Recent decades have seen the rise of a global beauty boom, with profound effects on people’s bodies worldwide. The global beauty and fashion industries seem to disseminate mass-mediated images of men and women whose bodies have startling similarities, despite their differences in shade and attire. Against this background, some scholars have warned against an increasing regularization of the human body, indeed, of a ‘pervasive smoothing out of human complexity and variation’ (Garland-Thomson 2009, 30). On the other hand, an emerging literature on beauty practices and images worldwide has demonstrated that, in their quest for beauty, modernity or enhancement, bodies are shaped by particular, yet transnational body politics (Elias et al. 2017; Jarrín 2017; Nguyen 2011) and are embedded in culturally specific, collective fantasies that are neither exclusively local nor global, but may be both (cf. Jafar and Casanova 2013; Jha 2016). While certain hegemonic beauty norms and images are becoming increasingly prominent globally, the present volume argues that, for a nuanced reading of their diverse meanings and effects on and for bodies, we need to pay careful attention to the various ways in which normative beauty is manufactured in different contexts and across national boundaries. Techniques for measuring or weighing the body, lightening or tanning the skin, processing hair and altering eyelids, female breasts or noses may travel transnationally, but to understand their relationship to normative regimes of representation, it is crucial to analyse their multiple and changing meanings in specific locations.
Beauty and the Norm contains chapters based on empirical research across a wide range of geographical locations and cultural contexts, as well as shorter conversations between scholars that also include more personal reflections on scholarly debates, artistic representations and everyday experiences. Rather than engaging in the certainly futile attempt to provide a complete review of the literature on the relationship between the beautified/beautiful body and norms of appearance, in this introductory chapter, we seek to provide a framework that ties the various chapters together. In its attempt to expose the generative operations of human standardization and normative looks in everyday life to more systematic analysis this edited volume contributes to a debate that we feel is only just emerging. Not least, it brings together hitherto rather separate debates in critical beauty studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, the history of science and disability studies on the gendered, classed, (dis)abled and racialized body, normative regimes of representation and the global beauty economy. Before introducing the contributions to this volume, we begin with a brief history of the notion of the norm and of the closely related debates on standardization and normalization as well as a discussion of the global economy of gendered and racialized bodies.
Debating Norms, Standardization and Normalization
In their attempt to delineate a sociology of standards and standardization, Timmermans and Epstein (2010, 71) remark that standardization has a negative ring to it as it is perceived to create worldwide homogenization. While we may tolerate or even invite the standardization of consumer goods, bureaucratic policies, technical codes and even research methods as processes that make ‘things work together over distance’ (ibid.), the notion of a standard human is rather troubling and may trigger dystopian fears of enforced homogenization, designer babies and cloning. Far from being entirely dystopian, or utopian, for that matter, the notion of a standard human has in some domains long been an everyday reality. To Epstein, ‘[a]ttempts to construct a standard human are unavoidable, in part because other standards have spillover effects’ (ibid., 36). By citing the example of a new policy announcement by Southwest Airlines in 2002 that overweight passengers would be forced to purchase two adjoining seats and the controversy this triggered, Epstein explains that ‘[t]o standardize consumer goods is inevitably to standardize those who consume them; to standardize consumer goods is inevitably to standardize those administered by them’ (ibid.).
From the perspective of disability studies, the insight that standardized material objects contribute to the construction of bodies as non-standard, extraordinary and indeed ‘disabled’ is hardly new (cf. Garland-Thomson 1997). Within disability studies, the notion of a ‘disabling society’ (Swain et al. 2003) has come to stand for both the analysis and the critique of the conceptual and material barriers that contribute to the impairment and exclusion of some members of society while they serve others. From such a perspective, the history of bodily standardization is intricately tied to that of the norm, the normal (and abnormal), normalcy, normality and the average—all notions, as Lennard Davis (1995, 24) suggests, that entered the English language rather late, in the mid-nineteenth century.
The history of human standardization is commonly traced back to the emergence of statistics in the mid-nineteenth century, and especially the works of Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), who developed the still powerful concepts of the average man and the body mass index. As ideological tools, these standards of somatic normalcy continue not only to describe, but also to prescribe human bodies today. With their help, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson remarks (2009, 28), generations of women, people of colour, the so-called handicapped and the poor have been measured, observed and evaluated, almost always being ‘found wanting.’ Up until the nineteenth century, when for Quetelet, as well as for artists like the Prussian sculptor Gottfried Schadow (cf. Döring 2011), the standardized or average human male came to signify beauty and vice versa, bodily beauty had been discussed in relation to the concept of the ‘ideal’ rather than the norm (Davis 1995, 24).
As Davis reminds us, in societies with bodily beauty ideals (rather than beauty norms), ‘all members of the population are below the ideal. … By definition, one can never have an ideal body. There is in such societies no demand that populations have bodies that conform to the ideal’ (1995, 25). To illustrate his point, Davis (ibid.) recounts the story of the Greek artist Zeuxis lining up all the beautiful women in the town of Crotona to create the ideal figure of Aphrodite by combining their most beautiful body parts as individuals. While Zeuxis’ creation of Aphrodite may sound not too far-fetched in an age when digital post-processing or ‘image cosmetics’ are routinely applied to the mass-mediated bodies and images of advertisement beauties and fashion models, there is nevertheless a great difference between his approach and ours: in contrast to Zeuxis’ society, which idealized beauty as an unattainable ideal for any actual living body, in contemporary societies that measure and quantify beauty as a norm, each individual body is readily scrutinized in relation to others, whether in terms of its height, weight or complexion, or more generally its attractiveness.
The conceptualization of beauty as a norm has thus effected various forms of exclusion for those who fall short of, exceed or violate the normative parameters or else escape the pressure to ‘correct’ those aspects of their body that defy the norm. In his profound cultural history of aesthetic plastic surgery, Sander Gilman (1999, xvii) describes the basic motivation for aesthetic surgery as the desire to correct such ‘deformations,’ in the language of medical experts, and to ‘pass’ visibly. The idea of the averaged human being as physically attractive continues to be advocated by some evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists, who, often on the basis of rather limited samples, claim to be able to measure physical attractiveness, linking it with averaged facial and bodily features (Pallet et al. 2010; Quinn et al. 2008; Rikowski and Grammer 1999), as well as reproductive strategies, fertility and, ultimately, evolutionary success (Buss 2003; Etcoff 1999). 1
As outlined by Davis (1995), the rise of the concepts of the norm, the normal, the average man and normality is also bound up with the rise of eugenics and of larger processes of ordering bodies into clear-cut, typically binary categories such as able and disabled, male and female, black and white, rich and poor, and, often resulting from these, the beautiful and the ugly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Based on an ‘ideology of containment and a politics of power and fear’ (ibid., 4), eugenicists like the English Victorian Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) conceptualized society as an organic body in need of perfection. In his work on cosmetic surgery in Brazil, Jarrín (2017, 28–53) speaks of the ‘eugenesis’ of beauty, showing how eugenic thought ‘produced the backbone of the aesthetic hierarchy present to this day in Brazil’ (ibid., 30). Social institutions such as hospitals, schools, prisons, barracks etc. became crucial in the process of creating ideal citizens and, indeed, of their normalization, which has been studied so prominently by Michel Foucault (1990, 1995). Normalization, according to Foucault (1990), involves disciplinary power and social control rather than direct force. It is a process enforced by various authorities based on the concept of the normal ‘as a principle of coercion’ (1995, 184), eventually creating ‘docile bodies’ that self-monitor their compliance with the normative order. In an age of neoliberalism and humanitarian imperialism, Mimi Thi Nguyen (2011) argues, beauty is recruited as a part of imperial statecraft, a form of biopower that produces particular ways of managing the body, regulating not just appearances, for exampl...