The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.70 (921 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0520293886 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-07-11 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Combining biopolitics with affect, and critiquing a governmentality that fosters a 'cosmetic citizenship' that does nothing to undo the precarity of those (classed/raced) at the bottom despite the 'gift' of free surgery, Jarrín is masterful in a book as ethnographically as theoretically rich."—Anne Allison, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and author of Precarious Japan. In a voice both critical and poignant, Jarrín offers a prescient platform from which to consider the ethical, cultural, and political underpinnings of the approaching global boom in cosmetic procedures."—Robin Sheriff, author of Dreaming Equality:
The Biopolitics of Beauty examines how beauty became an aim of national health in Brazil. 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 book historically traces the national concern with beauty to Brazilian eugenics, which established beauty as an index of the nation’s racial improvement. The Biopolitics of Beauty 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.. Using ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Brazilian hospitals, the author shows how plastic surgeons and patients navigate the public health system to transform beauty into a basic health right. Beauty can be understood as an immaterial form of value that Jarrín calls “affective capital,”