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Paper short abstract

We examine the body projects associated with two transitional periods in women’s lives (pregnancy/postpartum and perimenopause/postmenopause), both of them aesthetically anticipated and treated as requiring corrective measures, shaped by digital cultures and neoliberal regimes of responsibility.

Paper long abstract

Relationships with one’s corporeality situate themselves at the intersection of identity, appearance, and social aspirations in the context of late capitalism, heavily influenced by digital cultures and neoliberal regimes of responsibility. In this paper, we employ an autoethnographic lens to discuss the body projects associated with two transitional periods in women’s lives, both of which are felt physically with great intensity and clearly marked culturally: pregnancy and postpartum, on the one hand, and perimenopause and postmenopause, on the other. Both periods are aesthetically anticipated and treated as requiring “corrective” measures, oftentimes before any change is visible at all. We examine the body as a dynamic site of investment, judgment, and negotiation. Female bodies are not only subject to specific (double) standards but recently function within a regime of increasingly ephemeral, internally contradictory, and axiologically ambivalent norms. This normative instability opens up new spaces for practices that do not fit into simple binaries of subordination and transgression and, as such, require nuanced tools of description. In reflecting upon the socio-cultural conditionings of the female body and its transformation through adopted (or rejected) practices, we employ our age difference as a temporal pivot for our methodology. In this way, we examine socio-cultural mechanisms not as abstract structures, but through forces that act on the body in real and virtual ways, shaping, disciplining, and negotiating it in everyday practices.