Chronopractices of femininity: Affect, the body, and temporal discourse in Polish women’s magazines at the turn of the millennium

Abstract

This article examines how temporal experience was organised through practices of bodily care in Polish women’s magazines at the turn of the millennium. It introduces the concept of chronopractices to analyse the socially produced rhythms structuring everyday beauty routines. The study draws on advertisements and selected promotional materials published between 2000 and 2004 in magazines aimed primarily at middle-class and aspiring middle-class women. Combining perspectives from the anthropology of the body, affect studies, and the social study of temporality (Ahmed 2004; Adam 2013), I argue that advertisements did more than promote consumer products: they also shaped temporal orders by organising everyday care, seasonal transformations, and anti-ageing practices. Affects – particularly fear, hope, and the promise of control over the future – structured women’s relationships with both their bodies and time, orienting present actions towards anticipated risks. The material captures a formative moment in the emergence of new temporal regimes of bodily care during post-Socialist transformation and the expansion of consumer culture. Women’s magazines thus emerge as an important site for producing affective and temporal norms that embedded femininity within neoliberal projects of self-improvement.