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Abstract
This article explores visual discourses about over-40 and over-50 femininities that emerge from women’s own Instagram accounts. It analyses women’s visual and textual rhetoric of what over-40 and over-50 looks like, and whether it could interrupt the ageist, sexist, and body-normative discourses of female ageing and visibility. Intertextual visual discourse analysis of images, captions, and hashtags reveals two dominant themes (fitness and fashion) and two repeating rhetorical elements (motherhood and self-sufficiency) through which women make themselves visible as over-40/50. A few explicitly subversive discourses (i.e., over-40 fatshion account) exist, but a discourse of a healthy, fit, fashionable, independent, self-sufficient, and happy mother over-40/50 is prevalent. It easily lends itself to being interpreted as an insidious reproduction of post-feminist ideology, but I argue that there are moments of critique and subversion within. Thus, a reparative reading that acknowledges moments of disconnect from the discourse that normalizes ageing women’s limited or non-existent visibility is offered.
Notes
1. See Amy Schumer’s skit on Julia Louis Dreyfuss’ “Last fuckable day” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDz2kcjWpOs.
2. Tom Ford’s “Forever Love” photo-shoot in Paris Vogue (http://www.tomford.nl/blog/2010/12/04/tom-ford-forever-love/).
3. It has been noted that the MILF (acronym for Mother I’d Like to Fuck) label seems to be moving up in age. While in popular discourse MILF is a label for fit 30–50-year-old women (Wikipedia), it has been noted that in the porn industry it applies to women as young as 25 (Snow Citation2010).
4. Hashtags are “user-generated” (as opposed to created by platforms) descriptive annotations (Michele Zappavigna Citation2015). Hashtagging makes social media content searchable (generates machine-readable categories), but it is also used for the “distinctly rhetorical practice” of metacommunication (Alice R. Daer, Rebecca Hoffman, and Seth Goodman Citation2014, 2).
5. Not Safe For Work, mostly means sexually explicit content.
6. Pierre Bourdieu (Citation1990, 6–7) wrote that people’s photographic practices are governed by, and indicative of collective rules, class values, and social norms. Thus, what people deem photographable (what they take pictures of) expresses the shared norms in their society. I use photographability and un-photographability throughout the article to indicate apparent social norms about what is and what is not suited for, or worthy of capturing.
7. Sedgwick (Citation[1997] 2002) proposed a framework of reparative and paranoid hermeneutics. She saw the latter dominating a lot of queer and feminist writing, to the extent where “to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant” (Sedgwick Citation[1997] 2002, 126). Paranoid thinking is anticipatory, imitation based, generalizing, and functions as a strong theory of negative affects all leading up to triumphant uncovering of false consciousness, whereas reparative readings accept partial perspectives, and are open to surprise and consequently, hope (Sedgwick Citation[1997] 2002).
8. Instagram is an image- and video-sharing, smartphone-based social networking platform launched in 2010 and sold to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. By June 2016 Instagram had 500 million active users, 300 million of whom use the app every day (Instagram Blog, Citation2016). The bulk of images shared on Instagram are simple snapshots of everyday things.
9. I used a custom tool for which I thank Dr Gregory Minton.
10. An age-related hashtag has to be used at least 10 times for the account to be included in the corpus.
11. Called the “Love your body” discourse in some media analyses (cf. Gill and Elias Citation2014).
12. Acronym for Outfit of the Day, a popular style of selfies or selfie collages, that showcase an outfit and list its elements (often with brand precision).
13. Ten Years Younger is a UK makeover show aired on Channel 4, where participants are given a complete makeover, partially through plastic surgery.
14. Or motivational poster type images.
15. A neologism that combines fat and fashion.