Ngaire Donaghue

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

Body satisfaction, sexual self-schemas and subjective well-being in women

The objectification of womens bodies in western culture creates special emphasis on womens representations of embodied aspects of themselves. I argue that womens satisfaction with their bodies is likely to have particularly strong implications for other embodied aspects of self: in this case, representations of their sexual selves. This paper examines the relationships between womens body satisfaction, their sexual self-schemas, and components of subjective well-being in a sample of 91 Australian women aged between 18 and 68. Body satisfaction and dimensions of womens actual sexual self-schemas predicted satisfaction with life, positive and negative affect. The relationships between body satisfaction and both positive affect and satisfaction with life were partially mediated by the positive dimensions of sexual self-schemas. This finding suggests that at least some of the negative consequences associated with body dissatisfaction are due to the negative implications of body dissatisfaction for womens beliefs about their sexual selves.

'What you look like is such a big factor': Girls' own reflections about the appearance culture in an all-girls' school

High school is a key venue for the development and expression of body image concerns in adolescent girls. Researchers have begun to investigate the role of school-based ‘appearance cultures’ in magnifying the body image concerns of students. To date, however, no research has examined girls’ experience as participants within these cultures, and thus the opportunity to learn how girls account for the development and maintenance of these cultures has been missed. In interviews with nine girls attending an all-girls’ school, the existence of a strong ‘appearance culture’ in the school was identified as a major influence on the body image concerns of students. Girls talked about the ways in which appearance-focused conversations, dieting, and weight monitoring occurred as part of the everyday interaction with friends and peers at school. They also identified many ways in which their school attempted to address body image concerns, although these attempts were often portrayed as ineffective, if not counter-productive. These findings suggest that attempts to address the body image concerns of students will need to be sensitive to the lived reality of appearance cultures within schools.

Spinning the pole: A discursive analysis of the websites of recreational pole dancing studios

Pole dancing is an activity that came to prominence in strip clubs. Despite its widespread reinvention as a fitness activity for women, pole dancing is still strongly associated with, and indeed trades on, its exotic, erotic and sexual connotations. In this article, we examine how the pole dancing industry portrays itself to potential participants via a discursive analysis of the websites of 15 major pole dancing studios in Australia. In particular, we examine some of the ways in which pole dancing trades on its erotic associations and capitalizes on the emerging postfeminist sensibility in western countries and its advocacy of empowerment through sexual agency, while at the same time promoting an alternative, ironic construction in which pole dancing is simply something a bit different – a novel way to get an upper body workout while having ‘a bit of a laugh’. We argue that the tensions between authenticity and parody uncovered by our analyses reflect a tension that infuses ‘raunch culture’ more widely, and discuss the insecurity and contingency of the ‘empowerment’ offered in these practices.

Body image concern among Australian adolescent girls: The role of body comparisons with models and peers

This study investigated the potential mediating roles of body comparisons with peers and models in the relationship between the internalization of thinness norms and body image concern. A total of 224 Western Australian girls aged 14-15 completed questionnaires assessing their endorsement of thinness norms, body image concerns, and frequency of body comparisons with peers and with models. Both targets of body comparisons were found to significantly mediate the relationship between the endorsement of thinness norms and body image concern, with body comparison with peers a stronger mediator than comparison with models. These findings show that body comparison with peers, in particular, plays a significant role in the experience of body image concerns among adolescent girls, and should be given a higher profile in programs designed to prevent or reduce body image concern.

As if Postfeminism Had Come True: The Turn to Agency in Cultural Studies of ‘Sexualisation’

Our aim in this chapter is to examine what we see as a ‘turn to agency’ within feminism, in the context of the widespread take-up and popularisation of postfeminist ideas. Our particular area of focus lies in the field of media and cultural studies, and, more specifically, the growing interest in the ‘sexualisation’ of culture - a much contested notion that speaks to the growing sense of Western societies as saturated by sexual representations and discourses. We will argue that whilst agency has always been important to feminist theorising, in some recent writing it seems to have become a veritable preoccupation, endlessly searched for, invoked, and championed. In this chapter, we will explore the striking parallels between what we argue is a neoliberal and postfeminist sensibility circulating in popular culture and some contemporary feminist theorising in which agency, choice, and empowerment are given prominence. Both the feminist writing about agency considered here, and the popular cultural postfeminist sensibility are marked by a celebration of the capacity of female subjects to make free and autonomous choices and by a corresponding downplaying or even complete evacuation of any notion of influence, let alone coercion or oppression. Both focus upon areas of women’s lives in which trenchant feminist critiques have been articulated - and are now contested. Both rely on highly individualistic formulations of agency, which are thought in terms of personal acts rather than collective struggles. Moreover, both frequently position themselves as critical of feminism and indict feminists not only for ignoring women’s agency but also for imposing an orthodoxy of ideological constructs that are variously harmful to women or stand in the way of them acting in their own true interests.

“Giving Guilt the Flick”? An Investigation of Mothers’ Talk About Guilt in Relation to Infant Feeding

Manuals offering advice to new parents on the topic of infant feeding have recently begun to attend to the possible implications of pro-breast-feeding discourses for mothers’ subjective experiences, particularly with respect to guilt. In this article, we present a discursive analysis of focus groups with 35 Australian mothers in which we examine how mothers discuss their infant-feeding practices and their related subjective experiences. We focus on how the mothers draw upon notions of “guilt,” “choice,” and “emotional self-control” to attend to the possibility of moral judgment over their infant-feeding practices. We highlight a construction of choice that dramatically restricts permissible reasons for not breast-feeding one’s infant and a pervasive view that guilt is a natural and appropriate response for “good” mothers who do not breast-feed. We argue that the incorporation of advice to mothers that they should “not feel guilty” is unrealistic in a context in which breast-feeding is so heavily advocated and that, rather than providing relief or comfort, this advice can create an additional burden for mothers who do not breast-feed. Finally, we reflect upon the implications of our findings in relation to the provision of public health information to women making choices around how to feed their infants.

Who Gets Played By ‘The Gender Card’? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Coverage of Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Sexism and Misogyny Speech in the Australian Print Media

This article is concerned with questions of sexism and misogyny in the context of post-feminism. It examines the particular case of former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech’, a rare instance of a woman in high political office directly accusing her opponent of sexism. Through a critical discourse analysis of the coverage of that speech in the Australian print media, the article explores the radical disjuncture between how the speech resonated with women, both in Australia and internationally, and its construction in the print media as an illegitimate and ill-conceived ‘playing of the gender card’. In forwarding this analysis, the article highlights how, in a post-feminist media environment, the possibilities for women of naming experiences of sexism are being closed down not least because such naming is positioned as a strategic choice on the part of women deployed only to gain advantage.

Deservingness and Gratitude in the Context of Heart Transplantation

Heart transplantation is now routinely offered as a treatment for end-stage heart failure, and the “gift-of-life” metaphor has become pervasive in this context, forming the foundation on which transplantation discourses rest. In this article, we question organ-as-gift understandings of transplantation. One can also legitimately think of the transplanted organ as a donation, with distinct implications in terms of the transplantation experience for the recipient. We explored the transplantation experience of 13 heart recipients in Australia. We conducted semistructured interviews, and our interpretative phenomenological analysis of the data resulted in three themes: deservingness, nuances of gratitude, and giving forward. Our results indicate that differences between organ-as-gift and organ-as-donation understandings of transplantation are more than merely semantic. Organ-as-donation understandings raise the issue of deservingness, with recipients’ assessments of their worthiness influencing their posttransplant experience of gratitude and, ultimately, the meaning(s) gleaned from their transplant experiences.

The moderating effects of socioeconomic status on relationships between obesity framing and stigmatization of fat people

Framings of “obesity” have been associated with more stigmatization of fat people when weight is presented as the result of individual behavior. No research to date has examined how the effects of “obesity” framing interact with demographic characteristics of the fat person being evaluated. In this study, 198 adult men and women read information about “obesity” presented in one of three frames: a standard individual responsibility frame, a frame emphasizing the role of “obesogenic” environments such as industrial food production and urban design, and a frame claiming that the harms of “obesity” have been overstated, before reading a brief description of an fat target person that varied on socioeconomic status (SES) and gender. Participants in the overstated framing condition rated the fat target as more competent and more moral compared to those in the individual responsibility condition, although this effect was restricted to high-SES targets. These findings are discussed in terms of the ideological functions of weight stigma.