Beauty in Latin America

Abstract

Beauty clearly has power in Latin America—people deploy beauty to organize bodies in particular ways, and beauty clearly intersects with race, class, and gender inequalities present in the region. Within the nation, beauty gives meaning to particular hierarchies that exist within the body politic, and it is used by social actors to both craft ideal forms of racialized femininity (and to a lesser extent, masculinity) or to challenge those hegemonic beauty standards. Transnationally beauty allows people to generate narratives of how nations relate to one another, and beauty informs how individuals consume and practice gender and race across borders. The scholarly work on beauty in Latin America is still small, but it has grown rapidly over the last two decades as beauty pageants, practices of beautification, and other performances of beauty have become the object of study within anthropology, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, history, and gender studies. Beauty, once considered a superfluous topic of academic study, has gained traction because it helps explain why some bodies matter more than others in Latin America, and provides an additional analytic that explains the salience of femininity and race within biopolitical projects of various kinds. The global mediascape and the transnational political economy, additionally, has only exacerbated the importance of beauty as a form of bodily capital that provides hope and meaning to people in precarious economic situations, since it is associated with upward mobility across Latin America. In what follows, the literature on beauty has been organized according to the types of beauty practices being examined (Beauty Pageants, Weight and Eating Disorders, Cosmetic Surgery, and Fashion and Cosmetics) or according to the main themes they cover (Race and Beauty, Popular Culture, Masculinities, and Sex Work and Sex Tourism). This annotated bibliography is not meant to be an exhaustive compendium of all the literature on beauty in Latin America, but rather a selection of some of the most important interventions and the ways in which they speak to one another.