The growth of the service economy, widespread acceptance of cosmetic technologies, expansion of global media, and the intensification of scrutiny of appearance brought about by the internet have heightened the power of beauty ideals in everyday life. A range of interdisciplinary contributions by an international roster of established and emerging scholars will introduce students to the emergence of debates about beauty, including work in history, sociology, communications, anthropology, gender studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and psychology.
The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics is an essential reference work for students and researchers interested in the politics of appearance. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into six parts:
- Theorizing Beauty Politics
- Competing Definitions of Beauty
- Beauty, Activism, and Social Change
- Body Work
- Beauty and Labor
- Beauty and the Lifecourse
The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics is essential reading for students in Women and Gender Studies, Sociology, Media Studies, Communications, Philosophy, and Psychology.
Part One: Theorizing Beauty Politics
1 Introduction
Maxine Leeds Craig
2 Neoliberal Beauty
Rosalind Gill
3 Beauty and Class
Helen Wood
4 Transnational Feminist Approaches to Beauty
Oluwakemi M. Balogun and Gracia Dodds
5 Philosophy and the Politics of Beauty
Monique Roelofs
6 Picking Your Battles: Beauty, Complacency and the Other Life of Racism
Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa
Part Two: Competing Definitions of Beauty
7 Democratizing Looks: The Politics of Gender, Class and Beauty in early 20th century United States
Einav Rabinovitch-Fox
8 Some’s Thin, Some’s Voluptuous But They All Fine: Feminine Beauty in Black Publications 1827-1909
Sabrina Strings
9 Colorism and the Racial Politics of Beauty
Margaret Hunter
10 Beauty, Colorism, and Anti-Colorism in Transnational India
Vanita Reddy
11 Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Body Size
Viren Swami
12 Beauty Standards and Body-Image Issues in the West and Japan from a Cultural Perspective
Yuko Yamamiya and Tomohiro Suzuki
13 Body Aesthetics & Beauty Politics in 21st Century Africa: Case of the Sudan
Nada Mustafa Ali
14 Fantastic Bodies: Navigating Ideals of Beauty in Cosplay
Erynn Masi de Casanova and Jeremy Brenner-Levoy
Part Three: Beauty, Activism, and Social Change
15 The Rise of Disability Aesthetics: Reframing the Relationship between Disability, Beauty, and Art
Ann M. Fox
16 "There is Something Chic about Women Wearing Men’s Clothes": Lesbian Activists as Fashionable Women in the Fight for the Rights of Sexual Minorities in the United States, 1955-1972
Malia McAndrew
17 Fat Activism and Beauty Politics
Carla A. Pfeffer
18 Bumpah Politics: The Thick Black Female Body in the US and Caribbean Academic Discourses
Kamille Gentles-Peart
19 Rooted: On Black Women, Beauty, Hair and Embodiment
Kristin Denise Rowe
20 I do not see myself as anything else than white: Black resistance to racial cosplay blackfishing
Shirley A. Tate
21 The Beautiful Body in the Age of #metoo
Bernadette Wegenstein
Part Four: Body Work
22 Genital Aesthetics
Eric Plemons
23 Body hair removal: Constructing the ‘baseline’ for the normative gendered body in the contemporary Anglophone West
Melisa Trujillo
24 Negotiating "Islamic" Beauty in Turkey, or Conceptualizing the Complex Entanglements Between Beauty and Religion
Claudia Liebelt
25 Botox and Beauty Politics
Dana Berkowitz
26 Orthodontics as Expected Beauty Work
Maxine Leeds Craig
27 Cosmetic Surgery and the discourse of Westernization of Korean Bodies
Jo Elfving-Hwang
28 The Racial Politics of Plastic Surgery
Alexander Edmonds and So Yeon Leem
Part Five: Beauty and Labor
29 Size Matters (In Modeling)
Amanda M. Czerniawski
30 Tattooers at Work: An Emotional and Permanent Body Labor
Dustin Kiskaddon
31 Beauty Pageants and Border Crossings: The Politics of Class, Cosmopolitanism, Race and Place
Karen Tice
32 Retail Work, Race and Aesthetic Labor
Kyla Walters
33 Hourly Beauty: Aesthetic Labor in China
Eileen Otis
Part Six: Beauty and the Lifecourse
34 Girls and Beauty (Pageant) Culture
Hilary L. Levey Friedman
35 The Politics of Looking Old: Older Adults and the Aging Body
Laura Hurd
36 The Incredible Invisible Woman: Age, Beauty and the Specter of Identity
Brenda Weber
Biography
Maxine Leeds Craig is a professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Davis, USA. She is the author of Sorry I Don’t Dance: Why Men Refuse to Move (2014) and Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (2002). She studies the politics of beauty, of dancing and not dancing, or, in other words, the ways in which social structures of race, gender, and class are lived in day-to-day embodiment.
