Embodiment and Representations of Beauty
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- Description
- Contents
- About
Beauty embodiment and representations of beauty are crafted by legitimised hierarchies of power in popular culture, including across fashion, sports, media and social media outlets, and the arts. Informed and guided by an intersectional lens with a focus on underrepresented communities, this volume of Advances in Gender Research foregrounds gender and sexuality to engage with beauty as a site of knowledge creation.
Interrogating its very definition, chapters take a revolutionary, intersectional approach to explore beauty as an avenue to create alternative knowledge as well as a conduit to engage in critical conversations on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, illness, and fitness. Emphasizing that beauty definitions and standards in any given society closely reflect the distribution of power within it, contributors think critically about the role of institutions such as the hair industry, workplaces, the visual arts, and classical dance in how beauty is socially construed and conceptualized.
Grounded in a more open-ended conception that goes beyond aesthetics, Embodiment and Representations of Beauty celebrates beauty’s capacity as a source of liberation, agency, social justice, decolonization, and survival for marginalized communities, as well as an emancipatory path to feminist liberation.
Introduction. The Power of Beauty: Intersectional Feminist Approaches to its Embodiment and Representation; Esther Hernández-Medina and Sharina Maíllo-Pozo
- Chapter 1. Mamá Fit Goes to El Salvador: Fitness in a Transnational Society; Noelle K. Brigden
- Chapter 2. Shifting Perceptions of Women’s Weight; Courtney Dress
- Chapter 3. Doing Beauty, Doing Health: Embodied Emotion Work in Women Cancer Patients’ Narratives of Hair Loss; Marley Olson
- Chapter 4. "How Do They Really See Me?": The Sexual Politics of Multiracial Desirability; Julia Chin
- Chapter 5. Body Image and Sexual Pleasure in Women and Genderqueer Individual’s Sexual Experiences; Spencier R. Ciaralli
- Chapter 6. I Don’t Wear Black: Professional Muslim Workers and Personal Dress Code; Salam Aboulhassan
- Chapter 7. Millennial Agency and Liberation within Black American Beauty Standards; Jaleesa Reed
- Chapter 8. Ballet is [White] Woman: Anti-Black Standards of Beauty within Ballet; Sekani L. Robinson
- Chapter 9. Consuming Beauty, Constructing Blackness: A Constructivist Grounded Theory Analysis of Racialized Gendered Embodiment Practices through Shampoo Product Descriptions; Shameika D. Daye
- Chapter 10. Mulata in Repose; Jennifer Báez
Esther Hernández-Medina is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at Pomona College, USA, as well as a feminist academic, public policy expert, and activist originally from the Dominican Republic.
Sharina Maíllo-Pozo is Assistant Professor of Latinx studies in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Georgia, USA. In 2021, she was the recipient of the Sandy Beaver Excellence in Teaching Award.