Abstract
On 24 September 2016, Debora Spar, the then president of Barnard College, published an article in the New York Times entitled ‘Ageing and My Beauty Dilemma’. In this short piece, Spar publicly articulates not only her profound anxiety about ageing but also her feminist-inspired ambivalence about the panoply of anti-ageing strategies and procedures now available, at least to those who have the financial means. Spar describes how, for women in certain professional and social circles, the ‘bar of normal’ vis-a-vis the way in which women are expected to look keeps going up. And as the bar keeps going up so too do the financial expenditures and the aesthetic labour necessary to maintain this normative appearance. As Spar herself puts it: ‘Just saying no – to chemicals, peels, lasers and liposuction – becomes harder under these circumstances, even if no one wants to admit that’s the case.’
Spar’s discussion of the ever-rising bar of aesthetic maintenance for ageing women underlines the timeliness of the recently published edited volume Aesthetic Labor: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism. The book’s underlying premise is that we are currently witnessing an intensification of beauty pressures on women, and not merely in the West. These pressures are expanding to new temporalities – beginning earlier in girls’ lives and intensifying as women age – as well as extending to vastly more fine resolutions. Every and all aspects of the female body are now potentially scrutinized, especially given the ubiquity of smartphone cameras and Instagram, helping to produce a situation in which young women are constantly incited to undergo ‘forensic self-surveillance’.
The feminist-identified Spar’s description of the intense aesthetic labour that women in high powered positions are expected to perform also highlights another key argument that undergirds many of the essays in this book: that neoliberal governmentality and the techniques of the self operating as part of this political rationality help to produce subjects that are individualized, self-investing and self-regulating. In other words, read through the lens of the volume’s theoretical framework, Spar’s article reveals the gendered demand that women become aesthetic entrepreneurs of themselves, where constant work on the body (and on the soul) is necessary in order to maintain one’s market worth and indeed one’s very viability as a subject.
Then there is Ivanka Trump. In an article published in the New York Times on 11 January 2017, Ms. Trump is described as embodying the various contradictions of popular feminism and neoliberalism. She not only owns her own fashion line and lifestyle brand – and thus is an aesthetic entrepreneur in the most literal sense – but she is also, as the article claims, ‘selling us traditional femininity and support of male power wrapped up in a feminist bow’. The article details how Ms Trump has used the carefully cultivated image of her own career and family to sell her fashion brand. Moreover, her Instagram feed is full of images with motivational messages, which resonate loudly with another important term introduced in this volume, namely ‘confidence chic’. It is not enough to look good but today women must also feel good – confident, positive and upbeat.
These two examples from the US context highlight not only the urgency of the issues the book raises but also the usefulness of the theoretical terms it develops. While the essays in Aesthetic Labour make a number of significant contributions, I will outline two of what I understand to be the book’s most significant contributions to the debate about beauty politics in our neoliberal era.
First, the articles in the volume engage variously and critically with the notion of neoliberal governmentality. Governmentality was a term developed by Michel Foucault to ‘describe a convergence between micro-technologies by which individuals relate to and govern themselves and the macro technologies by which states and social authorities govern groups, institutions, and populations’ (Binkely, 2011: 382). Neoliberal governmentality describes those technologies that help produce neoliberalism as a normative form of reason that moves to and from the management of the state to the inner workings of the subject, recasting individuals as entrepreneurial and capital enhancing agents. As a political rationality, neoliberalism produces subjects that are informed through and through by a market metrics. Consequently, in order to survive let alone thrive in this world, subjects must become entrepreneurs of themselves; they must self-invest in order to appreciate their value in the market.
The book, however, crucially underscores the gendered aspect of subject formation under neoliberalism, exposing and describing how women’s market value, as the introduction so persuasively argues, is inextricably tied to their appearance and positive affect. This is precisely where the term ‘aesthetic entrepreneurialism’ becomes so useful – whether conducting auto-ethnographies of women academics, as Scarlett Brown does in her contribution to the volume, or examining popular representations of Stay at Home Moms as Shani Orgad and Sara De Benedictis do in their chapter, or analysing best-selling self-help books geared towards women in post-Soviet Russia as Maria Adamson and Suvi Salmenniemi do in theirs. Thus, one of the contributions of this anthology is the insertion of this key term into our feminist lexicon. Aesthetic entrepreneurialism helps us not only transcend the agency–domination dichotomy as the editors themselves suggest, but it also helps provide a more robust framework for understanding how gendered subjectivity is spawned under neoliberalism. This term is invaluable as we, feminist critics, continue to describe and theorize the technologies of self that help to cultivate the ‘properly’ aestheticized as well as affective female subject in different contexts. Indeed, aesthetic entrepreneurship, as the various essays demonstrate, helps us untangle the complex inter- and constitutive relationship among beauty politics, neoliberalism and subjectivity, while concurrently stressing the gendered effect and the multiple dissonances this imbrication produces.
The second contribution pertains to the way in which the book helps us conceptualize the divergences within neoliberal governmentality itself: while neoliberalism certainly breaks down regional and national differences, it also simultaneously takes on different regional forms. Thus, the book contributes to our understanding of the specific ways in which beauty politics, neoliberalism and subjectivity manifest themselves in specific trans-national settings – whether among educated young class privileged women in Lagos, Nigeria as Simidele Dosekun explores in her essay, within the booming beauty and wellness industry in urban China as Jie Yang shows, or in corporate confidence campaigns in conjunction with beauty vlogging as Sarah Banet-Weiser demonstrates in her chapter. The book thus successfully unpacks and exposes the way these convergences manifest themselves in differing forms in each region. This trans-national perspective thus helps to better understand as well as dissect neoliberal hegemony exactly because it refuses to adopt a homogenizing, imperialist or racist gaze.
Indeed, returning to the examples I offered above and examining them from Aesthetic Labour’s trans-national and intersectional theoretical perspective, a different set of critical questions emerge: namely, if Ivanka Trump is touted as a successful aesthetic entrepreneurial subject (though this is debatable, of course, given recent events) and Debora Spar is presented as embodying female success, then who and what get framed as their constitutive outside? Which women become unintelligible or are deemed disgusting or disposable because not properly ‘responsibilized’ within a colonizing neoliberalism that is increasingly converging with neo-fascism and shameless white supremacy in the West?
During our particularly bleak and frightening historical moment, this anthology can be read as enacting a stubborn resistance to our increasingly individualizing and competitive neoliberal era in which there are only winners and losers. It does so by embracing collaborative work as well as a commitment to uncovering as well as avowing the profound structural inequalities that shape our contemporary world. Indeed, in order to resist modes of domination, we must first endeavour to understand how they operate and the kinds of affective attachments as well as ambivalences they produce. This book does precisely that – and does so with theoretical rigour as well as consistently brilliant scholarship.