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Aesthetic Labour pp 3–49Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism

Part of the Dynamics of Virtual Work book series (DVW)

Abstract

In 2015 the Australian teenager Essena O’Neill quit Instagram and became headline news around the world. O’Neill, who had more than 600,000 followers on Instagram, earned ‘thousands of dollars’ from marketers for each post, she said, but could no longer tolerate the shameless manipulation of her images and the painful costs of ‘self-promotion’. ‘Resigning’ from the site, she deleted 2000 posts and ‘re-captioned’ the remaining 96 to draw attention to the artifice involved in their production—not just the (notorious) use of filters and ‘retouching’, much discussed in relation to magazine and advertising imagery, but also the poses, the happy and carefree attitude, and the fake intimacy involved. Of one image she wrote: ‘see how relatable my captions were - stomach sucked in, strategic pose, pushed up boobs. I just want younger girls to know this isn’t candid life, or cool or inspirational. It’s contrived perfection made to get attention’.

Keywords

  • Beauty
  • Affect
  • Neoliberalism
  • Postfeminism
  • Labour

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London, London, UK

    Ana Elias & Christina Scharff

  2. Department of Sociology, City, University of London, London, UK

    Rosalind Gill

Authors
  1. Ana Elias
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  2. Rosalind Gill
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  3. Christina Scharff
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College London, London, United Kingdom

    Ana Sofia Elias

  2. King’s College London, London, United Kingdom

    Rosalind Gill

  3. City, University of London, London, United Kingdom

    Christina Scharff

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Elias, A., Gill, R., Scharff, C. (2017). Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism. In: Elias, A., Gill, R., Scharff, C. (eds) Aesthetic Labour. Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47765-1_1

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