The Risky Business of Postfeminist Beauty

Abstract

This chapter explores the risks involved in women’s beauty practice under conditions of neoliberal postfeminism, drawing on a research project on young Nigerian women who fashion themselves in ‘spectacularly feminine style.’ It argues that with the postfeminist intensification of beauty norms, attended by the commodified proliferation of beauty technologies, the pursuit of beauty comes to pose heightened embodied and psychic risks for women. The chapter explores the research participants’ constructions of their ‘choice’ to take on such risk and their strategies to manage and mitigate it. It proposes the new theoretical concepts of ‘aesthetic vigilance’ and ‘aesthetic rest’ as entrepreneurial practices of risk-managing one’s attachments to beauty and its technologies so as to better maintain rather than resist them.

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