Avelie Stuart

Choosing to conform: The discursive complexities of choice in relation to feminine beauty practices

There exists the idea that western societies are now postfeminist, implying that remaining differences between men and women should be understood as a result of the free exercise of individual choice. Yet this postfeminist promise of liberation is overwhelmingly packaged within the crushingly cruel beauty images that western women are judged against and incited to emulate. Theorizing female agency in light of choice and liberation discourses has been the topic of much recent feminist literature, to which this article seeks to contribute. We utilized a feminist post-structuralist framework to examine how young Australian women position themselves as freely choosing and able to throw off oppression. We discuss these findings in relation to the conception of the neoliberal feminine subject; described as someone who playfully expresses herself by freely choosing her level of participation in socially promoted beauty practices; in turn resulting in a resistance to being seen as inflexible, or critical of wider social influences

DAMNED IF YOU DO AND DAMNED IF YOU DON'T: The (Re)Production of Larger Breasts As Ideal in Criticisms of Breast Surgery

Abstract In contemporary Western societies women are often thought to have overcome inequality, become autonomous and resistant to social pressures, and in so doing gained the freedoms to make their own choices. However, this ‘post-feminist sensibility’ can arguably be seen as a double-bind as some types of ‘choices’ cannot always be recognised as freely chosen if they are taken as an indication of failing to resist social (appearance) pressures. We argue that one such example is the ‘choice’ to have cosmetic breast surgery, a practice that has received both criticism and celebration from different feminist angles. In this paper we analyse how women who have had breast augmentation are constructed by readers of an internet blog in which they are largely vilified and pathologised for not valuing their ‘natural’ (yet ‘deficient’) breasts. We demonstrate how the same discursive constructions that appear to value womens ‘natural’ bodies simultaneously (re)produce the conditions in which women may feel the need to have breast augmentation.

Logging you, Logging me: A Replicable Study of Privacy and Sharing Behaviour in Groups of Visual Lifeloggers

Low cost digital cameras in smartphones and wearable devices make it easy for people to automatically capture and share images as a visual lifelog. Having been inspired by a US campus based study that explored individual privacy behaviours of visual lifeloggers, we conducted a similar study on a UK campus, however we also focussed on the privacy behaviours of groups of lifeloggers. We argue for the importance of replicability and therefore we built a publicly available toolkit, which includes camera design, study guidelines and source code. Our results show some similar sharing behaviour to the US based study: people tried to preserve the privacy of strangers, but we found fewer bystander reactions despite using a more obvious camera. In contrast, we did not find a reluctance to share images of screens but we did find that images of vices were shared less. Regarding privacy behaviours in groups of lifeloggers, we found that people were more willing to share images of people they were interacting with than of strangers, that lifelogging in groups could change what defines a private space, and that lifelogging groups establish different rules to manage privacy for those inside and outside the group.

Reaching Consensus Promotes the Internalization of Commitment to Social Change

Solving the world’s most pressing problems (climate change, global poverty) will require the commitment of large numbers of people. The current research draws upon the joint insights of self-determination theory and the social identity perspective to consider the mechanisms through which social interaction engenders commitment to social change. Participants (N = 137) engaged in a small group discussion to plan strategies for providing safe drinking water to people in developing countries. The degree of consensus within the interaction (regarding desired change and action to achieve that change) was measured. Multilevel path analysis showed that communication of consensus allows motives to become internalized, giving rise to new identities and commitment to social change. These results suggest that to understand how to promote commitment to social change, we need to understand the social forces that promote the formation and internalization of meaningful social identities.

Learning to share: Engineering adaptive decision-support for online social networks

Some online social networks (OSNs) allow users to define friendship-groups as reusable shortcuts for sharing information with multiple contacts. Posting exclusively to a friendship-group gives some privacy control, while supporting communication with (and within) this group. However, recipients of such posts may want to reuse content for their own social advantage, and can bypass existing controls by copy-pasting into a new post; this cross-posting poses privacy risks. This paper presents a learning to share approach that enables the incorporation of more nuanced privacy controls into OSNs. Specifically, we propose a reusable, adaptive software architecture that uses rigorous runtime analysis to help OSN users to make informed decisions about suitable audiences for their posts. This is achieved by supporting dynamic formation of recipient-groups that benefit social interactions while reducing privacy risks. We exemplify the use of our approach in the context of Facebook.