It’s just between girls: Negotiating the postfeminist gaze in women’s ‘looking talk’
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 11595352
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1177/0959353515626182
- Title of journal
- Feminism & Psychology
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 94
- Volume
- 26
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 0959-3535
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- February
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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2
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The article draws together two sets of data: one from women talking about sexiness (collected by Evans) and the other with women talking about drinking and nightlife, with a total of 44 interviewees. These two data sets are valuable, since they have not been brought together before yet represent areas of women’s lives that have undergone seismic shifts, creating both intense concern and celebration.
The authors use this data to understand how women make sense of looks shared between women, as a theme that occurred across both projects. While most theory on ‘the look’ or ‘the gaze’ focuses on men’s looks and male power, the authors propose a ‘postfeminist gaze’, where women are no longer understood to engage in appearance work for men, but instead experience a look shaped by judgement, self-scrutiny and surveillance, often between women.
The article has been widely cited in several disciplines, and the concept of the postfeminist gaze built on by others in research on gym culture, analyses of visual social media (especially Instagram) and advertising. It has also found an audience with PhD researchers around the world, and is taken up in theses submitted in America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The article was cited by Gill (Postfeminism and the New Cultural Life of Feminism, 2016; Surveillance is a Feminist Issue, 2019) as an important future direction for feminist researchers.
The work was presented by Evans at invited talks at Kings College (ESRC Sexualisation Series) Royal Holloway (Sociology Series), and at conferences at the Institute of Education (Pornified?) and LSE (British Sociological Association). It was reimagined as a public workshop, presented at Aberystwyth University’s ESRC Festival of Social Science.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -