The Circulation of Beauty

This chapter, which is based on ethnographic interviews with Brazilian patients, discusses the ways in which beauty makes bodies matter. Focusing first on class, then on gender, and ending with race, it explores how the beauty/ugliness dyad combines powerfully with other bodily signs and provides legitimacy to forms of inequality, simultaneously producing the terrain on which these forms of inequality can be questioned. It is argued that beauty shows us how bodies assemble into coherent gendered, racialized, and classed entities within the Brazilian context. Beauty, in other words, is the key to understanding why the promise of belonging to the body politic is always conditional in Brazil, inevitably tied to one's appearance, and why some bodies are more highly valued in this affective economy than others.

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Context (archaeology) · Geography · Legitimacy · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Sociology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Social and Cultural Dynamics