The glowy: the aesthetics of transparency in postfeminist "wellness" culture

Abstract

Over the past ten years or so, across the physical and virtual spaces of postfeminist culture, a novel aesthetic category has quietly but insistently taken hold: the glowy. In this article, I contextualise the glowy as the archetypal aesthetic of what has become known as “wellness culture,” an outgrowth of postfeminist culture that promotes the pursuit of an optimized state of physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing. At the same time, I make an argument about the glowy that challenges one of the central assumptions of scholarship on wellness culture. This is the assumption that wellness culture marks a turn, across postfeminist culture more broadly, from “outside” to “inside,” such that new forms of psychic discipline now flourish alongside longer-standing forms of bodily discipline. Resisting this reading, I argue that the rise of the glowy reflects not a turn from the cosmetic domain to the psychic domain but a collapse of the boundaries between these two realms. To sustain this argument, I draw on wellness content from prominent international fashion and lifestyle publications Elle and Vogue, as well as from the promotional material of key wellness brands and products.