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Tyred out: Natural aging and aesthetic labor in Pirelli's 2017 calendar
,
Rebecca Whiting
Gender, Work & Organization, Volume: 29, Issue: 5, Pages: 1562 - 1577
Swansea University Author:
Katrina Pritchard
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DOI (Published version): 10.1111/gwao.12849
Abstract
We review how natural aging is constructed in contemporary media discourse by examining coverage of the 2017 Pirelli calendar. While highly digitized and provocative representations of youthfulness might be readily associated with this calendar, the 2017 edition featured actors aged 28–71, shot in b...
| Published in: | Gender, Work & Organization |
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| ISSN: | 0968-6673 1468-0432 |
| Published: |
Wiley
2022
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa59780 |
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| Abstract: |
We review how natural aging is constructed in contemporary media discourse by examining coverage of the 2017 Pirelli calendar. While highly digitized and provocative representations of youthfulness might be readily associated with this calendar, the 2017 edition featured actors aged 28–71, shot in black and white with limited makeup and apparently no digitization. As older women we reflexively examine this exposure of how women might age naturally; and discursively unpack tensions surrounding understandings of beauty and empowerment across media coverage. We suggest the Pirelli calendar is a complex media production, with impact that extends far beyond the product itself, spreading through the economic system and connecting tyres to art in the process. We progress understandings of aesthetic labor across the lifecourse, offer further development of the beauty and empowerment tensions embedded in the aesthetics of natural aging and explain how natural aging facilitates a multi-layered process of binding. |
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| Keywords: |
age; beauty; digitalization; aesthetic labor; qualitative research |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Issue: |
5 |
| Start Page: |
1562 |
| End Page: |
1577 |