“You’d look better with some lipstick on”: Employers’ aesthetic demands and online dissent discourses

This study examines how reluctant female employees comprehend and respond to employers’ informal aesthetic demands, through social media discourses. The corpus we analyze is “r/antiwork”, a subreddit of the Antiwork Community. We analyze r/antiwork threads about employers’ aesthetic demands by using a combination of grounded theory and discourse analysis. Our study identifies three discursive practices involved in the Reddit threads – “Construction of the ‘Other’”, “Reinstatement of normative views through individualistic rhetoric”, “Rhetoric of choice feminism”, and “Rhetoric of feminist consciousness”. The discourses in the threads also included potential responses (solutions) to the aesthetic demands – resistance, compliance (acquiescence), satirical compliance, and malicious compliance. Our study thus demonstrates how r/antiwork redditers challenge the microprocesses of power behind aesthetic demands discursively. Further data collection and analysis will be conducted to ensure the credibility and transferability of findings.