- Description
- 1 online resource (xi, 254 pages) : illustrations.
- Summary
- "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.
- Uniform Title
- Biopolitics of beauty (Online)
- Alternative Title
- Biopolitics of beauty (Online)
- Subject
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Access (note)
- Access restricted to authorized users.
- LCCN
- 2017006866
- OCLC
- ssj0001841151
- Author
Jarrín, Alvaro, 1980-
- Title
The biopolitics of beauty [electronic resource] : cosmetic citizenship and affective capital in Brazil / Alvaro Jarrín.
- Imprint
Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017]
- Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Access
Access restricted to authorized users.
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