Biopolitics of Beauty

Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil

Bibliographic Data

ID8065174
AuthorsAlvaro Jarrin (0000-0001-5963-089X, corresponding author)
Year2017
Pages272
Publication date2017-08-29
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueThe Biopolitics of Beauty (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1525/california/9780520293878.001.0001
OpenAlexW4239014394
Open LibraryOL27408807M
ISBN9780520293878
LanguageEN
Citations received41

Using ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Brazilian hospitals, this book shows 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, the book 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 the book 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. This book explores not only the biopolitical 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

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Biopower · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Body Image and Dysmorphia Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · 617.9/50981 · Beauty, Personal · Biopolitics · Brazil · Personal Beauty · Plastic surgeons · Plastic Surgery · Public health · Rd119 .j37 2017 · Social aspects · Social conditions · Surgeons · Surgery, plastic · Wo 600 · Gender Studies · Law

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