The Entrepreneurial Practices of Becoming a Doll

Adrienne Evans, Sarah Riley

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAesthetic Labour
Subtitle of host publicationRethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism
EditorsAna Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill, Christina Scharff
PublisherSpringer Nature
Pages133-148
Edition1st
ISBN (Print)978-1137477644, 1137477644
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Feb 2017

Publication series

NameDynamics of Virtual Work
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK

Keywords

  • aesthetic labour
  • postfeminism
  • living doll

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