| In its transition to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, Brazil experienced rapid growth in its beauty industry. During this time, Brazil also became the country with the world's highest per capita rate of plastic surgery and the largest gap between rich and poor. This dissertation analyzes the social significance of cosmetic practices, aesthetic ideals, and racial appearance in a highly unequal society.; Based on 18 months of fieldwork in plastic surgery clinics and a public hospital that offers discounted operations to the poor, my research charts the emergence of a democratic concept of beauty as a “right” that cuts across class and is essential to entrance into labor markets, psychological health, and social acceptance.; I view the growth of the beauty industry as a total social fact , combining diverse spheres of social life: medicine, consumption, media, sexual norms, and aesthetic ideals defined in a national and racial idiom. Several studies have argued that beauty practices are a form of the “social control of women.” Instead, I relate beauty to gender norms, but also argue that patriarchal structures are weakened by an expanding consumer society, rising rates of divorce, and changing sexual and familial relationships.; My research shows how medicine acts as a conduit for the expansion of a market logic into new spheres of social, psychological, and biological experience. But medicine also is transformed as it is popularized and marketed. I argue that plastic surgery fuels the commodification of the body, but also analyze the social meaning of consumption and its importance for citizenship. Thus the beauty industry's growth is produced not just by global capitalism but also by a cultural and historical context in which appearance—defined by racial, class, and aesthetic markers—mediates entrance into the “markets” of work and marriage. Beauty culture medicalizes and aestheticizes problems of social origin, but also inspires fantasies of social mobility, self-improvement, and even fame.; This dissertation also examines the debate over the “myth of racial democracy” in Brazil. I argue that cosmetic practices and aesthetic ideals reproduce tensions between ideologies of “whitening” and “browning” central to Brazilian national identity. |
