The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil by Alvaro Jarrín
Requirements: ePUB Reader, 2.9MB
Overview: 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.
Genre: Non-Fiction, Cultural Anthropology
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