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PART ONE
Theorizing beauty politics
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1
INTRODUCTION
Maxine Leeds Craig
Beauty is political. It is the prize claimed by the victors of struggles over human worth. The sting of ugliness is a weapon used by those at the top of social hierarchies to assert superiority over groups they deem inferior and therefore ugly. Celebrating the beauty of oneâs people has been a way to fight back. Most of the time women are the beauties crowned in these struggles over collective worth. Beauty politics are gender politics. Trends in marketing and in the nature of work may have made contemporary men more concerned about their own appearance than in earlier generations, but the extent to which beauty defines women remains greater. The pressure imposed upon women to appear beautiful has in many ways intensified. Strangers and intimates scrutinize womenâs appearance across settings of leisure, love, and work. And because gender is always co-constructed with race and class, beauty politics are racialized, classed, gender politics.
Beauty is political, but beauty culture can also be fun, the basis of teen girlsâ solidarity, a source of sensual pleasure, a practice of care, a foothold in the economy, or just an accessible way to feel good. The puzzle of how to understand a set of practices and associated meanings that are simultaneously sites of oppressions and pleasures has drawn historians, sociologists, psychologists, media scholars, art historians, philosophers, literary critics, and others to study beauty. This book invites readers into that conversation.
Organization of the volume
There are many possible ways to organize a multidisciplinary, international volume on the politics of beauty. This book could have been organized by geopolitical location, social identity, academic discipline, or even body part. I rejected those possible arrangements in order to foster conversations across disciplinary, geographic, and other categorical divides, and to encourage more complex, de-centered, multi-faceted debates.
The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics has six sections. The chapters in âTheorizing Beauty Politicsâ take the broadest view, providing approaches that can be used to frame an array of specific issues associated with the meaning and consequences of beauty ideals and practices. Rosalind Gillâs chapter, âNeoliberal Beauty,â sets the stage for much of what follows. Contemporary beauty practices take place in the context of the expansion of the market into every corner of life. Neoliberalism fosters an individualistic and competitive ethos in which people, and especially girls and women, learn to perpetually monitor their appearance, and their feelings about their appearance, to produce their âbestâ selves. New technologies have intensified the ways in which the body has become the focus of endless labor and ceaseless consumption, both of which marketers and popular media present as self-care. Helen Wood examines the centrality of economic class to judgments regarding appearance and the ways in which women, especially working-class women, risk disparagement for how they engage with style. Oluwakemi Balogun and Gracia Dodds expand the frame of reference to transnational politics in a chapter that looks at how nations use beauty pageants to elevate their status in global hierarchies. Monique Roelofs invites readers to look at artists whose work reveals inescapable contradictions in the race and gender politics of beauty. MĂłnica Moreno Figueroa focuses on how everyday assessments of being âlighter thanâ or âdarker thanâ in racially mixed contexts function as part of the operational life of racism.
Competing definitions
âCompeting Definitions of Beautyâ brings together chapters that address how specific places, times, and communities can sustain or lead to transformations in definitions of beauty. Across these contexts, size, shape, and skin tone are attributes that define beauty. Readers will see patterns in this group of chapters, which may seem to arise from cultural hegemonies that transcend borders and saturate different contexts. Yet they will also find that beauty is not defined in the same way everywhere, and that similar patterns must be understood in their local contexts. For example, women in different places may desire pale skin, but for distinctly different reasons.
Beauty politics are not just about freeing women from beauty standards, or making beauty ideals more inclusive. The politics are also about how women have used beauty, and claimed beauty, to control how they were perceived. The chapters by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox and Sabrina Strings provide historical perspectives on beauty standards in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Both chapters show beauty standards as an unsettled set of beliefs, which despite their exclusionary natures, become the focus of popular aspirations. Margaret Hunterâs chapter presents colorism, or the favoring of light skin within communities of color, as an enduring system of discrimination in the United States. Vanita Reddy examines colorism in India and the limits of recent challenges to it. A chapter by Viren Swami and one by Yuko Yamamiya and Tomohiro Suzuki examine how preferences regarding body size do or do not circulate across national boundaries. Nada Mustafa Ali provides an overview of beauty politics in Sudan, where size and color matter in the perception of beauty. Ali introduces scent, and the collective production of perfumes as an important part of Sudanese womenâs beauty culture.
Together the chapters in this section refute notions of universal beauty standards. They show local beauty cultures as informed by globally circulating imagery, but not fully dominated or displaced by it. The final chapter in this section, by Erynn Masi de Casanova and Jeremy Brenner-Levoy, takes us to the fantasy world of cosplay, where fans of anime, comic books, video games, and other forms of popular culture gather to wear costumes that enable them to take on the appearance of their favorite characters. Casanova and Brenner-Levoy ask if the beauty standards, which have so much force in everyday life, reign inside the alternative universe created in cosplay conventions.
Activism and social change
Cultural hegemonies are always unstable balances, and at any moment, in any place, in any context, beauty standards compete for dominance. Though a perception of beauty may feel spontaneous, idiosyncratic, or innate, it is way of seeing that is a product of that competition. Sometimes social movements directly work to change the publicâs way of seeing beauty. Often beauty advocacy arises as an unintended extension of a broader movement. As part of fighting size discrimination, which has especially harsh consequences for women, activists proudly claimed the often reproachful word fat, and celebrated the beauty of fat women. In the early 1960s, young Black women activists in the Civil Rights Movement began to perceive the widely accepted Black womenâs practice of hair straightening as an attempt to conform to a white supremacist society. They stopped straightening their hair and over time, Black women beyond activist circles saw the beauty of unstraightened hair textures. New ways of seeing beauty arise among transformed people in changed societies. The chapters in âBeauty, Activism, and Social Changeâ address the ways in which social movements have altered beauty standards and reshaped aesthetics. Of the sections in the book, this one engages most directly with organized social movement politics. It displays the wide range of outcomes that can result when activism and beauty meet. The chapters ask which beauty practices should be considered counterhegemonic and examine whether assimilation can be a strategy of resistance. They reveal the importance of community institutions for nurturing new ways of seeing beauty and look at responses to new forms of racism.
Beauty politics are as complicated and riven by conflict as the movements from which they grow. Ann Fox systematically explicates a definition of disability aesthetics as a practice of social justice. Malia McAndrew explores the way in which lesbians in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s strategically used conventional dress to make a place for themselves within a homophobic society. Carla Pfefferâs chapter on fat activism and the politics of beauty asks us to consider whether we would be better served by embracing a politics of ugliness. Ugliness haunts beauty. It lurks behind every word describing the beautiful. While social movements usually advocate expanding narrow definitions of beauty, Pfeffer questions why beauty has become a necessary achievement.
The physical spaces, oral traditions, and print and digital media through which people find and make community are the sites where people imagine, describe, and nurture alternative ways of seeing beauty. Critiques of the racism of beauty standards preceded second-wave feminism. The longer history of critique is visible in the literature of anticolonial and anti-racist movements, and found popular expression in song and folklore. Kamille Gentles-Peart explores how Black women in the United States and the Caribbean have resisted racist disparagement of their bodies. White racist imagery made Black womenâs bodies the focus of ridicule. Gentles-Peart shows how Caribbean folklore and Jamaican dancehalls were vehicles for envisioning and nurturing anti-racist aesthetics. Social media provide perhaps the dominant contemporary vehicle for disseminating popular aesthetics. Social media influencers have a particularly commanding place in the sea of voices and images that tell us how to see beauty. Shirley Tate follows the battle over the worth of Black womenâs bodies to Instagram where vloggers challenge white appropriation of forms of beauty for which Black women have won recognition. Bernadette Wegenstein situates beauty politics inside feminist debates regarding the politics of appearance.
Body work
The chapters in the âBody Workâ part consider the social meanings of an array of ways that people alter their bodies to meet social expectations for appearance. In a deliberate juxtaposition, presented to prompt readers to consider how boundaries of acceptability are formed, the section places chapters on practices widely treated as routine, or even necessary, alongside chapters on interventions typically seen as extreme. Eric Plemonsâ comparative survey of genital-altering procedures offers a framework for thinking about conflicts that characterize contemporary debates about genital aesthetics. Melisa Trujillo examines research on body hair removal in the Anglophone West and finds increasingly stringent social expectations for hairlessness across zones of the body. Claudia Liebeltâs chapter on Muslim womenâs beauty practices in Turkey, which involve hair removal and the use of cosmetics, challenges simplistic understandings of the relationship of religious faith to beauty. Kristin Rowe surveys the politics of Black womenâs hair. Amid shifting political contexts and using the products and techniques available to them, Black womenâs aesthetic choices often signify political stances regardless of their intent. Dana Berkowitz writes about the implications of Botox treatments as an increasingly normative practice. Initially marketed as a way to mask the signs of aging, a range of medical and non-medical practitioners now promote Botox to younger consumers as a preventative treatment. I contribute a chapter about orthodontics as the beauty practice that is so medicalized and normalized that it has escaped the attention of beauty scholars. Two chapters, one by Joanna Elfving-Hwang, and the other co-authored by Alexander Edmonds and So Yeon Leem, address the racial politics of cosmetic surgery in Korea and Brazil.
Labor
Within sociology, beauty scholars have turned their attention to the labor of beauty, and labor scholars have begun to pay attention to beauty. âBeauty and Laborâ brings together chapters that examine the aesthetic pressures of work, including the labor of producing beauty, the experiences of professional beauties in modeling and pageants, and the aesthetic demands of poorly paid service work. Amanda Czerniawskiâs chapter examines the limited place for and physical constraints placed upon âplus sizeâ models in the fashion industry. Dustin Mabry focuses on the emotionally laden aesthetic labor of tattooers, whose artistry permanently alters the appearance of their customers. Karen Tice examines beauty pageants as institutions that are simultaneously formulaic and flexible, anachronistic, and forward-looking. Mobile apps and other innovations in entertainment have provided new vehicles that extend the reach of pageant culture beyond contestants into everyday lives. Despite social change and critique, pageants endure and people aspire to enter them because pageants have found ways to cover the institutionâs political flaws with veneers of inclusion and purpose. Kyla Waltersâ survey of research on the aesthetic demands of retail employment reveals the ways in which racism inheres in the appearance norms that shape retail hiring. Eileen Otis examines how service workers in China must transform their appearance to meet customer and managerial expectations. Otis examines the complexity of workersâ experiences who find pleasures in new forms of embodiment that facilitate their movement across class boundaries.
Age
The book concludes with three chapters that look at the politics of those seen as too young or too old to engage in beauty work....
