The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil

by Alvaro Jarrín

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. The Biopolitics of Beauty explores not only the biopolitical 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.

Genres: Fashion, Eugenics, Nonfiction, Sociology

267 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 29, 2017

Reviews

[Sydney]

4.5 stars

[Marija Assereckova]

I've come across this book in one of the Guardian's longreads on plastic surgery. Can't say that the book is an essential read (I found the article to be more concise and illuminating, even though it wasn't fully dedicated to the plastic surgery in Brazil) but it's nevertheless interesting. Perhaps not the best combination of academic research and human stories, but still a good example of a critical approach to controversial matters.

[Ana Facio]

Interesting connections made