Visibly ageing femininities: women’s visual discourses of being over-40 and over-50 on Instagram

Abstract

This article explores visual discourses about over-40 and over-50 femininities that emerge from women’s own Instagram accounts. It analyses women’s visual and textual rhetoric of what over-40 and over-50 looks like, and whether it could interrupt the ageist, sexist, and body-normative discourses of female ageing and visibility. Intertextual visual discourse analysis of images, captions, and hashtags reveals two dominant themes (fitness and fashion) and two repeating rhetorical elements (motherhood and self-sufficiency) through which women make themselves visible as over-40/50. A few explicitly subversive discourses (i.e., over-40 fatshion account) exist, but a discourse of a healthy, fit, fashionable, independent, self-sufficient, and happy mother over-40/50 is prevalent. It easily lends itself to being interpreted as an insidious reproduction of post-feminist ideology, but I argue that there are moments of critique and subversion within. Thus, a reparative reading that acknowledges moments of disconnect from the discourse that normalizes ageing women’s limited or non-existent visibility is offered.     

A Maternal Heart: Angelina Jolie,choices of maternity,and hegemonic femininity in People magazine

In the last decade practices of celebrity transnational adoption have garnered a significant amount of media attention. Through an analysis of transnational adoption as a site of morality where ideals of femininity are enacted and embodied, this paper brings together celebrity studies, theories of maternity, and literature on adoption in pursuit of studying hegemonic femininity as a social phenomenon spread by media discourses. Focusing on Angelina Jolie as an epistemic individual, this paper draws on concepts of female moral authority, global motherhood, and successful femininity to explore the ways transnational adoption adheres to norms of femininity and norms of racial hierarchy in an era of autonomy and choice. In a critical discourse analysis of articles covering Jolie’s transnational adoptions from People magazine, narratives of choice, individualism, and mobility emerge. Such narratives contribute to Jolie's hegemonic position as a globe-trotting, mobile figure of successful femininity made possible by her position in gendered, raced, and classed hierarchies. Jolie's presence in the mediascape continues to signal boundaries of femininity through choices enabled and constrained by historical ideals of motherhood, global dynamics of transnational adoption, and expectations of female moral authority.     

Indigenizing girl power

This article considers the intersection of girlhood, agency, and indigenousness through a reading of the internationally renowned film Whale Rider. I suggest that Whale Rider presents a double project that resymbolizes girlhood as it also produces a “decolonizing of the screen.” On the one hand the film resonates with what emerged in the 1990s as the assertion of “girl power” and the notion of a new, active, powerful and agentic femininity. On the other hand, the film mobilizes a re-articulation of these discourses of “new femininities” by “indigenizing the image” of the empowered girl.     

‘Girls Who Do Boys Like They're Girls’? Exploring the Role of Gender in the Junior Management of Contemporary Service Work

This article attempts to explain the clustering of women managers at junior managerial grades in the service sector by focusing on the structuring and organization of work in a call centre. The article is based on an ethnography of an organization and seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate in gender research by exploring and documenting the requirement for the enactment of masculinities at work for successful managers. Central to our account is the role of team leader which, as a junior management position, occupies a key role in understanding and accounting for the gendered hierarchical terrain of contemporary service‐based organizations. In exploring the role of team leader, a position that tends overwhelmingly to be held by female staff, we draw attention to the perception of the gendered nature of the role by subordinate members of the organization, the team‐leaders themselves and more senior managers. The position is also brought into sharp relief in comparison with the subordinate role of the ‘problem manager’, a position overwhelmingly held by men.     

‘Doing femininity’ at work: More than just relational practice1

Workplaces constitute one of the more interesting sites where individuals ‘do gender’, while at the same time constructing their professional identities and meeting their organisation's expectations. Drawing on interactional data recorded in New Zealand professional organisations, this paper focuses in particular on how participants manage and interpret the notion of ‘femininity’ in workplace discourse. In much current usage, the concepts ‘feminine’ and ‘femininity’ typically evoke negative reactions. Our analysis suggests these notions can be reclaimed and reinterpreted positively using an approach which frames doing femininity at work as normal, unmarked, and effective workplace behaviour in many contexts. The analysis also demonstrates that multiple femininities extend beyond normative expectations, such as enacting relational practice ( Fletcher 1999 ), to embrace more contestive and parodic instantiations of femininity in workplace talk.     

New women,old messages? Constructions of femininities,race and hypersexualised bodies in selected South African magazines, 2003–2006

This article discusses the ways in which racialised femininities are differently presented as hyper(hetero)sexual in three South African magazines targeting female readers – Femina, Fair Lady and True Love – between 2003 Fair Lady. 2003. RoC. Fair Lady, : 71 [Google Scholar] and 2006. I argue that the bodily work women are expected to perform is determined by constructs of race, where women are advised to regulate and control their physical bodies as a means of maintaining (hetero)sexual desirability or becoming (hetero)sexually desirable. I discuss how the racist portrayal of black womanhood in magazine advertisements that target white female readers of Femina and Fair Lady are sexualised in ways that define the black female body as alluring and exotic. My discussion reveals that the privileging of white heterofemininity in all three magazines as normative and ideal, simultaneously defines black women as the embodiment of a racialised (hetero)sexuality – at times mediated by essentialist ideas of Africa – which echoes racist colonial discourse and defines black women as essentially different.     

婚恋交友节目中“女性气质”的话语构建——以江苏卫视《非诚勿扰》为例

通过对《非诚勿扰》样本的批评话语分析,研究时下盛行的电视婚恋节目对＂女性气质＂的话语构建。研究发现：虽然女性敢于在公共场所展现自己,参加相亲,体现了时代的进步元素,但节目的＂女性气质＂构建比较单一、刻板,主要表现了以男性为主体、男女二元对立等传统观念。由于节目本身的限制,当代多元化女性气质,如智慧、主动、独立个性等方面涉及较少,在节目话语中未能得到充分展示。并且,＂女性气质＂单一的建构无法真实反映现实生活,不利于社会性别关系的健康发展。