Beauty: What Makes Us Dream, What Haunts Us

Abstract

In recent years, feminist anthropologists have contributed to an interdisciplinary debate on beauty, which focuses on gendered desires, affectivity, and projects of self‐making amid a global boom in beauty products and services. Drawing on the emergent field of critical beauty studies and ethnographic research on middle‐class femininity in urban Turkey, this article explores the salience and potential of beauty as a feminist keyword in anthropology. It argues that despite men's increasing investments in beauty, beauty continues to be tied to “women” in existential ways. Moreover, while beauty still means work for women, this work is often outsourced to female migrant or racialized workers. Beauty norms and body images materialize in intimate encounters and particular settings. In Turkey, the recent extension of the urban beauty economy has created spaces of possibility and aesthetic desires for ordinary women to “take care of themselves.” With its neoliberal emphasis on self‐care, the urban beauty economy has fueled the emergence of new female subjectivities and affective desires. Finally, the article argues in favor of a relational feminist ethnography and pedagogy of beauty, which is conscious of what we define as beautiful, desirable, harmful, or healthy and what the implications are of doing so.