This chapter is structured by a concept of the ‘frame’ which I have taken from Lynda Nead's study of the female nude (Nead 1993: 2). Nead's understanding of the female nude is useful here, because it enables parallels to be drawn between the processes by which the naked female body is held within the frame of cultural acceptability and the ways that representations of de Beauvoir (and especially of ‘her’ sexuality) are aestheticised and situated within the confines of a predominantly heterosexual culture. It is especially important to draw attention to the processes of aestheticisation in the context of press representations given that, as Susan Sontag argues in relation to professional photographers, journalists often claim that their work is characterised by a ‘disavowal of empathy, a disdain for message-mongering, a claim to be invisible’ (Sontag 1979: 77). As with the biographies, where the narrative appears to unfold ‘naturally’ and to be driven by the ‘facts’ themselves, journalistic deference to a ‘professional code’ (S. Hall 1993: 101) – which foregrounds ‘neutrality’ and which does not overtly signal the discursive paradigms within which it operates – seemingly displaces the role the media play in the active production of meaning.

The frame metaphor also situates techniques of the self firmly within the aesthetic domain and, as such, I will be including in this chapter some discussion of the debates around, and implications of, the aestheticisation of the self (and how this aestheticisation might be gendered). Similarly, Sontag's work On Photography (1979) allows me to highlight the way that the biography of de Beauvoir is portrayed, in newspaper representations, through a series of ‘snapshot summaries’.