Claudia Liebelt

• Professor
• Professor at Freie Universität Berlin

In recent years, feminist anthropologists have contributed to an interdisciplinary debate on beauty, which focuses on gendered desires, affectivity, and projects of self‐making amid a global boom in beauty products and services. Drawing on the emergent field of critical beauty studies and ethnographic research on middle‐class femininity in urban Tu...

Im Zuge neoliberaler Umstrukturierungen, einer Feminisierung des städtischen Dienstleistungssektors und der Ausweitung einer global orientierten Mittelschicht entwickelte sich die türkische Metropole Istanbul in den vergangenen Jahren zu einem regionalen Zentrum der Schönheitsindustrie. Schönheitsoperationen und ästhetische Körpermodifikationen sin...

This article discusses the relationship between affective body politics and gendered norms of urban belonging in Istanbul, Turkey. As I will show, there are specific bodily imaginations and affective desires that tie a classed and racialized appearance to imaginations of modernity, femininity and urban belonging. In Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul,...

Beauty and the Norm contains chapters based on empirical research across a wide range of geographical locations and cultural contexts, as well as shorter conversations between scholars that also include more personal reflections. It represents a first attempt to expose the generative operations of human standardization and normative looks in everyd...

This chapter contributes to the debate on the standardization of bodily appearances by probing an understanding of cosmetic surgery, in particular nose and female breast (reduction) surgery in urban Turkey, as a gendered and racialized desire for a ‘normal’ body image. Given the construal of large female breasts and noses as particularly problemati...

Recent decades have seen the rise of a global beauty boom, with profound effects on perceptions of bodies worldwide. Against this background, Beauty and the Norm assembles ethnographic and conceptual approaches from a variety of disciplines and across the globe to debate standardization in bodily appearance. Its contributions range from empirical r...

In this introductory paper, we contribute to the important debate on 'Everyday Islam' by thinking about ways in which the everyday constitutes a useful analytical category in relation to Islam, not in contrast to studies of Islamic piety and normativity, but as co-constituted with (Islamic) morality. Secondly, drawing on a feminist critique in anth...

Based on research in Istanbul in 2013-14, the article describes a changing urban geography of beauty, which has multiple repercussions on women's spatialized notions of femininity, intimate bodily grooming, and aesthetics. Beauty salons in two neighborhoods typically placed on different ends of both the social and the Islamist-secularist axes highl...

Care has become a key notion in anthropological and feminist circles, not least because it offers a link between debates on the gendered division of labor and on affects, or what in earlier debates were called the authenticity and inauthenticity of feelings (cf. Hochschild 2003a). It has been argued that care and domestic work are naturalized as fe...

Der Beitrag untersucht die Karriere des Kosmopolitismus-Konzepts in der ethnologischen Migrationsforschung seit den 1990er Jahren. Dabei zeigen wir, dass sowohl normative als auch deskriptive Ansätze des Kosmopolitischen erweitert werden müssen. Wir argumentieren mit Étienne Balibar für ein Konzept der Kosmopolitik, das uns Migration als soziale Be...

Each Friday, a loose network of Catholic migrant domestic workers, almost exclusively women from the Philippines, carries a figure of the Virgin Mary through the marginalized neighborhoods of southern Tel Aviv, Israel. As the figure is carried from one participant’s home to another of this so-called block rosary, they believe “she” (the Virgin Mary...

This article investigates the sensual participation of Filipina care workers in Israel, more specifically in the urban space of Tel Aviv. By creating a rich communal life, by parading icons of the Virgin Mary through the streets, and by crafting Origami paper swans that have conquered urban spaces in all sizes, shapes and colours, migrants have fas...

In Israel, Filipina migrants employed in domestic work and caring come into contact with global and Filipino so-called 'VIPs', especially in the realm of Christianity. As both Catholic and evangelical religious leaders, miracle-workers and elite pilgrims tour the 'Holy Land' of Christians worldwide, Filipina domestic workers integrate them into the...

Research on migrant care and domestic workers has focused on their multiple dislocations and exclusions in the diaspora, analysing a highly gendered global economy of care and domestic work. This article investigates the role of ritual performance and spirituality in female care workers' projects of migration and in the emergence of their feminized...

In Israel, as in numerous countries of the global North, Filipina women have been recruited in large numbers for domestic work, typically as live-in caregivers for the elderly. The case of Israel is unique in that the country has a special significance as the 'Holy Land' for the predominantly devout Christian Filipina women and is at the center of...

Filipino Christian care and domestic workers' migration to Israel is a deeply transformative process of embodied subjectification, imbuing their religious practice with imaginative meanings rather than merely economic. Filipino pilgrimages to holy sites in Israel sacralise the humdrum and sometimes demeaning realities of their work, enabling them t...

Zusammenfassung Philippinische Migrantinnen sind die Hausarbeiterinnen der globalen Arbeitsteilung schlechthin. Ihre Repräsentation als entrechtete, ausgebeutete und verletzliche Frauen als eine Form der diskursiven Viktimisierung begreifend, analysiert die Autorin in diesem Artikel die Selbstbilder der Migrantinnen. Diese erzählen sich als Märtyre...

Within a global gendered economy based on an international division of labor, Filipina migrants have become nannies, maids, and caregivers in affluent homes in numerous Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Filipina migrants who seek employment as domestic workers abroad have been described as “classical” transmigrants who keep in touch with family m...

While the Jewish diaspora is generally treated as the ideal type of an imagined global community, the notion of a Filipino labor migrant diaspora has arisen more recently. As I will show, the analysis of "diaspora" as an emic discourse offers much insight into the political and affective aspects of economic, social and cultural dislocation within a...

After the ousting of Palestinians from an ethnically segmented labour market, Israel has recruited large numbers of nonJewish labour migrants to fill the country's low wage sector. As elsewhere, restrictive migration policies could not hinder migrants from staying on, organising, and collectively struggle for their rights. Within the urban space of...

Transnationale Ansätze in der Migrationsforschung haben in den vergangenen Jahren gezeigt, wie Migranten multiple soziale, politische und kulturelle Bezüge aufbauen, die nationale Grenzen überschreiten, ohne jedoch die machtpolitischen und legalen ‚Arenen’, in denen sie agieren, aus den Augen zu verlieren. Hiervon ausgehend analysiert der vorliegen...

'Transnationale Ansätze in der Migrationsforschung haben in den vergangenen Jahren gezeigt, wie Migranten multiple soziale, politische und kulturelle Bezüge aufbauen, die nationale Grenzen überschreiten, ohne jedoch die machtpolitischen und legalen 'Arenen', in denen sie agieren, aus den Augen zu verlieren. Hiervon ausgehend analysiert der vorliege...