Bearded, Mustached, and Hairy, but Looking Pretty. Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, Biopolitics and Normative Femininity

Femininity standards have served as social control, they have been an instrument of biopower designed to maintain the capitalist social, political, and economic system in which female bodies are considered devices that produce capital. Beauty practices, among them hair removal, are a mandate for women’s bodies to turn them into desirable objects to attract and please men. However, women with hirsutism due to Polycystic Ovary Syndrome are naturally unable to comply these duties, as this disorder causes hair growth. Therefore, is necessary to ask: how female identity was transformed by suffering hirsutism due to PCOS? And how does it relate to biopolitics and social reproduction? To answer we analyzed different experiences through multimodal discourse analysis. The results indicate that in the face of violence and exclusion, women had to transform their identity by the adaptation of femininity to an attainable goal. Also, by presenting their non-conformist bodies to the media with an emancipatory message against the imposition of the prevailing canons of beauty.