Thinking of Beauty Transnationally

This concluding chapter reflects on the transnational dimensions of beauty. Beautification can be thought of as a global industry that takes on very different registers depending on the specific histories and the body politics where it emerges. Nonetheless, there are common methodologies and theoretical insights that allow us to think about beauty globally and about the ways it travels, producing certain forms of affect that transcend boundaries and which enable transnational biopolitical operations that are tied to both colonial histories and new forms of empire. The twin concepts of biopolitics and affect can be applied to many different contexts where beauty matters, and they allow us to think beyond the structure/agency or empowerment/disempowerment debates that have long plagued academic discussions of beauty practices.

Cosmetic Citizens

This chapter analyzes the affective and biopolitical structures that produce low-income patients as willing experimental subjects. It argues that the experimental settings of plastic surgery create medical and legal rationalities that externalize the risks of surgery onto the bodies of patients, diminishing the risks assumed by surgeons. It illuminate the ways in which surgeons favor innovation over safeguarding their patients by focusing on the ongoing controversy regarding bioplasty, a surgical technique that has a considerable number of backers despite its long record of causing serious health problems. In a broader sense, the chapter explores how affect complicates our understanding of rationality, and how it helps us trace the ways in which patients and their surgeons become lashed into biopolitical networks of knowledge production.

The Raciology of Beauty

This chapter addresses the racial logic that underpins the contemporary construction of beauty as a national health concern. Plastic surgeons portray their work as complementing the work of Brazilian miscegenation by correcting mistakes resulting from racial mixture. These corrections, however, always presume a higher desirability for whiter facial features, based on an aesthetic hierarchy that devalues and medicalizes non-European features, such as the diagnosable “negroid nose.” This raciology of beauty, however, also relies on more diffuse forms of racialized affect, which blur the boundaries between bodies and thus produce whiteness as a fragile quality, as demonstrated by upper- and middle-class patients who seek beauty in order to differentiate themselves from the black body of the mulatta.

Hope, Affect, Mobility

This chapter examines the narratives of upward mobility through beauty that are interwoven throughout diverse forms of Brazilian media—from journalistic accounts of recently discovered models to the carefully crafted storylines of soap operas and televised beauty pageants. It compares these accounts with ethnographic research among working-class parents who send their daughters to talent agencies or modeling schools. These girls' parents and teachers pin their hopes on performances of beauty because they understand the female body itself as a form of capital that promises a better future. This affective promise of a better future, however, becomes a moral injunction as well, sexualizing and racializing, in very particular ways, the poor women who are said to deserve upward mobility, emphasizing virtuous sexual behavior, European features, and straighter hair as essential components for success.

The Circulation of Beauty

This chapter, which is based on ethnographic interviews with Brazilian patients, discusses the ways in which beauty makes bodies matter. Focusing first on class, then on gender, and ending with race, it explores how the beauty/ugliness dyad combines powerfully with other bodily signs and provides legitimacy to forms of inequality, simultaneously producing the terrain on which these forms of inequality can be questioned. It is argued that beauty shows us how bodies assemble into coherent gendered, racialized, and classed entities within the Brazilian context. Beauty, in other words, is the key to understanding why the promise of belonging to the body politic is always conditional in Brazil, inevitably tied to one's appearance, and why some bodies are more highly valued in this affective economy than others.

The Eugenesis of Beauty

This chapter, which is based on archival research, demonstrates that beauty developed as a central concern for the Brazilian eugenics movement in the early twentieth century as it became associated with improved hygienic practices and ongoing racial mixture, which eugenicists believed would inevitably whiten the nation as whole. The beauty of women—as the imagined bearers of future generations and as the objects of (male) medical scrutiny—was of particular concern. In other words, female beauty came to be understood as a symbol of the nation's progress, and beautification practices such as plastic surgery were lauded as sensible hygienic practices that aided the work of miscegenation.

The Biopolitical and Affective Dimensions of Beauty

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book examines the prevailing notions of beauty in Brazil by combining ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and readings of popular culture. The research was carried out over three nonconsecutive years: between 2006 and 2008 and between 2009 and 2011. The main argument is that beauty matters in Brazil because it produces forms of affect that condense race, class, and gender inequalities onto and through the body, generating an aesthetic hierarchy that produces a scale of value ranging from the beautiful and normative to the ugly and abject. It is hoped that this work provides a turning point in the scholarship about race in Brazil, which has long suggested that aesthetic evaluations are central to daily experiences of racism, but which has not fully examined beauty as a social category.

Plastic Governmentality

This chapter traces the ways by which plastic surgeons in Brazil became fused with the state at specific junctures, or nodes, within the networks of public health care, appropriating the state's biopolitical authority for themselves. Plastic surgeons deploy a type of governance, a so-called ‘plastic governmentality’—a flexible approach to the management of public health that allows them to conceal its imbrication with commercial medicine. This flexibility makes it possible for plastic surgeons to bend hospital rules, re-label surgeries, and adjust waiting queues according to their own interests, yet to always present themselves as humanitarians providing a health service on behalf of the state, thus realigning national interests to match their own.