The Life of Beauty

The Life of Beauty challenges any straightforward or linear understanding of how bodily beauty comes to matter in people’s lives. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research in Taiwan, India, Tibet, Cameroon, Rwanda, Brazil, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Germany, the contributions to this volume examine an impressive range of issues through the lens of embodied aesthetics, including migration, sex work, pregnancy, nationalism, caste, class, race, materiality, and fieldwork itself. The chapters guide readers through known and perhaps unknown worlds, with protagonists such as feminist writers and teachers, cis- and trans-gender sex workers, hairdressers, beauty service workers and customers in beauty parlours. They invite readers to consider connections between everyday materials, like hairdresser training heads, depilatory wax, second-hand clothing, and processes of marginalisation and global inequality. By attending closely to subjective experience, and meticulously locating beauty in individual lives, objects, and socio-political contexts, the volume foregrounds intersections between everyday life and politics which are often studied in isolation.