The Biopolitics of Beauty : Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil / Alvaro Jarrín.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jarrín, Alvaro, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Surgery, Plastic--Social aspects--Brazil.

Surgery, Plastic.

Biopolitics--Brazil.

Biopolitics.

Public health--Social aspects--Brazil.

Public health.

Plastic surgeons--Social aspects--Brazil.

Plastic surgeons.

Beauty, Personal--Social aspects--Brazil.

Beauty, Personal.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (pages cm)

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The Biopolitics of Beauty examines how beauty became an aim of national health 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. 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 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction. The Biopolitical and Affective Dimensions of Beauty

Chapter 1. The Eugenesis of Beauty

Chapter 2. Plastic Governmentality

Chapter 3. The Circulation of Beauty

Chapter 4. Hope, Affect, Mobility

Chapter 5. The Raciology of Beauty

Chapter 6. Cosmetic Citizens

Conclusion. Thinking of Beauty Transnationally

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 20. Sep 2019)

ISBN:

9780520967212

0520967216

OCLC:

994006263