Beauty: What Makes Us Dream, What Haunts Us

Abstract

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 Turkey, this article explores the salience and potential of beauty as a feminist keyword in anthropology. It argues that despite men's increasing investments in beauty, beauty continues to be tied to “women” in existential ways. Moreover, while beauty still means work for women, this work is often outsourced to female migrant or racialized workers. Beauty norms and body images materialize in intimate encounters and particular settings. In Turkey, the recent extension of the urban beauty economy has created spaces of possibility and aesthetic desires for ordinary women to “take care of themselves.” With its neoliberal emphasis on self‐care, the urban beauty economy has fueled the emergence of new female subjectivities and affective desires. Finally, the article argues in favor of a relational feminist ethnography and pedagogy of beauty, which is conscious of what we define as beautiful, desirable, harmful, or healthy and what the implications are of doing so.

The failure of postmodern biopolitics: some notes on travesti beautification technologies and practices

“…In other words, beauty is much more than the social construction of femininity and inevitably cannot be un-related to its intersection with gender, age, social class, "race", or sexuality. I highlight, therefore, the political and transformative beauty concept aspect 24,25 : through their beautification practices, travestis are transforming their bodies and their identity when creating new social subjects. As one of the travestis I interviewed told me from Rio de Janeiro:…”

El fracaso de las biopolíticas posmodernas: algunos apuntes sobre las tecnologías y prácticas de embellecimiento travestis

“…Al mismo tiempo, al poner la atención en el hacer de la belleza también podremos pensar qué tipos de luchas de poder se tejen a su alrededor, es decir, la belleza es mucho más que la construcción social de la feminidad e indefectiblemente no puede estar desvinculada de su intersección con el género, la edad, clase social, "raza" o sexualidad. Destaco, por lo tanto, el aspecto político y transforma-dor del concepto de belleza 24,25 : a través de sus prácticas de embellecimiento, las travestis están transformando no sólo sus cuerpos sino también su propia identidad en el proceso de creación de nuevas sujetas sociales. Como una de las travestis que entrevisté me decía desde Río de Janeiro:…”