Global Beauty, Local Bodies

by Jafar, Afshan; Casanova, Erynn Masi de

• ISBN13: 9781137378668
• ISBN10: 1137378662
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-12-11
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

What do the words global, transnational, national, and local mean when talking about beauty, which is simultaneously abstract and ephemeral, embodied and concrete? How do ideas and images of beauty circulate in a globalizing world, and how do people's bodily practices respond to them? Rather than simply examining how beauty is thought about and aspired to in international settings, this collection of original scholarly work and first-person accounts takes globalization processes and the transnational links these processes create as the jumping-off point for an examination of what it means to be, have, or aspire to a beautiful body.

Author Biography

Afshan Jafar is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Connecticut College, USA. Her first book from Palgrave Macmillan, Women's NGOs in Pakistan (2011), uncovers the overwhelming challenges facing women's NGOs and examines the strategies used by them to ensure not just their survival but an acceptance of their messages by the larger public.
 
Erynn Casanova is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Cincinnati, USA where she is also a Faculty Affiliate of the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. She is the author of Making Up the Difference: Women, Beauty, and Direct Selling in Ecuador (University of Texas Press, 2011), which won the National Women's Studies Association's Sara A. Whaley Book Prize.

Table of Contents

Globalizing Beauty
1. Refashioning Global Bodies: Cosmopolitan Femininities in Nigerian Beauty Pageants and the Vietnamese Sex Industry; Oluwakemi M. Balogun and Kimberly Kay Hoang
2. Aesthetic Labor, Racialization and Aging in Tijuana's Cosmopolitan Sex Industry; Susanne Hofmann
3. In Praise of Big Noses [personal reflection]; Persis M. Karim
4. ¡Más que un Bocado!/ More than a Mouthful: Comparing Hooters in the U.S. and Colombia; Michelle Newton-Francis and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
5. Most Days I'm Beautiful: A Reflection on Skin and Body Hair in Cambodia [personal reflection]; Kaija Bergen
6. Reproducing Beauty: Marriage and Motherhood in the Somali Diaspora; Lucy Lowe
7. The Before-And-After Template: Researching and Reflecting on Body Image Concerns in Globalizing India [personal reflection]; Jaita Talukdar
8. Metrosexuality as a Body Discourse: Masculinity and Sports Stars in Global and Local Contexts; Jan Wickman and Fredrik Langeland