Beauty Demands

Our Beauty Demands blog is 5 years old this year! We have had many brilliant posts over those years, so we're going to revisit some of these, starting with the ever-important topic of social media. Below is Emilie Lawrence's discussion on body positivity, which introduces a paper she presented at our workshop back in 2016:  In this post, Emilie Lawrence (UCL) discusses her work on body positivity discourse as it plays out on social media. The paper I am presenting at the forthcoming Beauty Demands workshop explores social media sites as platforms for creating networked communities (Papacharissi, 2010, 2011 & 2012) notions of the performative body (Butler, 1988) and embodied subjectivity (Braidotti, 2013.) I will explore body positive feminism ( an emerging form of online and offline activism stemming from Love Your Body (LYB) discourse, ‘positive, affirmative, seemingly feminist-inflected media messages, targeted exclusively at girls and women, that exhort us

Feeling ashamed of how we look has become normal. Hardly any of us think we make the beauty grade. We might even think there is something odd with someone who is perfectly happy with how they look. For some this anxiety is low level and periodic – a bad hair day once in a while, or a fleeting thought that we wish we could lose a few pounds when we glance in the mirror. For others it is overwhelming and almost constant, a deep shame which stops us doing all kinds of things. In the Girls’ Attitudes survey 2016 conducted by Girl Guiding UK, “47% of girls aged 11–21 say the way they look holds them back”. This is nearly half of young women who are willing to admit that how they look limits what they can do. The list of where we fail, and what we feel ashamed of is almost endless. It is hard to find a body part which can’t be thought of as failing, and flaws - perceived flaws – can be found in every body. No matter how much you might fit the ideal, flaws can be found. Selena Gomez, wh