To Örebro University

Older female celebrities are increasingly visible in popular media culture, but what kinds of representations are being offered? By deploying a feminist intersectional perspective and adopting Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), this article interrogates how British Vogue’s Non-Issue communicates ideas and values about ageing and how the magazine constructs discourses through which women’s ageing is understood. The analysis shows that the Non-Issue represents older women as radical and empowered subjects. The rhetoric of freedom and choice, central to postfeminism, is prominent in the magazine and aligns with neoliberal discourses of successful ageing. Such discourses encourage women to confine themselves to never-ending, rigid forms of self-surveillance, self-monitoring and self-disciplining that ultimately subject the older female body to a ‘new’ set of bodily inscriptions and prescriptions that reinforce patriarchal standards of beauty. These standards of beauty are, however, challenged in the magazine through a recuperated do-it-yourself discourse of punk spirit rebellion that works to commodify women’s empowerment, yet still reduces women to how they look.

In the present time, we see a rapid development of so-called cosmetic apps promoted by prominent cosmetic companies. Although there is an emerging market for male consumers, these apps are marketed as technological innovations designed to analyse, rate and evaluate mainly women’s facial appearances through the submission of a selfie. Based on the results generated from the selfie, personalised solutions are offered in the form of recommended products to supposedly help women improve their appearances. Drawing on a critical feminist approach and using multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), the aim of this article is to study how these evaluations are semiotically reproduced and presented to the users. The paper examines in detail how apps convey the evaluation process and transform a selfie into measures, presented through diagrams and charts, that is, how the female face is fragmented and metricised. Coming with affordances of being systematic, exact and scientific, these infographics assign the facial evaluations with meaning. A key argument is that these cosmetic apps are changing the way women are implied to consider and control their (facial) appearance. Following neoliberal notions, the apps put strong pressure on women to take the responsibility to engage in intensive forms of aesthetic labour and to consume the ‘right’ products to appear as the best versions of themselves.

This study draws on the theory of Social Semiotics and the methodology of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to examine the textual and visual design of skincare advertisements targeted towards men. The current proliferation of the market for male-oriented facial products represents an important shift towards the increased attention to the beautification of male bodies in Western societies. Such beautification encourages men to work on and improve the self (and face) through intensifying practices of “aesthetic labour.” Aesthetic labour places emphasis on an entrepreneurial self-care and self-control regime that promotes an active late lifestyle fostered through ideas about “successful ageing.” As expected, the analysis of the corpus consisting of advertisements from L'Oréal Men, Nivea Men and Clarins Men shows that the male face is generally constructed as a “problem” that can be cured through the consumption of skincare products. The consumption of these products increases men's visual literacies of the face and hence normalises male beauty practices that seemingly encourage men to care for and work on their skin, which can be construed of as a feminising practice. Nonetheless, the advertisements employ masculine traits and strategies that link cosmetic products to traditional values of masculinity. The beautification of the male body, thus, turns the consumption of skincare products into a performance through which men can maintain their already privileged status in society, rearticulating the double standard of ageing (Sontag, 1972).

This paper examines the marketing of trending green cosmetic products containing natural ingredients and coming with claims to keep skin health-enhancing and age-defying benefits. This is fostered by the growing importance of successful ageing and the neoliberal self-care agenda. Adopting the notion of "integrated design" from Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), this paper looks at the communicative affordances of the web and how marketers of "green" cosmetics connect these to science. The analysis shows that the integrated design of the webpages allows cosmetic companies to connote science while glossing over significant details, leaving causalities, classifications, and processes unspecified. This marketing frames fighting the "look" of ageing as a moral and ethical consumption choice. Such choices relate to self-care regimes of a "successful" neoliberal citizenship.

This thesis examines the intersection between representations of ageing femininities, empowerment, and oppression in marketing and advertising practices, within the context of successful ageing. In the current era of population ageing, debates on gender and ageing are becoming more pronounced. Due to population ageing, there is a visible increase in representations of (successful) ageing in the media. As a result, we are experiencing an expansion in the “grey market” of anti-ageing products and services, e.g., cosmetics, mainly aimed at wealthy older women who constitute an important market segment for such. Given that the media helps form people’s ideas about ageing, there is a need to critically examine this growing market and how older women are represented and/or addressed in it. Such representations are crucial for understanding contemporary feminist discussions on the contestation between women’s empowerment and oppression. To provide a deeper understanding of this phenomenon, I use an intersectional feminist perspective combined with the methodology of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA). This perspective highlights and deconstructs the complex ways in which power and ideology work to maintain and reinforce existing intersectional structural inequalities based on age, gender, class, and race that marginalise women. This thesis consists of three empirical studies. The findings suggest a shift from the postfeminist gaze towards a neoliberal self-objectifying gaze that closely operates alongside discourses of successful ageing. This self-objectifying gaze encourages women to actively work on and transform the ageing self through intensifying self-surveillance, self-scrutiny, and self-improvement practices. These self-transformation practices are presented as the free choices of empowered, entrepreneurial, and responsibilised subjects. Nonetheless, such choices confine women to never-ending forms of self-governance that promote the internalisation of patriarchal and capitalist ideal standards of beauty, thus reinscribing privilege and oppression.

This study focuses on the recent increase in the use of older celebrities in cosmetics advertising. It asks what kinds of ideas and values these images may attribute to discourses of ageing. Drawing on a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) perspective, this study focuses on L'Oreal UK and Ireland Web advertisements, examining how these advertisements use older celebrities to redefine/reposition ageing and exploring how they relate to the notion of 'successful ageing'. In these advertisements, using cosmetics is presented as a positive, empowering choice. The advertisements simultaneously promote new discourses about ageing in which older women's sexuality is presented as a form of power. However, the analysis shows that the underlying discourse pathologises ageing and presents ageing as something which can be evaded through the consumption of cosmetics. It thus turns ageing into a choice, but one where the 'right choice' aligns with neo-liberal ideas about ageing well. For women, decision-making about ageing seems to be a never-ending process that requires constant construction, promoted through the older celebrity's sexualisation. Women are expected to always look good and present the best versions of themselves, even at the latest stages of life, which reproduces and legitimises sexist and ageist expectations about women's appearances, including the expectations that for older women to remain visible and attractive, they must hide outward signs of ageing.