The Entrepreneurial Practices of Becoming a Doll

This chapter explores the aesthetic labour of Anastasiya Shpagina (aka Anime Girl), whose beauty and body work through online makeup tutorials and celebrity imitations align her to the ‘living dolls movement’, where women engage in constant practices of self-transformation to appear doll-like. We argue that Shpagina’s aesthetics is an example of a transnational postfeminist entrepreneurial subjectivity that has emerged from a post-Soviet context and borrows heavily on Japanese kawaii culture and Western constructs of self-branding. In this chapter, we show how the promise of a transnational postfeminism is located in feminine beauty practices, flexible labour and affective economies, and the production of the self-as-commerce-and-commodity. Together, these perform a digital global assemblagistic restructuring of femininity and new modes of governance in relation to authenticity and freedom.