Individuality, empowerment, and heightened modes of bodily self-surveillance: these defining values of postfeminism are perhaps nowhere more visible today than in American health and wellness culture. This paper considers corporate marketing strategies that appeal to postfeminist scripts (e.g. Lululemon, CrossFit) through social media platforms, but also the ways these scripts are invoked by female consumers who craft social media personalities seemingly external to corporate projects.
Building on previous work on postfeminist self-representation in digital media culture, a textual analysis of popular influencer and non-sponsored individual accounts on Instagram and Pinterest demonstrates that the valuation of the healthy as the autonomous self (e.g., #justbreathe, #lookwithin, #nourishyourself) mimics the same superficially anti-consumerist language used by health, wellness, and athletic-leisure corporations (e.g., Lululemon’s slogans advise to “breathe deeply,” “put your phone on hold,” and that “friends are more important than money”).
Following Rosalind Gill (2016), I argue that postfeminism remains as relevant an analytical category today as it was two decades ago. However, I focus on wellness and bodily self-surveillance as a discursive strand within contemporary postfeminist culture because of how notably it departs from discourses of playfulness and indulgence observed in postfeminist media of the late 1990s and early 2000s, e.g. Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’s Diary. The narratives I examine here, like these ur-texts, project empowered female subjects while abandoning the traditional political commitments of feminism. By connecting scholarly critiques of postfeminism with broader theories of neoliberalism, this paper illustrates an important mode of apolitical postfeminism that seeks to construct the “natural” female subject under neoliberal governance and global capitalism.
About the presenterAmy Paeth
I am a Lecturer in Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in 20th- and 21st-century U.S. literature and gender and popular culture. My first book, The American Poet Laureate: A History of U.S. Poetry and the State is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in April 2023. It is the first modern history of the U.S. national poetry office. A.B., English, Princeton University (2008). M.A., Ph.D., English, University of Pennsylvania (2010, 2015).