Towards a Biopolitics of Beauty: Eugenics, Aesthetic Hierarchies and Plastic Surgery in Brazil

Abstract

This article provides a historical and ethnographic perspective to explain the saliency of beauty within the reproduction of racial inequalities in Brazil. I argue that Brazil’s neo-Lamarckian eugenics movement was the first to craft beauty as an index of racial improvement within the nation, and this eugenic legacy undergirds many of the contemporary discourses of beautification. Plastic surgery, in particular, inherited the biopolitical aim to produce a homogeneous body politic through beautification, an aim that was easily adapted to the contemporary context of neoliberal self-improvement. Today, beauty is a technology of biopower, one which ranks the population within an aesthetic hierarchy that produces non-white facial characteristics as undesirable, and interpellates patients as responsible for their own surgical corrections, albeit with state support in the case of the poor. Thus, this article contributes to the literature that understands science and medicine as key within the history of racialization in Latin America, making explicit how biopolitics has fashioned race and beauty as inextricable and intertwined elements of social inclusion and exclusion.

Keywords:

• Beauty
• eugenics
• race
• Brazil
• plastic surgery
• biopolitics

Acknowledgements

I am thankful for the invaluable feedback that Anne Allison, Paul Christensen, Jason Roberge and the anonymous peer reviewers provided on drafts of this article. This work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, under the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and by the American Council of Learned Societies, under the Mellon/ACLS Early Career Fellowship Program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Depending on the hospital, female patients were 70 to 95% of the patient population, and made up most of my interviewees.

2. The structure of university admissions, as well as the added costs of medical school, makes it much harder for working-class Brazilians to enter and succeed in the field of medicine. Plastic surgery as a discipline is only recently becoming more diverse in terms of gender, but not so in terms of skin color (the only exception in my pool of interviewees was a doctor of Lebanese background).

3. While it was taken for granted at the time that European immigration was positive for Brazil, there was disagreement about whether other nationalities, such as the Japanese, should be allowed in the country. These concerns shaped immigration policies at the time (Stepan 1991).

4. Even though the United States has a very different racial formation from Brazil, Sander Gilman has found evidence of plastic surgery having a similar neo-Lamarckian character in the early twentieth century (Gilman 2001).