Beauty Culture in the Digital Era: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Ellen Atlanta’s Pixel Flesh (2024)

Abstract

This paper provides a critical corpus-based discourse and narrative analysis of the Pixel Flesh (2024) by Ellen Atlanta to explore the framed discourse of toxic beauty culture and its harmful impacts on women and girls during the digital era. The study is based on the quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis of the full book text as the main corpus, combining the quantitative (frequency of the keyword, collocation, Key Words in Context (KWIC)) and the qualitative (narrative and critical discourse) methods of analyzing the text. Findings indicate that the lexemes like women, girls, beauty culture, online, image, nude and harm constitute lexical core of the text. Beauty culture is implicated with such discourses as objectification, self-commodification, platform-mediated violence and counterproductive so-called empowerment in strong collocational networks. Atlanta creates an impressive story that reveals the overlaps of capitalism, patriarchy, and racialized beauty ideals and points out the postpartum pressures on the body and digital surveillance. The discussion indicates how the book undermines postfeminist concepts on choice by portraying beauty practices as culturally coercive as opposed to liberating. This study has added to the study of feminist media and discourse studies by portraying how powerful corpus linguistics can be when it comes to demystifying the current critique of toxic beauty culture. It highlights how accountable platforms are essential and necessary, and as a collective against the sale of women's bodies in social media space.

 Keywords: Toxic Beauty Culture, Gendered Harm, Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Narrative Framing, Digital Self-Commodification, Objectification, Post-feminism