![]() ![]() Yet, as the age of digitized beauty progresses, alongside a growing personal capacity to technologically modify our own images as many in Western society, and other societies, now can, there is a greater need for discussion as to how this is affecting women’s relationship to their bodies. The relationship between women and media representations of beauty, sex and youth have been extensively explored and critiqued by gender and feminist theorists alike (such as Susan Bordo, 1993 Amy Shields Dobson, 2007, 2011, 2014 Susie Orbach, 2009). It is seen as reproductive, sexual, insatiable, as a commodity, a place of purity, as Mary and Eve, of sin and flesh and monstrous appetites-a map of spatial, temporal and lived female experiences. The female body has continuously been a battlefield of diverging concepts, regulations, values and modifications. This article is published as part of a collection dedicated to multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives on gender studies. Ultimately, this article offers an initial exploration into how this digitized dsymorphia affects our perception of self individually and as a collective society. Alternatively, perhaps this enablement irrevocably changes definitions of “normativity” as we alter our relations to the body and image. How do these online ideal images affect women’s relationships to their material bodies, do these digital images provide the freedom to express a self that would otherwise be overlooked or simply accentuate the disparity between female bodies and the images women feel they must embody? In positing the new term of “Digitised Dysmorphia”, I question whether transforming oneself into a virtual ideal, manipulating the image, is an act of dissidence, or a demonstration of how fully regulated we are by social norms, whereby digital modifications simply enable us to reach normative ideals. Not only do we critique our bodies in mirrors, but now we can digitize our dysmorphia by virtually modifying what we dislike, creating “perfect” selves instead. ![]() Nowadays, particularly in Western culture, we can digitally alter ourselves through Photoshop and apps such as Perfect365, producing our own notions of normativity. Yet, media no longer has exclusive power over regulating representations of female aesthetics. What has the digitization of female appearances, the altering of female bodies not only in media but individually among the general public through the use of apps, done to human sexual interactions and senses of self? Western society’s booming beauty and sex industries have hyper-sexualised society, over-selling the female image as a currency and commodity of desire. ![]()
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