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- Presents a well-rounded, nuanced, and cutting-edge discussion of the globalization of beauty
- Offers, unlike other works on similar topics, a discussion of beauty in relation to disabled bodies
- Engages with beauty concepts across a wide regional scope
- Locates beauty ideals and ideas within discussions of disability, race, feminism, art and media representations, and bodily politics
This edited volume brings together ethnographically rich and conceptually informed contributions from a variety of disciplines to analyze the relation between beauty and the norm. The book contributes to an emerging debate on the global standardization in bodily appearance. The book is part of an important debate among scholars on the norms and ethics of modifying and representing gendered and racialized bodies. With the help of aesthetic techniques, aesthetic surgery aficionados, trans-people, and beauty queens - everyone ready to subject themselves to the demands of the market - may strive to become ‘beautiful’. Are such fantasies part of a pervasive “beauty myth,” as claimed by critical feminists, who argue that increased spending on bodily appearance supports, rather than challenges a subordinate position within patriarchal societies? Or do they disturb normative regimes of representation? Contributors engage with this and other complex questions. Table of Contents- Beauty and the Norm: An Introduction
- Faces of Masculinity: Shaving Practices and Popular Exhibitions of ‘Hairy Wonders’ in Early Twentieth-Century PragueStandardizing Slimness: How Body Weight Quantified Beauty in the Netherlands, 1870–1940
- Extraordinarily White: The De/Spectacularization of the Albinotic Body and the Normalization of Its Audience
- ‘Disability Gain’ and the Limits of Representing Alternative Beauty
- Broken Beauty, Broken Cups: Disabled Bodies in Contemporary African Art
- Reshaping ‘Turkish’ Breasts and Noses: On Cosmetic Surgery, Gendered Norms and the ‘Right to Look Normal’
- Fashioning the Female Muslim Face: From ‘Hiding One’s Beauty’ to ‘Managing One’s Beauty’
- Beauty and the Norm Sketches: A Conversation on a Performative Response
- Body Beautiful: Comparative Meanings of Beauty in Brazil, South Africa and Jamaica
- ‘In This Country, Beauty Is Defined by Fairness of Skin.’ Skin Colour Politics and Social Stratification in India
- Skin Colour Politics and the White Beauty Standard
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