Book

The biopolitics of beauty : cosmetic citizenship and affective capital in Brazil

Jarrín, Alvaro, 1980- author

Overview

\"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.\"--Provided by publisher.

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Subject: Surgery, Plastic Social aspects Brazil. / Biopolitics Brazil. / Public health Social aspects Brazil. / Plastic surgeons Social aspects Brazil. / Beauty, Personal Social aspects Brazil.
• ISBN: 9780520293878, 9780520293885

Item info:

1 item available

1 item total in all locations

Holdings :

Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
RD119.J37 2017	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE