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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Lithuanian women’s pursuit of authenticity oscillates between empowerment and new norms. Framed as freedom and self-expression, authenticity also becomes an obligation, shaping bodies, beauty practices, and self-perception in a polarized cultural landscape.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how contemporary lithuanian women negotiate individuality and authenticity in a polarized socio-cultural context shaped by both emancipatory ideals and normative pressures. Theoretically, authenticity is approached as a field of negotiation between inner selfhood and external norms, as a performative script, a form of bodily capitalization, and a neoliberal obligation of continuous self-optimization. This perspective allows everyday beauty and body practices to be analyzed as sites where self-expression and conformity, emancipation and control, are constantly balanced.

In today’s polarized world, women experience a double bind. Public discourse promotes self-acceptance, body diversity, and authenticity, while beauty industries, social media, and visual culture intensify standardized aesthetic and emotional norms. As a result, the lithuanian female “self” in 21st-century is constructed between proclaimed freedom of choice and clearly defined boundaries imposed by media, family, professional environments, and cultural stereotypes.

Empirical survey data reveal that authenticity operates through two interconnected poles. On the one hand, it empowers women through narratives of confidence and self-worth (“be yourself,” “trust yourself”). On the other hand, it functions as a disciplinary regime demanding to be “authentically correct”: emotionally resilient, aesthetically moderate, orderly, and socially acceptable. Deviations acquire moral and psychological significance. Empowerment and control thus emerge simultaneously from the same cultural logic.

Finally, the study identifies six interrelated phases in women’s search for individuality, conceptualized as a dynamic mechanism of the authenticity norm. Individuality appears not as an achieved state but as an ongoing, never fully completed process shaped by contemporary body politics.