The dream of eternal beauty: female body and the anti-aging discourse
beauty; female body; discourse; aging; advertising
The media, in alliance with consumer markets, presents the body as an object moldable to aesthetic standards socially determined (LE BRETON, 2013; LIPOVETSKY; SERROY, 2015; SANTAELLA, 2004), in addition to placing beauty as an obligation (NOVAES, 2006) and aging as a factor to be hidden, especially for women (SIBILIA, 2012), leveraging the cult of the body (CASTRO, 2007). We propose, then, to study the discursive strategies adopted by anti-aging cosmetic brands from the analysis of the discourse (FOUCAULT, 2008; 2014b) materialized in advertising pieces conveyed in the institutional Instagram profiles of the brands Avon, Beyoung, L'oreal, Payot and Vichy, paying attention to the criteria that enter into the problems of the technologies of the self (FOUCAULT, 2004) and the care of the self (FOUCAULT; 2010; 2020), both articulated as a way of producing subjectivity when dealing with the construction of the self by surveying the speeches of others. In this dissertation, we will seek to understand the effects of meaning produced around the female body, relating it to the concepts of beauty and aging (GOLDENBERG, 2015; SANT’ANNA, 2014) linked to physical appearance.