Ser/parecer jovem como uma virtude: usos e apropriações do instagram por mulheres de diferentes faixas etárias

Abstract

This work seeks to understand how the consumption of beauty content on Instagram affects the way women of different age groups produce meanings and understand (their) aging. Thus, the general objective is to observe how the consumption of content about aesthetics and rejuvenation on Instagram impacts the way women of different age groups produce meanings about their appearance, from the perspective of aging? For this, we delimited three specific objectives: a) understand how youth is seen as a value among the groups of women investigated; b) verify whether/how the social and cultural pressures that involve female aging impact these women's performances on networks; c) observe how the exchanges and construction of meanings about beauty and youth on Instagram reverberate in the way in which they construct their self-perception. This work is located within the studies of media appropriations (Bonin, 2016), which are inserted in the field of qualitative research focused on audience studies. This is a comparative research and, therefore, selects six women - two aged from thirty to thirty-nine years old, two from forty to forty-nine and two from fifty to fifty nine years old - to carry out in-depth semi-structured individual interviews. As a theoretical contribution to thinking about gender issues, it mainly presents investigations carried out by Ana Colling (2004), Heleieth Saffioti (1987), Joan Scott (2017), Linda Nicholson (2009) and Pierre Bourdieu (2022). To reflect on aspects related to female beauty, it relies on texts by Denise Sant'Anna (2022), Gilles Lipovetsky (1997), Joana de Vilhena Novaes (2010), Mary del Priore (2000) and Raquel Moreno (2012). With regard to issues involving youth and aging, it is based on the texts of Gisela Castro (2015; 2016), Guita Grin Debert (1997; 2011), Mirian Goldenberg (2008; 2011) and Paula Sibilia (2011). To think about networks, the non-neutrality of platforms and the action of subjects, it uses research carried out by José van Dijck; Thomas Poell; Martijn de Wall (2018), Eli Pariser (2012), Beatriz Polivanov (2019) and Beatriz Polivanov; Fernanda Carrera (2022). The analyzes point to a blurring of the meanings produced about beauty, health and female youth, which are often seen as synonymous. Furthermore, the understanding of “well aging” is directly linked to the hegemonic norm that imposes on women the denial of an aged appearance and to the aesthetic disseminated on Instagram that places youth as an ideal to be maintained and exalted. Taking care to preserve a youthful appearance is, for women, a way of distancing themselves from the negative stereotypes associated with old age and aging. Hence the need to critically reflect on the meanings that involve the aged appearance and that reinforce discourses that impose the denial of time that passes on female faces.