Do human bodies only exist in their physiological frame? The question may appear common-sensical. But a critical sociological analysis would delve deep to uncover that bodies are socially constituted, reflecting the times they inhabit. ‘Bodies’ today embody complex sensorial experiences. They reflect global trends. Neo-liberalisation, transnational migration, digitalisation and competitive narrativization rapidly distance the human bodies from their locale to dispersed globality.
In this, the role of celebrity or the social media influencer and the ‘celeb’ culture all have a role to play. They prompt and sometimes ‘finance’ the celebs’ bodies, tweaking it with multiple surgeries, laser treatments, radiation and Botox injections, while setting the bar high for unrealistic or even (un)human bodily standards. Such forms of practice are not only about the labour of acting in movies or becoming ‘influencers’, but also for garnering followers for social media handles. The more they contour their cheekbones with painful surgeries, the more they sharpen it or remove buckled fat from their face, and the more they make it camera-friendly (or dwell in a technocratic world), they reproduce their chiselled bodies as spheres of modern cultural shifts. So, ‘techno-faces’ and bodies today project a complex tie of gender, class and digital lifeways.
Beauty with Needles
On 27th June, 2025, India received the tragic news of celebrity Shefali Jariwala’s untimely death. The cause of her death was determined to be her anti-ageing medications and a range of glutathione injections that were made worse by consuming stale fried rice the night before she passed away (PTI, 2025). Similarly, Chethana Raj, a popular South Indian actress in her early 20s, passed away in 2022 due to her plastic surgeries and fat-free procedures (Ghosh, 2022). The list of such cases is unfortunately long. Extreme weight-loss diets and fashionable appeals are often made without proper supervision or checking the nutritional balance of the body. This results in not only deep physiological and social crisis manoeuvred through an achievement-oriented ideology of contemporary or ‘liberated’ femininity, but also represents the vulnerable gendered stereotypes, ethics and binaries, normalised by mass media. Such publicity of performing surgeries or cosmetic procedures by celebs, or the usages of organic or natural ingredients for radiant skin tones (the viral trend of Korean ‘glass skin’) create a situation of paradox between subversive marginality and middle-class(ness) vis-à-vis the aspirational upper-classness. This is essentially about a symbolic notion of mobility rather than tangible material mobility.
This entire process can be seen as ‘techno-femininity’. Techno-femininity can be a covert expression of divisive femininity, where accessibility to digital and technological resources plays an important role in indicating hegemonic socio-psychological processes of feminisation. For e.g., photographs are being taken with certain poses and cameras, being influenced by celebs. Relatively, the viral practices of cosmetic skin care and the claims of all-positive benefits of such creams, serums and lasers for our skin, are no less than what Baudrillard (1994) frames as ‘simulation’, i.e., ‘generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’ (p. 1). Relatively, such hyperreal faces and the bodies of the celebrities function as material objectification vis-à-vis asymmetrical inclusivity. This too points to the functioning of an economy of self-care where some of the social influencers promote cosmetics from their chosen brands or brands that sponsor their YouTube channels, emotionally inform their product quality and their journey to skin care as the ‘best’. Such best forms, brands or products then indicate a way of re-normalising or idealising the face or skin through systems of not mere embodied realities but structures of media, medicine and digital markets. Human bodies are processed more as a technological icon, shaping the dynamic of capitalistic accumulation. In other words, as societies are rapidly transforming cultural, economic and political sociability through a consumerist and content-driven (the financialization of life and knowledge) age, the graphed bodies with measurement of cheeks, lips, jaws, etc., connotes a developmental rhetoric of work, labour and governmentality of feminine perfection.
The Quest for Social Desirability
The influences of stereotyping or digitally mediating discourses of subservient femininity then make beauty ‘mechanised’, to be sustained through the market economy and not necessarily agentic or self-actualisation. In observing, meeting, interacting, and conducting case studies with some of the students pursuing their undergraduate and postgraduation courses, I realised how age and gender, along with the emerging digital-social codes, circulate the power flows that then control bodies. This shapes one’s social participation, attributes of desirability and essence of personification.
One such case of Seema, a 20-year-old student living in Guwahati, who is a ‘Gen Z’, reflects this vividly. Facing racist slurs throughout her college days due to her dark skin, she now aspires for a skin-lightening treatment. In a quest to save money for affording such treatments, she performs a range of jobs, like working as an assistant for a photocopy shop in the evening and managing her college schedule during the day. She conceives her multi-tasking hands as an ‘agency’, being able to think about and work hard for such expensive treatments, while coming from a lower-middle-class family.
It is the moral and socially-entitled definitions diffused through interactions, relations and digital presentation of ‘self’ in huge social media networks that reproduce idealised versions of skin-type. In a way, it is the culture of media imperialism that overpowers the biological explanations for different skin types. Even if Seema’s family could have saved Seema’s money for her future education and aspirations, the money is now being stored for her ruptured selfhood in turning pushing the family to a deeper financial crisis. It is this circle of extraction and objectification that processes how ‘social inequalities’ are ‘articulated through various features of the body … in terms of corporeal imperialism’ (Shilling, 2016, pp. 5 – 6). As Seema follows various Indian celebrities and aspires to follow their lifestyles as well as diets, she invests a substantial amount of money in some exotic or imported fruits like avocados, dragon fruit, or other items of consumption like almond milk. In a way, it is the changing gustatory and material body practices from everyday familial food habits (lentils, rice, fruits) and affordable skin care (applying gram flour on her face) to a more distant, trendy yet class symbolic experiences, that concretise her liminality. So, today, liminality or the dichotomy between one’s embodied knowledge, beauty and discursive media socialisation is turning into what Foucault (1977) would refer to as sites of ‘power’ invested through the ‘political technology of the body’ (p. 24).
References
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbour: The University of Michigan Press.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
Ghosh, S. (2022). Kannada actor Chetana Raj’s death: How safe is fat removal surgery? The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/health/kannada-actor-chetana-rajs-death-how-safe-is-fat-removal-surgery-7922210/
PTI (2025, June 30). Shefali Jariwala’s death: Medicines on an empty stomach may have caused blood pressure drop, say cops. https://www.ptinews.com/editor-detail/Shefali-Jariwala-death–Medicines-on-empty-stomach-may-have-caused-blood-pressure-drop–say-cops/2687718
Shilling, C. (2016). The Rise of Body Studies and the Embodiment of Society: A Review of the Field. Horizons in Humanities and Social Sciences: An International Refereed Journal, 1, 1 – 14.
***
Ahana Choudhury is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Work, Girijananda Chowdhury University, Guwahati.