Recent decades have seen the rise of a global beauty boom, with profound effects on perceptions of bodies worldwide. Against this background, Beauty and the Norm assembles ethnographic and conceptual approaches from a variety of disciplines and across the globe to debate standardization in bodily appearance. Its contributions range from empirical research to exploratory conversations between scholars and personal reflections. Bridging hitherto separate debates in critical beauty studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, the history of science, disability studies, gender studies, and critical race studies, this volume reflects upon the gendered, classed, and racialized body, normative regimes of representation, and the global beauty economy.
I. Introduction: Changing Beauty: Doing and Undoing Norms
2. Stephan Bibrowski, The Lion Man, And The Changing Face Of Normative Middle-Class Masculinity In Bohemia Around 1900
3. Quantifying Beauty: How Bathroom Scales Shaped Aesthetic Norms In The Dutch Interbellum
4. Debating Bodily Standardization In The Global Beauty Boom/A Conversation
Part I. Mediatizing Beauty: Representing Alternative Beauty
5. From Freak To Quirk Model: The Spectacularization Of The Albinotic Body
6. Prabuddha Dasguptas Alternative Indian Advertising Beauties
7. Broken Beauty, Broken Cups: Disabled Bodies In Contemporary African Art
8. Disability Gain And the Limits Of Representing Alternative Beauty / A Conversation
Part II. Beauty As Self-Fashioning: Aesthetic Practices And Subjectivities