Beauty and the Norm Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance
Abstract
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 research to exploratory conversations between scholars and personal reflections. Bridging hitherto separate debates in critical beauty studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, the history of science, disability studies, gender studies, and critical race studies, this volume reflects upon the gendered, classed, and racialized body, normative regimes of representation, and the global beauty economy.
Genetik kusurlar çağlar boyu tüm canlı türlerde var olmuştur. Bu evrede konu ile ilgili bilimsel çalışmalar insanlığın gelişimine bağlı olarak ilerlemiştir. Doğada kusurlu bireyler, doğal seçilimde güçlülerin hayatta kalması ile sonuçlanırken modern toplumlar da bu yasayı uygulamayı amaçlamıştır. Toplumların bu amaç ve idealleri, sanatta güzel kavramına nasıl yansıdığı araştırmada irdelenmiştir. Modernizmde başlayan dramatik güç ve kendini geçmiş biçimlerden bir kopuş olarak sunması nedeniyle modern sanat, sakat bedenlerin metaforik kullanımlarına sahne olmuştur. Öte yandan normal kabullerin ötesinde olan eserler ve böylesi bir sanatı yozlaşma olarak değerlendiren otoritenin propaganda amacı kıyaslanarak açıklanmıştır. Nihayetinde görülmektedir ki sanatta modern anlayış, iktidarın reklamı ile çok fazla ülkede saygınlığını artırmıştır. İnsanlık tarihinde anomali bireylerin sergileme biçimleri çalışmaya oldukça güçlü bir referans sağlamaktadır. Kusurlu bedenlerin var olduğu toplumla öteki sınırlarındaki yaşamına dair örneklerden bahsedilmiştir. Aslında kusurun hayatta kalma yöntemine dönüşümü oldukça ironiktir. Çünkü anomali bireyler, öteki olarak kabul görürken teşhir geleneğinin sürmesini de sağlamıştır. Bu sergilerde kusurlu bireyler -sanattan yalıtılmış biçimde- toplumlarda fayda ve merak üzerine kullanılmıştır. Toplumların böylesi farklılıkları ırk, etnik, kültürel ve insani değerler açısından nasıl algıladığı incelenmiştir. Sanat ile ilgili olarak değişen yapıyı sergileyen eserler eşliğinde albino bireylerin tasvirlerinden yararlanılmıştır. Seçilen albino eserler, günümüzde geleneksel güzellik sınırlarının ötesinde ulaştığı değerle güçlü bir kaynak sağlamaktadır. Araştırma kronolojisi, genetik kusurların dünü ve sanatın güzel kabullerine ulaşılan bugünü kapsamaktadır.
This study aims to critically analyze the problem of the beauty bias prevalent in contemporary India with the help of popular postmillennial Hindi television serials. It begins with a review of literature on television’s social impact and then demonstrates how representations of women on Indian television have historically been deeply interwoven with hegemonic perceptions of appearance. It then examines as case studies five popular tele serials which, while trying to be forward-looking attempts at critiquing beauty norms, in actuality reinstate normative ideals of appearance or a globally dominant beauty myth. The findings of this study indicate that most so-called progressive serials implicitly endorse casual sexism against female bodies and/or subject the purportedly unattractive female protagonist to a life of injustices owing to her lack of proverbial good looks. Accordingly, this study claims that popular television dramas instead of empowering women often uphold the beauty bias so as to attain mass appeal along with sponsorships and high target rating points. Finally, this study hopes that its findings will provide inputs for television producers and policy makers who may not only prevent body shaming and appearance discrimination, but also promote nuanced and inclusive representations of female embodiment on Indian television.
This essay analyses the changing politics of beauty labour and female body image in Indian cinema. It begins by discussing how beauty, a social capital for women, is a measuring rod with which their bodies are both assessed and objectified. It claims that cinema being a visual medium demands some aesthetic capital from actors, and the beauty of leading ladies portrayed on screen often adds to the spectacle. Focusing on mainstream Bollywood films produced especially over the last two decades, this essay examines narratives upholding the beauty ideal both as a cinematic necessity and also as a plot point. Tracing developments in cinematic representations of female beauty, it then examines select postmillennial films (both mainstream Bollywood as well as regional productions) to suggest that a maturing trend in representing female bodies is emerging in Indian cinema where instead of the prettified heroine one increasingly encounters protagonists who refuse to agonize under beauty labour. Finally, it argues that owing to global debates and critical feminist interventions on female body image, a radical shift is palpable in postmillennial Indian films which showcase women who either reject or redefine the politics of beauty labour.
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, Jarrín 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 Jarrín 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.
Prozeduren der Vermessung suchen das allgemeingültige Mass. Das 19. Jahrhundert bringt indes Unmengen von diffusen Daten, Lücken und Brüchen hervor. Die Kulturtechnik des Messens gerät hier in einen Wandel: proportionale, relative Körpermasse werden von statistisch-arithmetischen Verfahren abgelöst. Das Zahlzeichen selbst löst sich von seiner materiellen Grundlage wie Finger, Kerbholz oder Rechenstein und wird so zum Garant von Objektivität. Die Autorin folgt den Wegen der Zahl, die durch ästhetische, statistische und anthropologische Messungen hindurch in neuer Gestalt zum Körper zurückkehrt. Dabei bildet der männliche Körper den idealen Massstab, der für den Menschen schlechthin geltend gemacht wird. In der Konfektion wird mit dem ersten weiblichen Grössensystem das ideale Normalmass hingegen als ambivalente Figur Fraeulein Gelbstern entworfen, um die sich schillernde Geschichten ranken. Die Studie entschlüsselt die in der Kulturgeschichte der Zahl bereits angelegte symbolische Geschlechterordnung und weist ihre Wirkmächtigkeit im Standardisierungs- und Normalisierungsprozess nach.
This paper reports findings from a large-scale, multi-disciplinary, mixed methods project which explores empirically and theoretically the rapidly growing but poorly understood (and barely regulated) phenomenon of cosmetic surgery tourism (CST). We explore CST by drawing on theories of flows, networks and assemblages, aiming to produce a fuller and more nuanced account of - and accounting for - CST. This enables us to conceptualise CST as an interplay of places, people, things, ideas and practices. Through specific instances of assembling cosmetic surgery that we encountered in the field, and that we illustrate with material from interviews with patients, facilitators and surgeons, our analysis advances understandings and theorisations of medical mobilities, globalisation and assemblage thinking.
Pretty Modern is a riveting account of Brazil’s emergence as a global leader in plastic surgery. Intrigued by a Carnaval parade that mysteriously paid homage to a Rio de Janeiro plastic surgeon, anthropologist Alexander Edmonds conducted research that took him from Ipanema socialite circles to glitzy telenovela studios to the packed waiting rooms of public hospitals offering free cosmetic surgery. The result is provocative exploration of the erotic, commercial, and intimate aspects of beauty in a nation with extremes of wealth and poverty and a reputation for natural sensuality. Drawing on conversations with maids and their elite mistresses, divorced housewives, black celebrities, and favela residents aspiring to be fashion models, Edmonds analyzes what sexual desirability means and does for women in different social positions. He argues that beauty is a distinct realm of modern experience that does not simply reflect other inequalities. It mimics the ambiguous emancipatory potential of capital, challenging traditional hierarchies while luring consumers into a sexual culture that reduces the body to the brute biological criteria of attractiveness. Illustrated with color photographs, Pretty Modern offers a fresh theoretical perspective on the significance of female beauty in consumer capitalism.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in hospitals that offer cosmetic surgery to the poor, this article examines the causes of a rapid growth in plastic surgery rates in Brazil over the past two decades. It argues that problems with diverse social origins manifest themselves as aesthetic defects, which are diagnosed and treated by the beauty industry. But plastic surgery also incites the consumer desires of people on the margins of the market economy and mobilizes a racialized ‘beauty myth’ (a key trope in national identity) in marketing and clinical practice. Beauty practices offer a means to compete in a neoliberal libidinal economy where anxieties surrounding new markets of work and sex mingle with fantasies of social mobility, glamour, and modernity.
Several studies have found body and facial symmetry as well as attractiveness to be human mate choice criteria. These characteristics are presumed to signal developmental stability. Human body odour has been shown to influence female mate choice depending on the immune system, but the question of whether smell could signal general mate quality, as do other cues, was not addressed in previous studies. We compared ratings of body odour, attractiveness, and measurements of facial and body asymmetry of 16 male and 19 female subjects. Subjects wore a T-shirt for three consecutive nights under controlled conditions. Opposite-sex raters judged the odour of the T-shirts and another group evaluated portraits of the subjects for attractiveness. We measured seven bilateral traits of the subject's body to assess body asymmetry. Facial asymmetry was examined by distance measurements of portrait photographs. The results showed a significant positive correlation between facial attractiveness and sexiness of body odour for female subjects. We found positive relationships between body odour and attractiveness and negative ones between smell and body asymmetry for males only if female odour raters were in the most fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The outcomes are discussed in the light of different male and female reproductive strategies.
This collection of original scholarly work and first-person accounts takes globalization processes and the transnational links these processes create as the jumping-off point for an examination of what it means to be, have, or aspire to a beautiful body.
This book's discussion of skin bleaching, lightening and toning in Black Atlantic zones disengages with the usual tropes of Black Nationalism and global white supremacy such as 'the desire to be white', 'low self-esteem' and 'self-hatred' and instead engages with the global multi-billion dollar market in lighter skins with products from local cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies and entrepreneurs. This practice can be for short-term strategic purposes and the production of bleached lightness and new subjectivities through skin shades across Black Atlantic zones - the UK, USA, Caribbean, Latin America and the Africa continent- is also a simultaneous critique of continuing pigmentocracy and darker skin disadvantage. This book seeks to decolonize skin bleaching, lightening and toning by exploring its racialized gender political and libidinal economies in the Black Atlantic. In so doing it moves past the notion that global white supremacy dynamizes the practice to a position where the interaction of colourism and 'post-race' neo-liberal racialization aesthetics becomes the focus.
"With a wedding impending, the Taiwanese bride-to-be turns to bridal photographers, makeup artists, and hair stylists to transform her image beyond recognition. They give her fairer skin, eyes like a Western baby doll, and gowns inspired by sources from Victorian England to MTV. An absorbing consideration of contemporary bridal practices in Taiwan, Framing the Bride shows how the lavish photographs represent more than mere conspicuous consumption. They are artifacts infused with cultural meaning and emotional significance, products of the gender- and generation-based conflicts in Taiwan's hybrid system of modern matrimony. From the bridal photographs, the book opens out into broader issues such as courtship, marriage, kinship, globalization, and the meaning of the ""West"" and ""Western"" cultural images of beauty. Bonnie Adrian argues that in compiling enormous bridal albums full of photographs of brides and grooms in varieties of finery, posed in different places, and exuding romance, Taiwanese brides engage in a new rite of passage-one that challenges the terms of marriage set out in conventional wedding rites. In Framing the Bride, we see how this practice is also a creative response to U.S. domination of transnational visual imagery-how bridal photographers and their subjects take the project of globalization into their own hands, defining its terms for their lives even as they expose the emptiness of its images."
This engaging introduction to Japan's burgeoning beauty culture investigates a wide range of phenomenon-aesthetic salons, dieting products, male beauty activities, and beauty language-to find out why Japanese women and men are paying so much attention to their bodies. Laura Miller uses social science and popular culture sources to connect breast enhancements, eyelid surgery, body hair removal, nipple bleaching, and other beauty work to larger issues of gender ideology, the culturally-constructed nature of beauty ideals, and the globalization of beauty technologies and standards. Her sophisticated treatment of this timely topic suggests that new body aesthetics are not forms of "deracializiation" but rather innovative experimentation with identity management. While recognizing that these beauty activities are potentially a form of resistance, Miller also considers the commodification of beauty, exploring how new ideals and technologies are tying consumers even more firmly to an ever-expanding beauty industry. By considering beauty in a Japanese context, Miller challenges widespread assumptions about the universality and naturalness of beauty standards.
Chinese women are now pursuing cosmetic surgery as a way to increase their "beauty capital" and create new opportunities for social and professional success. Building on rich ethnographic data, this book shares the perspectives of women who have undergone cosmetic surgery and illuminates the motivations behind their decision. Wen Hua explores turbulent economic, sociocultural, and political change in China since the 1980s and its production of immense mental and corporeal anxieties.
The Global Beauty Industry is an interdisciplinary text that uses beauty to explore topics of gender, race, class, colorism, nation, bodies, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and intersectionality. Integrating materials from a wide range of cultural and geo-political contexts, it coalesces with initiatives to produce more internationally relevant curricula in fields such as sociology, as well as cultural, women's/gender, media, and globalization studies.
Preface and AcknowledgmentsPart 1. Politicizing Bodily Differences1. Disability, Identity, and Representation: An Introduction2. Theorizing DisabilityPart 2. Constructing Disabled Figures: Cultural and Literary Sites3. The Cultural Work of American Freak Shows, 1835-19404. Benevolent Maternalism and the Disabled Women in Stowe, Davis and Phelps5. Disabled Women as Powerful Women in Petry, Morrison, and LordeConclusion: From Pathology to IdentityNotesBibliographyIndex
Should western beauty practices, ranging from lipstick to labiaplasty, be included within the United Nations understandings of harmful traditional/cultural practices? By examining the role of common beauty practices in damaging the health of women, creating sexual difference, and enforcing female deference, this book argues that they should. In the 1970s feminists criticized pervasive beauty regimes such as dieting and depilation, but some 'new' feminists argue that beauty practices are no longer oppressive now that women can 'choose' them. However, in the last two decades the brutality of western beauty practices seems to have become much more severe, requiring the breaking of skin, spilling of blood and rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Beauty and Misogyny seeks to make sense of why beauty practices are not only just as persistent, but in many ways more extreme. It examines the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high-heeled shoes, and looks at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing and surgical alteration of the labia. It looks at the cosmetic surgery and body piercing/cutting industries as being forms of self-mutilation by proxy, in which the surgeons and piercers serve as proxies to harm women's bodies, and concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created. This essential work will appeal to students and teachers of feminist psychology, gender studies, cultural studies, and feminist sociology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women's health.
An international comparative and historical study of the growth of the beauty industry between the nineteenth century and the present day
Recent feminist theory has attempted to bring considerations of women’s agency into analyses of the meaning and consequence of beauty norms in women’s lives. This article argues that these works have often been limited by their use of individualist frameworks or by their neglect of considerations of race and class. In this article I draw upon examples of African-American utilization of beauty discourse and practices in collective efforts to resist racism. I argue that there is no singular beauty standard enforced by a unified male gaze. Instead, we should conceive of fields in which differently located individuals and groups invest in and promote particular ways of seeing beauty, producing both penalties and pleasures in women’s lives.
This article engages with and draws on what have been called two recent “turns” in feminist theory: to beauty and to affect. While much feminist research has concentrated on the beauty industry, where beauty is conceived as a series of economic, social and cultural practices, the authors suggest that beauty should also be understood as an embodied affective process. The authors’ focus is on understanding the conceptions of beauty that emerged in their own empirical work with white British girls and mestiza Mexican women. The authors suggest that for the girls and women in their research, beauty is an inclination towards a perfected temporal state which involves processes of displacement to the past and of deferral to the future. The authors draw on Colebrook’s discussion of the relationship between feminist theory and philosophies of aesthetic beauty, and on Lauren Berlant’s notions of “cruel optimism” and “aspirational normalcy”, and argue that beauty can be seen as an aspiration to normalcy that is, simultaneously, optimistic and cruel. Beauty is seemingly characterised by its inability “to be” in the present and is thus positioned as temporalities that have passed or have yet to come. Through these displacements and deferrals, beauty is understood as both specific and imaginary, and as promising and depressing. Following on from such a conception of beauty, the authors make a distinction between optimism and hope, and argue that while, in Berlant’s terms, optimism is that which is cruel, hope might involve a different way of thinking about how beauty might be experienced in and as the present.
Standards and standardization aim to render the world equivalent across cultures, time, and geography. Standards are ubiquitous but underappreciated tools for regulating and organizing social life in modernity, and they lurk in the background of many sociological works. Reviewing the relevance of standards and standardization in diverse theoretical traditions and sociological subfields, we point to the emergence and institutionalization of standards, the difficulties of making standards work, resistance to standardization, and the multiple outcomes of standards. Rather than associating standardization with totalizing narratives of globalization or dehumanization, we call for careful empirical analysis of the specific and unintended consequences of different sorts of standards operating in distinct social domains.
As part of a feminist commitment to collaboration, this article, which appears as a companion essay to Minh-Ha T. Pham's "The Right to Fashion in the Age of Terror," offers a point of departure for thinking about fashion and beauty as processes that produce subjects recruited to, and aligned with, the national interests of the United States in the war on terror. The Muslim woman in the veil and her imagined opposite, the fashionably modern and implicitly Western woman, become convenient metaphors for articulating geopolitical contests of power as human rights concerns, as rescue missions, as beautifying mandates. This essay examines newer iterations of this opposition, after September 11, 2001, in order to demonstrate the critical resonance of a biopolitics of fashion and beauty. After the events of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush's administration launched a military and public relations campaign to promote U.S. national interests using the language of feminism and human rights. While these discourses in the United States helped to reinvigorate a declining economy, and specifically a flagging fashion industry (as Pham addresses in her companion essay), feminism abroad was deployed to very different ends. This article considers the establishment of the Kabul Beauty School by the nongovernmental organization Beauty without Borders, sponsored in large part by the U.S. fashion and beauty industries. Examining troubling histories of beauty's relation to morality, humanity, and security, as well as to neoliberal discourses of self-governance, the author teases out the biopower and biopolitics of beauty, enacted here through programs of empowerment that are inseparable from the geopolitical aims of the U.S. deployment in Afghanistan.
Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces. We examined whether this preference is human-specific. Three- to 4-month-olds preferred attractive over unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces (Experiments 1 and 3). The preference was not observed when the faces were inverted, suggesting that it did not arise from low-level image differences (Experiments 2 and 3). In addition, the spontaneous preference for attractive tiger faces influenced performance in a recognition memory task involving attractive versus unattractive tiger face pairings (Experiment 4). The findings suggest that infant preference for attractive faces reflects the activity of general processing mechanisms rather than a specific adaptation to mate choice.
Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body
- Lennard J Davis
Davis, Lennard J. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body.
London and New York: Verso.
Beyond the Human Standard?
- Steven Epstein
Epstein, Steven. 2009. "Beyond the Human Standard?" In Standards and
Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape
Everyday Life, edited by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star, 35-53.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
The History of Sexuality
- Michel Foucault
Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction.
Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.
New 'Golden' Ratios for Facial Beauty
- P Pallet
- S Link
- K Lee
Pallet, P., S. Link, and K. Lee. 2010. "New 'Golden' Ratios for Facial Beauty."
Vision Research 50: 149-54.
Controversial Issues in a Disabling Society
- John Swain
- Sally French
- Colin Cameron
Swain, John, Sally French, and Colin Cameron. 2003. Controversial Issues in a
Disabling Society. Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press.
Introduction: Mapping Embodied Deviance
- J Urla
- J Terry
Urla, J., and J. Terry. 1995. "Introduction: Mapping Embodied Deviance."
In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular
Culture, edited by J. Terry and J. Urla, 1-18. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
- Naomi Wolf
Wolf, Naomi. 1991. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against
Women. New York: William Morrow and Company.