Resisting Beauty? Examining How Women Negotiate and Respond to Contemporary Beauty Ideals

This thesis examines how women discursively respond to and resist beauty ideals through their talk. From conducting qualitative group and individual interviews with 42 women in Malaysia, Singapore and UK, I employ a discourse analysis to study how women make sense of beauty pressures in complex, contradictory ways that often reinforce these ideals as much as resist them. I first challenge taken-for-granted notions of dominant media influence by examining how women, as both media content producers and consumers, conceptualise and construct their own and other imagined audiences’ interactions with media-perpetuated beauty ideals. I then move to study other repertoires and discourses that women engage and ‘translate into’ (DeVault 1990) – namely health, professionalism, and personal development – to negotiate their relationship with and resistances against beauty/ideals. Through my discussion, I demonstrate how previous concerns for fulfilling physical bodily ideals have now evolved into a preoccupation with securing ideals of successful enterprising, self-determined selfhood instead. This thesis argues that ostensible assertions of resistance against beauty are thus often redirected to fulfilling yet another ideal – the neoliberal, postfeminist demand for “compulsory individuality” (Cronin 2000) and confidence, which increasingly places responsibility on individuals to overcome beauty oppression and attain bodily contentment, while eliding the systemic inequalities that create and sustain these pressures in the first place. I also explore how these manifestations of resistance to beauty are enacted in specific ways by cosmopolitan women of a “global sisterhood” (Chen 2009), who possess class privileges, resources and cultural capital that enable and encourage them to employ a particular range of discourses. Finally, recognising the interactive moments of discussion, debate and reflection in my interviews, I suggest that the interview space itself (and other discursive events like it), offers potential for women to exercise agency, resist and talk back to dominant discourses around beauty.