The Biopolitics of Beauty

Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil

Alvaro Jarrín (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

272 Seiten

2017
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-29388-5 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

The Biopolitics of Beauty examines how beauty became an aim of national health in Brazil. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Brazilian hospitals, the author explains how plastic surgeons and patients navigate the public health system to transform beauty into a basic health right. The book historically traces the national concern with beauty to Brazilian eugenics, which established beauty as an index of the nation's racial improvement. From here, Jarrin explains how plastic surgeons became the main proponents of a raciology of beauty, using it to gain the backing of the Brazilian state. Beauty can be understood as an immaterial form of value that Jarrin calls "affective capital," which maps onto and intensifies the social hierarchies of Brazilian society. Patients experience beauty as central to national belonging and to gendered aspirations of upward mobility, and they become entangled in biopolitical rationalities that complicate their ability to consent to the risks of surgery.
The Biopolitics of Beauty not only examines the biopolical regime that made beauty a desirable national project, but also the subtle ways in which beauty is laden with affective value within everyday social practices, thus becoming the terrain upon which race, class, and gender hierarchies are reproduced and contested in Brazil.

Alvaro Jarrin is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at College of the Holy Cross.

Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Biopolitical and Affective Dimensions of Beauty
1. The Eugenesis of Beauty
2. Plastic Governmentality
3. The Circulation of Beauty
4. Hope, Affect, Mobility
5. The Raciology of Beauty
6. Cosmetic Citizens
Conclusion: Thinking of Beauty Transnationally

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	09.10.2017
Zusatzinfo	13 b-w
Verlagsort	Berkerley
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	408 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Schönheit / Kosmetik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Archäologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-520-29388-6 / 0520293886
ISBN-13	978-0-520-29388-5 / 9780520293885
Zustand	Neuware