A01=Alvaro Jarrin
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
anthropologist
anthropology
Author_Alvaro Jarrin
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beauty
beauty culture
beauty standards
brazil
brazilian
brazilian culture
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HD
Category=JHM
Category=JHMC
Category=WJH
central america
class issues
COP=United States
Delivery_Pre-order
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographic
ethnography
eugenics
fieldwork
health and wellness
healthcare rights
healthcare system
hospital
Language_English
medical patients
PA=Temporarily unavailable
physical appearance
plastic surgeons
plastic surgery
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
public health
race
race issues
racism
social hierarchy
social studies
softlaunch
south america
surgery
upward mobility
Product details
- ISBN 9780520293878
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 29 Aug 2017
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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, Jarrin 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 Jarrin 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.
Alvaro Jarrin is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at College of the Holy Cross.
