Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Beauty and the Norm: An Introduction

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Beauty and the Norm

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Globalization and Embodiment ((PSGE))

Abstract

Beauty and the Norm contains chapters based on empirical research across a wide range of geographical locations and cultural contexts, as well as shorter conversations between scholars that also include more personal reflections. It represents a first attempt to expose the generative operations of human standardization and normative looks in everyday life to more systematic analysis. In doing so, the volume brings together hitherto rather separate debates in critical beauty studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, the history of science and disability studies on the gendered, classed and racialized body, normative regimes of representation and the global beauty economy. In this introductory chapter, we provide a framework that ties the various contributions together, beginning with a brief history of the notion of the norm and of the closely related debates on standardization and normalization, followed by a discussion of the global economy of gendered and racialized bodies.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 19.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 27.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Adrian, Bonnie. 2003. Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory Culture Society 7: 295–310.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bartky, S. L. 1990. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bartky, S. L. 1988. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Feminism and Foucault, edited by I. Diamond and L. Quinby, 61–86. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brunsson, N., and B. Jacobsson (eds.). 2000. A World of Standards. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Buss, David. 2003 [1994]. The Evolution of Desire. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York and London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Judith. 2016. “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance.” In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by J. Butler, Z. Gambetti, and L. Sabsay, 12–27. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Craig, Maxine L. 2006. “Race, Beauty, and the Tangled Knot of Guilty Pleasure.” Feminist Theory 7 (2): 159–77.

    Google Scholar 

  • Coleman, R., and M. M. Figueroa. 2010. “Past and Future Perfect? Beauty, Affect and Hope.” Journal for Cultural Research 4 (4): 357–73.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, Lennard J. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body. London and New York: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Döring, Daniela. 2011. Zeugende Zahlen. Mittelmaß und Durchschnittstypen in Proportion, Statistik und Konfektion. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos [German].

    Google Scholar 

  • Edmonds, A. 2007. “‘The Poor Have the Right to Be Beautiful’: Cosmetic Surgery in Neoliberal Brazil.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2): 363–81.

    Google Scholar 

  • Edmonds, A. 2010. Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Elias, Ana Sofia, Rosalind Gill, and Christina Scharff, (eds.). 2017. Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Epstein, Steven. 2009. “Beyond the Human Standard?” In Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life, edited by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star, 35–53. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Etcoff, Nancy. 1999. Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. New York: Doubleday.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd ed. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garland-Thomson, R. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garland-Thomson, R. 2009. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garland-Thomson, R. 2015. “A Habitable World: Harriet McBryde Johnson’s ‘Case for My Life.’” Hypatia 30 (1): 300–6.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilman, S. L. 1999. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hamburger, Andreas. 2015. “Beautiful Beasts—Motif Tradition and Film Psychoanalysis in Jean Cocteau’s LA BELLE ET LA BETE (F 1946).” In Women and Images of Men in Cinema: Gender Construction in La Belle et la Bete by Jean Cocteau, edited by A. Hamburger, 43–95. London: Karnac.

    Google Scholar 

  • Holliday, R., D. Bell, O. Cheung, M. Jones, and E. Probyn. 2015. “Brief Encounters: Assembling Cosmetic Surgery Tourism.” Social Science and Medicine 124: 298–304.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hua, Wen. 2013. Buying Beauty: Cosmetic Surgery in China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Jafar, A., and E. M. de Casanova. 2013. Global Beauty, Local Bodies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jarrín, A. 2017. The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil. Oakland: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jeffreys, S. H. 2005. Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. London and New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jha, M. R. 2016. The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism and the National Body. New York and Abingdon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jones, Geoffrey. 2010. Beauty Imagined. A History of the Global Beauty Industry. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, L. 2006. Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nguyen, M. T. H. 2011. “The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialism and Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror.” Signs 36 (2): 359–83.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ochoa, M. 2014. Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Pallet, P., S. Link, and K. Lee. 2010. “New ‘Golden’ Ratios for Facial Beauty.” Vision Research 50: 149–54.

    Google Scholar 

  • Porter, Theodore M. 1986. The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900. Princeton and Chichester: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Quetelet, L. A. J. 2013 [1842]. A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Quinn, P. C., D. J. Kelly, K. Lee, O. Pascalis, and A. M. Slater. 2008. “Preference for Attractive Faces in Human Infants Extends Beyond Conspecifics.” Developmental Science 11: 76–83.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rikowski, A., and K. Grammer. 1999. “Human Body Odour, Symmetry and Attractiveness.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 266 (1422): 869–74.

    Google Scholar 

  • Siebers, Tobin. 2010. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Swain, John, Sally French, and Colin Cameron. 2003. Controversial Issues in a Disabling Society. Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tate, S. H. A. 2009. Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tate, S. H. A. 2016. Skin Bleaching in Black Atlantic Zones: Shade Shifters. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Timmermans, Stefan, and Steven Epstein. 2010. “A World of Standards but Not a Standard World: Toward a Sociology of Standards and Standardization.” Annual Review of Sociology 36: 69–89.

    Google Scholar 

  • Urla, J., and J. Terry. 1995. “Introduction: Mapping Embodied Deviance.” In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, edited by J. Terry and J. Urla, 1–18. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wolf, Naomi. 1991. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: William Morrow and Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Young, I. M. 1980. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality.” Human Studies 3: 137–56.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany

    Claudia Liebelt

Authors
  1. Claudia Liebelt
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Claudia Liebelt .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany

    Claudia Liebelt

  2. University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany

    Sarah Böllinger

  3. University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany

    Ulf Vierke

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Liebelt, C. (2019). Beauty and the Norm: An Introduction. In: Liebelt, C., Böllinger, S., Vierke, U. (eds) Beauty and the Norm. Palgrave Studies in Globalization and Embodiment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91174-8_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91174-8_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91173-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91174-8

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation