Technique on Fleek: Digital Beauty Practices in the Age of Instagram

• In Event: Technoscience, Aesthetics, and the Senses - II

Abstract

The starting point for this paper is an old question about the relationship between digital technology, materiality, and the body. However, rather than return to the somewhat intractable question of what digital technologies are, I will shift attention to what such technologies do and what their relationship might be to aesthetic and embodied practices. More specifically, I argue that digital platforms such as YouTube and Instagram, and related technologies such as smartphone cameras, play a key role in the co-construction of new sensory and aesthetic modalities. Many of these developments are, unsurprisingly, ocularcentric and give rise to new ‘ways of seeing’ of both objects and bodies. This paper will focus on an aesthetic practice that titillates an array of the senses, namely something known as ‘Instagram makeup’. Using various sources such as online makeup tutorials, selfie photography, and in-depth interviews with makeup practitioners, I explore how an online visual regime is reproduced on the skin and through the manual labour of those who apply makeup. The establishment and sharing of such makeup techniques results in the modification and reaffirmation of particular pre-existing notions of gender and race into new constellations of meaning and practice. Analysing how innovation in beauty practices is enacted both on digital platforms and with embodied digits, will, it is hoped, contribute to a deeper understanding of how femininity and gender are entangled with neoliberal beauty politics and emerging categories of technique, aesthetics, and embodiment.

Author

• Chris Hesselbein, Cornell University STS