjects work to love their bodies -- and therefore themselves -- through assembling in communities that self-identify through labels (“fatties,” “anas,” “WLS- ers”), thereby replicating consumer concepts and practices by packaging their aesthetic values as personal brands. Self-love subjectivity, a concept that defines a set of neoliberal meanings and practices as well as an affect, captures the ways in which users take in contemporary consumer messages about beauty and empowerment to form themselves. Their sense of self underscores the pursuit of self-esteem and transformation, and also indicates narcissism, self-promotion, hope, and struggle. This self references the history of entanglements between feminism and media, indicating a potential trajectory from a self-help culture to a self-love culture. Ultimately, users remain attached to the notion of loving their bodies, but continue to be dissatisfied with their appearance and with themselves, suggesting conflicted support for cultural norms of female beauty and with the postfeminist focus on the body. Self-love subjectivity, then, leads women to create themselves around the values of neoliberal postfeminist media culture and appears to leave aside resistance to or critique of the political context, especially regarding norms for women's beauty/bodies.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Dara Persis Murra