“It still has to be me”: How emotion mediates older women’s use of generative AI for self-presentation in China

Studies of older adults and digital technology often treat emotion as secondary: anxiety may discourage use, while confidence may support it. This article asks what emotions do when older women use generative AI to remake photographs of themselves and their everyday worlds. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s later work on the care of the self and feminist gerontological work on aging and appearance, it examines an AI photography class for older women in Lanzhou, China. Based on classroom observation, interviews, and textual–visual analysis of AI-assisted works, the article shows that AI photography became a practice of later-life self-fashioning. This practice unfolded through a series of judgments: whether learners could enter and repeat AI use at all, whether AI could be made to follow their intentions, whether an image was beautiful and worth showing, and whether an enhanced portrait still looked like ‘me.’ Emotion mediated these judgments at every stage: surprise, frustration, satisfaction, and anxiety were how learners registered access, control, aesthetic value, and recognizability. The article extends digital aging research beyond adoption by showing how older women become evaluators of AI-generated images, and it develops a gendered account of care of the self as a mundane visual practice in later life.