“If you look great, you feel great”: Instagram and the Construction of Aesthetic Treatments as Technologies of the Self by Barboza, Romina Andrea, Arias, Valentina

“…From the analysis of four Instagram accounts oriented to the promotion of aesthetic treatments in Mendoza and four in-depth interviews with the doctors responsible for these accounts, we analyze, firstly, the conception of the body as a continuously perfectible project and the relations of tension and complementarity between classical aesthetic criteria and contemporary criteria; secondly, we describe the notion of the soul as an asymptotic project, with particular psychic and affective anchors and certain paradoxical tensions. We conclude that aesthetic treatments are constructed as technologies of the self, converging with an aesthetic/ethics fostered by the neoliberal ethos.…”
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