The Biopolitics of BeautyAuthor :
Paperback
Published : Tuesday 29 August 2017
Description
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.
You may also like ...
by
Paperback
05 Jul 2024
Social and cultural anthropology
€32.70
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
by
Paperback
17 Sep 2021
History of the Americas
€44.46
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
by
Hardback
17 Sep 2021
History of the Americas
€156.78
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
by
Hardback
29 Aug 2017
Archaeology
€93.60
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
Reviews