‘It takes a long time to become young’: A critical feminist intersectional study of Vogue’s Non-Issue

Abstract

Older female celebrities are increasingly visible in popular media culture, but what kinds of representations are being offered? By deploying a feminist intersectional perspective and adopting Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), this article interrogates how British Vogue’s Non-Issue communicates ideas and values about ageing and how the magazine constructs discourses through which women’s ageing is understood. The analysis shows that the Non-Issue represents older women as radical and empowered subjects. The rhetoric of freedom and choice, central to postfeminism, is prominent in the magazine and aligns with neoliberal discourses of successful ageing. Such discourses encourage women to confine themselves to never-ending, rigid forms of self-surveillance, self-monitoring and self-disciplining that ultimately subject the older female body to a ‘new’ set of bodily inscriptions and prescriptions that reinforce patriarchal standards of beauty. These standards of beauty are, however, challenged in the magazine through a recuperated do-it-yourself discourse of punk spirit rebellion that works to commodify women’s empowerment, yet still reduces women to how they look.