Rostidade filtrada: a construção do feminino entre photoshop, inteligência artificial e neoliberalismo

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the constitution of contemporary aesthetic identity through the concept of faciality, considering two fundamental axes: the field of femininity and the socio-historical context. We proposed to investigate the logic of neoliberalism, contemporary technologies of facial image modification—whether virtual or physical—and their effects on forms of social bonding. We developed an intra- and interpsychic account of the subjective constitution of aesthetic identity. Within this framework, the face was understood as the privileged representative of the body image, and the concept of faciality was proposed as a theoretical operator for understanding the constitution of contemporary aesthetic identity. The study focused on the physiognomic modifications of girls and women, driven by neoliberal rationality and electronic devices that foster the construction of a self-referential ego ideal at the expense of relational formation. Methodologically, we conducted a psychoanalytically oriented literature review, which enabled both an examination of the prevailing social discourse and an analysis of narrative excerpts used to illustrate and critically engage with the theoretical formulations. The findings indicate that the constitutive lacks inherent to narcissistic experience permeate all subjective constitution and that no aesthetic procedure, technique, or intervention is capable of eliminating them. Accordingly, we examined the phenomenon by emphasizing its role as a mode of managing contemporary social malaise through its excessive manifestations, understood as strategies for coping with the discontents of contemporary life. These manifestations reveal the unconscious's resistance to the erasure of alterity, sustained by prostheses of the ideal ego constituted as fetishized phallic objects. Finally, we sought to avoid a reductionist or moralizing interpretation of the phenomenon, remaining aligned with psychoanalytic ethics as a critical and interpretive framework.