From the end of the 20th century onwards, new forms of politically emptied feminist thinking, collectively called postfeminisms, have emerged in Western society, with the values of individualism, consumerism, and pleasure at the forefront. A woman is presented as autonomous and empowered and able to make her own decisions about various aspects of her life. One of these is also the decision to grow body hair. The norm of women's hairlessness pervades much of Western culture; it is the predominant beauty ideal, which also brings with it sexist ideologies. The diploma thesis aims to use qualitative multimodal and critical discourse analysis to explore the meanings of a specific example of showing the hairiness of a model as a representative of embodied beauty ideals on Instagram. Value judgements in the comments in response to the published photo are also explored. The main findings are that women's hairlessness is one way of defining the female body as unacceptable in its natural form and that the model posted the photo in the name of feminism, but it is devoid of political charge and is set within postfeminist and patriarchal frameworks. Sexism can be detected in some comments and postfeminist rhetoric in others. The analysis shows that we live in a time of gender inequality, although postfeminism says that equality between women and men has been achieved. The analysis shows that traditional gender ideologies are present in Western society and are also reproduced through the language used.
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