scholarly journals Because You’re Worth It! The Medicalization and Moralization of Aesthetics in Aging Women

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Chiara Pussetti
Keyword(s):  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Gender Performance ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Structural Determinants ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Aging Women ◽  
Neoliberal Ideology ◽  
Ageing Body ◽  
And Gender

In this article—based on the fieldwork I conducted in Lisbon (Portugal) between 2018 and 2021, employing in-depth ethnography and self-ethnography—I describe the experience of the medicalization and moralization of beauty in Portuguese women aged 45–65 years. I examine the ways in which practitioners inscribe their expert knowledge on their patients’ bodies, stigmatizing the marks of time and proposing medical treatments and surgeries to “repair” and “correct” them. Beauty and youth are symbolically constructed in medical discourse as visual markers of health, an adequate lifestyle, a strong character and good personal choices (such as not smoking, and a healthy diet and exercise habits). What beauty means within the discourse of anti-aging and therapeutic rejuvenation is increasingly connected to an ideal gender performance of normative, white, middle-class, heterosexual femininity that dismisses structural determinants. The fantasy of eternal youth, linked to a neoliberal ideology of limitless enhancement and individual responsibility, is firmly entrenched in moralizing definitions of aesthetics and gender norms. Finally, my article highlights the ways in which the women I interviewed do not always passively accept the discourse of the devaluation of the ageing body, defining femininity and ageing in their own terms by creating personal variants of the hegemonic normative discourses on beauty and successful ageing.

scholarly journals “Un estado de la conciencia contemporánea”: género y moral en La sirena negra de Emilia Pardo Bazán

Neophilologus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Bardavío Estevan
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Gender Performance ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emilia Pardo Bazan ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Emilia Pardo Bazán ◽  
Decadent Aesthetics

AbstractDespite Emilia Pardo Bazán’s prominent feminism, La sirena negra has been strangely overlooked by gender studies. When the novel was published in 1908, Gómez de Baquero judged it “non feminist” due to its superficial heroines and the centrality of its complex masculine characters. Academic studies of La sirena negra have not refuted this idea, since they have elided gender approaches to focus on its decadent aesthetics. This article argues, on the contrary, that the novel’s androcentrism can be read as a Pardo Bazan’s strategy to appropriate the patriarchal discourse and hold it responsible for national degeneration. Emilia Pardo Bazán was harshly affected by the fin-de-siècle crisis. In her opinion, Spanish decay came from a lack of solid morality. Thus, Catholic principles should be restored because they would provide the autoregulation mechanisms to regenerate and reassemble the country. Literature should show the new reality, and the French roman psychologique provided her with an appropriate model. La sirena negra sets out the problem of the moral anomie through its protagonist, Gaspar de Montenegro. The analysis of his sexuality and gender performance reveals the danger of this amoral behavior for the degeneration of society, attributed ultimately to the patriarchal order and the androcentric discourse.

Starring Women

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara E. Lampert
Keyword(s):  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Atlantic Seaboard ◽  
Patriarchal Family ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
And Gender

Star actresses and dancers were among the most publicly visible, celebrated, and often polarizing female public figures in the early United States. This book examines the careers and celebrity of the women and girls from Europe and America whose fame drove the growth and transformation of theater between 1790 and 1850 from the Atlantic seaboard to the trans-Appalachian West. Starring women introduced new repertoire—melodramas, breeches roles, dance pantomime and ballet—that catalyzed debates about social ownership of American culture, regional and national identity, and women’s place in public life. This book transforms existing understandings of early U.S. theater and culture by examining a broad cohort of understudied figures and argues that women stars were vital to the development of transatlantic and U.S. entertainment, celebrity culture, and gender ideology. Most significantly, starring women lived and performed the tensions and contradictions of changing nineteenth-century gender roles. As this book demonstrates, even while they achieved unprecedented levels of wealth and prominence through the “starring system,” the patriarchal family structures that governed women’s lives and careers conditioned their participation in the industry. The celebrity culture that expanded from the 1820s demanded that starring women conform to new standards of sentimental domestic femininity, even as the structural realities of their lives defied such standards. Starring women were exceptional figures who mapped the margins of a narrowing white middle-class domestic ideal.

“It’s Going to Be Okay”

2018 ◽  
pp. 117-138
Author(s):  
Mary Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Family Formation ◽  
American Family ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Same Sex Couples ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Younger Age ◽  
And Gender

Acknowledging that the youth of Spectrum tend to disclose their sexual and gender identities to parents at a relatively young age, this chapter explores the role of family in the formation of these youths’ sexualities and genders. It was often the case with Spectrum youth that, rather than rejection, they encountered loving support about their sexuality from their parents. The youth of Spectrum are of a generation of kids who are the first to grow up in a society in which same-sex couples and genderqueer parents rearing children have become significantly socially acceptable. The chapter argues that young people are sharing their queer sexual and gender identities with their parents at a younger age because of gender non-conformity that leads parents to make assumptions about their child’s sexuality because they are more frequently exposed to LGBTQ family members and loved ones and because these particular parents do not conform to the white, middle-class, heteropatriarchal regime of the Standard North American Family. Queer family formation has broad implications not just for same-sex couples but for the way U.S. society understands and recognizes family in general.

Beyond tropes: a dialogue on Asian women's experiences in the outdoors.

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-77
Author(s):  
Yi Chien Jade Ho ◽  
Pei Ting Tham
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Outdoor Education ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Gender Oppression ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Systemic Discrimination

Abstract In this chapter, researchers offer their own experiences through an extended dialogue between a long-term outdoor educator in Australia and a researcher of outdoor education in Canada. They engage and share their conversations in order to highlight the ways in which outdoor education as an industry and academic field perpetuates systems of racial and gender oppression. Although the chapter centres on racial and gender discrimination embedded in outdoor education policy and practices, the conversation also presents the ways in which class further entrenches systemic discrimination. Each axis of oppression works intersectionally to create unequal material conditions, further marginalizing people and communities who are not white, middle-class and/or male (Crenshaw, 1989; hooks, 2015; Taylor, 2017).

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