Embodiment and Representations of Beauty: Volume 35

Contributions to this volume showcase the current state of gender research as it relates to the embodiment and representation of beauty. In particular, the authors highlight a more open-ended concept of beauty that goes beyond esthetics. The authors call our attention to the fact that beauty definitions and standards in any given society closely reflect the distribution of power in it. For this purpose, the authors in this volume share findings of research and conducted in multiple sites in the United States (i.e., Southern California, the Midwest, the Northwest, New York City, Salt Lake City, Houston, Boston, and Washington, DC), El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic. Contributors also use a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies to expand notions of beauty and its embodiment across diverse areas and experiences. The authors ask and invite us to ask ourselves how race, class, disability, gender identity or sexual orientation, and other dimensions of inequality inform our definitions of what beauty is and is not. They exhort us to interrogate who defines who and what is beautiful and why. Finally, rather than being problem-oriented, the premise of each study is to effect collective change in the ways we construe, see, represent, and embody beauty.

Taking the Mamá Fit memes and other social media eruptions as a starting point and delving deeper into popular print media, this chapter traces the racialized and gendered practices that constitute fitness in El Salvador in a diasporic context. Importantly, the word fit is now often expressed in English, captured in the names of commercial gyms and diet advertisements; the use of this word signals an important cultural change in conventional understandings of the body in a Spanish-speaking society. By charting the emergence of this new health/beauty norm in a transnational domain, this chapter explores the relationship between shifting patterns of gendered body discipline and changes in El Salvador’s location within the global political economy. This chapter argues that fitness discourse has become a subtle, but powerful, conduit for coloniality during a renegotiation of the meaning of gender to fit a neoliberal reality. The argument ends by pointing in the direction of future research to explore how this discourse is experienced in embodied practice with potentially contradictory impacts in Salvadoran society.

Body weight has a long history of functioning as a symbol of one’s beauty, social status, morality, discipline, and health. It has also been a standard inflicted much more intensely on women than men. While US culture has long idealized thinness for women, even at risky extremes, there is growing evidence that weight standards are broadening. Larger bodies are becoming more visible and accepted, while desire for and approval of a thin ideal has diminished. However, the continued widespread prevalence of anti-fat attitudes and stigma leaves uncertainty about just how much weight standards are changing. This study used an online survey (n = 320) to directly compare evaluations of thin, fat, and average size women through measures of negative stereotypes, prejudicial attitudes, and perceptions about quality of life. Results indicated that, as hypothesized, thin women were perceived less favorably than average weight women. However, fat women were perceived less favorably than both average and thin women. Men were harsher than women in their evaluations of only fat women. Additionally, participants being underweight or overweight did not produce an ingroup bias in their evaluations of underweight and overweight targets, respectively. That is, participants did not rate their own group more favorably, with the exception of overweight participants having lower prejudice toward overweight targets. These findings add to the emerging evidence that women’s weight standards are in transition, marked by an increasingly negative perception of thin women, though not necessarily growing positivity toward fat women. This evidence further points toward the need for more extensive research on attitudes of people across the entire weight spectrum.

This chapter advances understandings of emotion work by examining how “doing gender” and “doing health” are implicated in the pursuit of emotional tranquility. The study examines the role of hair loss in women’s illness narratives of cancer using in-depth interviews with 16 white women in the US Northwest who vary in age, marital status, diagnoses, and treatments. The absence of women’s hair presents an appearance of illness that prevents them from doing femininity, which calls into question their health status because of Western beauty standards. To overcome this barrier, the women use emotion work to manage the effects of their appearance through necessarily co-occurring bodily, cognitive, and expressive strategies (Hochschild, 1979). The required emotion work during women’s hair loss makes explicit the symbolic linking of the healthy body with the feminine body through women’s head hair. Pursuing treatment for cancer is often seen as a “fight” or a “battle” against the disease and the bodily assaults of such treatments, including unwanted visible bodily changes. A substantial body of empirical work has established the complex web of social psychological problems associated with breasts and breast cancer, but less attention has been given to the side effect of hair loss that is common across cancer types and treatments.

How do participants navigate the sexual politics of multiracial dating and how does this relate to belonging? The results of this study illustrate that the 21 participants interviewed faced internal and external struggles and triumphs due to their mixed-race identity. For participants, trying to situate themselves into just one racial identity when they straddled both became a point of contention with romantic partners and themselves. Moreover, participants struggled with feeling like they were “enough” and if they belonged. Furthermore, mixed-race women and non-binary people were forced to navigate the racial expectations of others as well as the fetishization of their mixed-race identity. In turn, this impacted confidence levels, self-esteem, and sense of belonging and authenticity. The findings contribute to research on desirability and critical mixed-race studies by examining how mixed-race women and non-binary people perceive their own desirability.

Past research has shown there is a relationship between body image, sexual behavior, and pleasure. However, the majority of this research has centered on heterosexual participants. In this analysis, the author considers how this relationship between body image, sexual behavior, and pleasure may look within women and genderqueer individuals who are all AFAB (assigned female at birth) with 26 out of 30 participants identifying as LGBTQIA+. The author examines perceptions of body size, body hair, and genitals to consider how intersections of social structures – specifically internalized sexism, racism, and misogyny – influence the participants’ experience of sexual interactions. Both resistance and embodiment of traditional gender norms, even as queer women and genderqueer individuals, were examined in these narratives. The majority of the moments where traditional gender norms are examined describe situations when the participants were sexually interacting with cis-gendered men.

Based on qualitative data from a large study exploring Muslim experiences in the workplace, this chapter explains how Muslim dress standards inform identity and are influenced by US cultural ideals about self-presentation and perceived anti-Muslim hostility. Theoretical sampling was used to find 25 men and 59 women, 32 of whom are veiled. These individuals worked at major corporations as numerical minorities or held professions where they encountered non-Muslims regularly. Informed by theories of orientalism and social identity, findings examine hegemonic representations of organizational power and describe how men could employ masculine practices to navigate anti-Muslim discourse and foster a sense of belonging at work. Within immigrant-centered workplaces, women face cultural backlash for appropriating Western styles deemed immodest. While working outside their community, women who wore hijabs emphasized their femininity through softer colors, makeup, or “unpinning” their veil to offset the visceral reaction to their hijab. Thus, adapting to workplace dress expectations is structured by intersections of gender, religion, and workplace location. This chapter illustrates how Muslim dress strategies indirectly reflect how Western standards of dress, behavior, and self-expression determine qualifications and approachability within workplace structures, marginalizing Muslims and reproducing racial and gender hierarchies.

This qualitative study investigated the relationship between beauty standards and identity in the United States from the perspective of 20 self-identified millennial Black women. During semi-structured virtual interviews, participants defined Black, American, and millennial beauty standards distinctly. American beauty was associated with Eurocentrism and mainstream media representation. Interpretations of a millennial beauty standard were aligned with perceptions of the generation as tolerant and politically conscious. Black American beauty standards embraced the range of hair textures and skin tones present in the African diaspora. While participants were cognizant of the different beauty ideals present, their interaction with beauty standards was ambivalent. Interviewees found beauty knowledge accessible through social media. However, they remain confined to a restrictive beauty standard due to workplace expectations around professionalism. Participants negotiated where and when to express their intracultural beauty ideals but participated in the beauty industry through processes of learning how to care for their hair in its natural state. Even though they have autonomy and flexibility in expressing their cultural styles, personal and professional repercussions are still plausible. Future studies can expand on these findings by exploring perceptions of American beauty standards from a different generation, region, or identity.

The ballet industry has long been criticized for using excessively thin and exclusively Anglo-looking ballerinas. The statement that they fit the “look” or comments such as this in the 2015 New York Daily Post: “A lot of people feel ballerinas should all be the same color” (Keivom, 2015) have been used to exclude Black and Brown ballerinas. This chapter describes the relationship between race, gender, and beauty within the ballet industry. It describes the challenges that Black women experience and the anti-Blackness that takes place within ballet due to Eurocentric beauty standards. Through a focus on the emphasis on hair texture, flesh-tone tights, and pointe shoes, and on the racist history of America and ballet, this chapter demonstrates how ballet continues to discriminate against and marginalize Black women.

The racialized gendered body in consumer culture invokes the construction of identities and representation of beauty through embodiment practices. As companies hone in on consumer racial marker distinctions to enhance uniqueness as otherness for profit, an analysis of hair products marketed for Black hair textures provides an opportunity to analyze how products use these at the intersection of race, gender, and beauty. This study uses constructivist grounded theory to analyze the product names and long descriptions for 124 shampoos marketed for Black hair textures on the websites of two major retailers to answer the following questions: What message does the discourse of shampoo product descriptions marketed to Black hair textures communicate about beauty? What message does the discourse of shampoo product descriptions marketed to Black hair textures communicate about Blackness? How does this discourse define the embodiment of Black beauty through hair? The results reveal that the racialized gendered body in consumer culture invokes the construction of identities and representations of beauty through embodiment practices. Through advertisements and product descriptions, beauty companies create ideal images of the lived experiences achieved through consuming beauty products. By constructing visual interpretations of racial signifiers through text, marketing strategies encourage the consumption of otherness, creating a racialized space for Blackness consumption. Combining the five senses with the descriptions of shampoo products marketed for Black hair textures helps us see how beauty embodiment practices reinforce racialized and gendered practices to subjugate the Black body.

This chapter provides a close reading and critical analysis of work by two New York City-based Afro-Dominican artists, Joiri Minaya (1990) and Josefina Báez (1960). The author argues that Báez' “Carmen FotonovelARTE” (2020) and Minaya's “Containers” series (2015–2020) play with the trope of repose and mixed-race beauty to chart pathways of Afro-Latina representation that are shaped by yet that radically challenge the colonial script of the mulata. The artists create a space of refusal that transforms repose into a powerful site from which to articulate, problematize, and dismantle oppressive, reductive systems of representation.