“If you look great, you feel great”: Instagram and the Construction of Aesthetic Treatments as Technologies of the Self

Abstract

Minimally invasive aesthetic treatments, such as hyaluronic acid and botulinum toxin injections to fill and shape different parts of the face, have recently become particularly popular in Argentina. The use of the Instagram platform for the promotion of these services is also widespread among doctors and aesthetic clinics. Thus, this social network becomes a space where professionals show, describe, explain and encourage this type of procedures. Our research aims to analyze the meanings that revolve around these treatments, focusing on the conception of the body that underlies these practices, the aesthetic criteria that are put into play, the forms of interpellation to women as the main consumers of these services and the transformations they promise. 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.