Death, Flesh, and Consequences: Ethnographic Tracings of Skincare Culture and Consumptive Performativity Online

• In Event: 20220 - Section on Communication, Information Technology, and Media Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Section on Communication, Information Technology, and Media Sociology Roundtable VII: Social Media III

Abstract

“Beauty” may be a subjective term, but it is far from nebulous. A petite nose, flawless light skin, and big eyes and lips are distinctly Western ideals. These expectations are frequently re-produced online via short-form video content in an online space known colloquially as “SkinTok”. Here, users showcase their skincare routines and retail-level quantities of aesthetically packaged beauty products stored in their bedrooms. The sheer volume of products in combination with their effortless application on glowing, always youthful skin create a digital content-genre oriented around what we call a consumptive performativity. Here, the mundane embodiment of a “soft,” feminized consumer equips white neoliberal feminism with the ability to easily overlook the harmful consequences of mass production and consumption.
Occasional critiques of these videos by other users are rapidly neutralized by comments that allege creators “have a right to spend their money however they want,” or by infantilizing lines like “I’m just a girl”. While the latter claim performs feminine innocence as inevitably ignorant, arguments about one’s right-to-consume erase long strings of global economic relations, systems of waste management, and human rights abuses. In this sense, digital skincare content eschews death and consequences at multiple scales — first by “delaying” and disparaging aging, and second by avoiding the death, sickness, exploitation, and pollution produced by these global supply chains.
In this paper, we use digital ethnographic research to argue that the practices employed by these short-form content creators emerge passively from contemporary neoliberal, white and male supremacist ontologies. Further, we link the obsessive avoidance of aging in online beauty spaces with our cultural tendency to remove signs of mortality from view. By examining neoliberal relations between death, flesh, and the consequences of consumption, we work to qualify how gendered, raced, economic, and bodily processes maintain the allure of feminine consumptive performativity.

Authors

• Melody Devries, Allegheny College

• Sam Heilmann, Allegheny College