Consuming Beauty : Postfeminist Beautypractices : Neoliberalism Embodied

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2013-12
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en
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This thesis is concerned with the tremendous pressures on women to satisfy increasingly narrow constructions of beauty. It aims to get insights in how this repressive mechanism gets shape and, importantly, is accepted, justified and even celebrated by women themselves. It emphasizes that bodies are relational, in other words, the way we construct and experience our bodies is codetermined by wider social processes. This relationship has a double entanglement: the dominant system tries to construct bodies to its needs and in the same time the narratives of this system codetermine what we come to feel as normal, acceptable and beautiful (bodies). To understand the way the female body is currently constructed this thesis focuses on widespread postfeminist ideas and their relationship to the dominant discourse of neoliberalism. Because, were feminism is know for its critique on the narrow construction and objectification of female bodies the contemporary emancipated woman, self-consciously, even cheerfully, involves herself in an extensive arsenal of beauty practices. This thesis will explore the role of this ideologies in the construction of the female body and how simultaneously its discourses function for us to come to experience this as natural and even pleasurable.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen