Aging beauty matters: Normative and resistant narratives on female aging bodies

Abstract

This article examines how older women navigate beauty work and anti-aging norms within contemporary Western aesthetic regimes. Rather than centering menopause as a biological transition, the study foregrounds beauty work as a key site where ageism and sexism intersect in shaping women's embodied experiences. Drawing on feminist sociology, cultural gerontology, embodiment theory, and scholarship on decline narratives, visibility and temporal governance, anti-aging norms are conceptualized as a form of gendered biopolitical regulation that frames visible aging as aesthetic and moral failure.Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Milan and Turin, Italy, involving 25 women aged 63-73 and 28 professionals working in aesthetic and anti-aging centers, the study demonstrates how aging women internalize, negotiate, reinterpret, and at times resist normative discourses of beauty and aging. Beauty work emerges as neither purely oppressive nor fully emancipatory, but as a situated practice embedded within neoliberal, age-stratified, classed and gendered power relations.The article contributes to feminist aging studies by highlighting not only discriminatory aesthetic norms, but also alternative narratives through which older women reframe wrinkles, gray hair, bodily change, salon sociability and aesthetic care as resources for dignity, visibility, relational belonging and embodied agency.

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