Aesthetic citizenship, beauty politics and the state: an introduction

ABSTRACT

This introduction situates our approach to the nexus between citizenship, beauty politics and the state, highlighting how embodied aesthetics constitute a central dimension of state-subject relations. We propose ‘aesthetic citizenship’ to describe embodied aesthetics as a biopolitical field of self-making and a site of disciplining, educating and manufacturing ‘proper’ citizens through visual and sometimes surgical technologies of surveillance and recognition. In this introduction, we analyse how norms of bodily appearance are related to and shaped by state-led processes of citizenship, first in relation to ideas of nationhood and representation, and secondly in relation to what could be termed the biopolitics of beauty and aesthetic governance. Foregrounding affective, multisensorial and embodied aesthetics, this introduction probes a crucial, yet often overlooked lens with which to zoom in on the dynamics between state images and practices in their interrelatedness and as they are embedded in everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetic citizenship
• beauty politics
• embodied aesthetics
• somatic belonging
• aesthetic governance
• self-making

Introduction

In recent years, a number of scholarly works have investigated a consistently growing global beauty industry in respect of its far-reaching impact on body images, notions of modernity and progress, and projects of self-making across the globe. In this special issue, we seek to (re-)analyse citizenship and (bio-)political operations in relation to embodied aesthetics. By doing so, we wish to take seriously the cosmological concerns of beauty and self-adornment that ethnographers have long described (see, for example, Turner [1980] 2012, 2017; Taussig 2012). This involves taking a closer at how the affective power of beauty and fashion has been afforded by and is an outcome of processes of citizenship in the making and how it informs political formations at the level of the nation state and beyond. Thus, while recent scholarly work has investigated the consistently growing global beauty industry and the transnational circulation of body images (Craig 2021; Elias, Gill, and Scharff 2017; Jha 2016; Jones 2010), state-led regulations, notions of citizenship, national belonging and boundary-making in relation to bodily appearance have not yet been studied in systematic and comparative ways. Against this background, we ask the following questions: What is the role of embodied aesthetics in the relational dynamic between everyday acts and representational images of national belonging? How are notions such as (national) progress and modernity linked to representations of citizenship that are more than visual? What geographies of power are at work in the interplay between bodily self-making, citizenship and the politics, national and otherwise, of belonging? To engage with these questions, we have assembled ethnographic and conceptual contributions that discuss examples from across a wide range of geographical contexts across Asia, Africa and the Americas.

All contributions engage with notions of citizenship that start from the assumption that it is an embodied ‘process of self-making and being made’ (Ong et al. 1996, 737). Such an approach offers an understanding of how citizenship is constituted through everyday ‘acts’ such as ethical and bodily self-making, control and surveillance, including acts of the self (Isin 2008, 2012; Isin and Turner 2007; Turner 2009). By doing so, we seek to shed light on how visual technologies, bodily appearances and the processes by which ‘proper’ and ‘beautiful’ citizens are shaped form crucial domains in the relationship between the state apparatus and its (non-)citizens. One of the strengths of this approach is that it includes political actors regardless of their official citizenship status. As is explained below, we employ the notion of ‘aesthetic citizenship’ (Liebelt 2019a) to stress the fact that affective, mediated and sensory body images and investments texture the processes of self-making and being made in relation to social norms and hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion.

This introduction proceeds as follows. In the following section, we outline our approach to what we call aesthetic citizenship. Secondly, we delineate our treatment of embodiment, affects and the senses by investigating somatic belonging as crucial for processes of self-making and being made. Finally, before moving on to introduce the individual contributions, we analyse how norms of bodily appearance are related to and shaped by state-led processes of citizenship, first in relation to ideas of nationhood and representation, and secondly in relation to what could be termed the biopolitics of beauty and aesthetic governance.

Aesthetic citizenship: practices of self-making and being made

As mentioned above, our concept of aesthetic citizenship draws on approaches to citizenship that see it as constituted through everyday ‘acts’ and practices rather than formal status alone. Such an approach is well-suited to looking more closely at the processes by which embodied citizens are created and classified as ‘proper’ or ‘good’ in relation to multisensorial aesthetics and how people modify and shape their bodies to conform, oppose, or subvert such notions.

There now is a longstanding debate on the biopolitical and embodied aspects of citizenship, which have been studied in relation to medical-therapeutical infrastructures (Petryna 2002; Nguyen 2005), ethical responsibilities (Rose and Novas 2005) and biotechnological changes that transform the human body into a source of evidence for citizenship and a target for state intervention (Maguire, Rao, and Zurawski 2018; see also Netz et al. 2019). What is often missing from these writings is a more detailed analysis of how affective and multisensorial aesthetics inform processes of belonging and claim-making. Notions such as ‘cosmetic citizenship’ (Jarrín 2017) and ‘aesthetic citizenship’ (Liebelt 2019a) have conceptualized embodied aesthetics as a biopolitical field of self-making and a site of disciplining, educating and manufacturing ‘proper’ citizens through visual and sometimes surgical technologies of surveillance and recognition, including the recognition of ‘strangers’ (Ahmed 2000). Using the example of neighbourhood watches, Ahmed (2000) describes how ‘foreign’ bodies are visually assessed and judged in social encounters. In this context, she speaks of a visual economy of recognition, which involves the demarcation ‘not only of social space, but also bodily space’. (ibid.: 15). The process by which aesthetic differences between bodies come to be materialized in a ‘relationship of touch’ – including the touch mediated by CCTV – is clearly an act of citizenship from the perspective of those who touch, of ‘good citizenship’. For Maguire, Rao and Zurawski, biometric security, e.g. the ‘drive to secure individual identities, bodies, borders, and all sorts of boundaries’ (2018, 7) lies at the heart of modernity. What is important to note is that the act of the policing of bodies functions not only ‘top-down’, but also ‘bottom-up’, for example, in the form of affective desires for and images of national and other forms of progress and modernity-as-aesthetic.

This becomes especially clear when looking at everyday (post-)colonial constellations and imaginations. In Brazil, the devaluation of the poor is strongly racialized as an outcome of eugenic and colonial ideologies that were obsessed with miscegenation and that tied the nation’s progress to the beauty of women (Jarrín 2017; see also Edmonds 2007, 2010). According to Jarrín, the common phrase ‘poor, black, and ugly’ is attached to bodies that, within Brazil’s rigid social hierarchy, are marked as ‘undeserving of social recognition and full citizenship within the nation’ (ibid., 14). By potentially transforming poor girls into models, cosmetic surgery is considered a very concrete tool offering a way out of an abject state of undeservingness. Unable to afford the high costs of private beauty clinics, young women from lower social strata become experimental subjects in public training clinics who are ‘caught in a paradoxical bind between the affective promises and the biopolitical costs of surgery’ (ibid., 158). Accordingly, Jarrín speaks of ‘cosmetic citizens’ to define those who risk experimental cosmetic surgery in the hope of accessing the promise of full citizenship.

However, aesthetic citizenship goes beyond cosmetic surgery (and citizenship) to include all kinds of aesthetic acts and practices to aspire to and conform with gendered and racialized appearances. Putting embodied aesthetics, somatic belonging and beauty politics at the centre of our analysis enables us to critically examine different regimes of inclusion and exclusion within and beyond the nation state that speak of multisensorial and affective state-subject relations. Thus, we are also interested in the infrastructural dimension, including the ideological relationship between the state and its (non-)citizens, again paying special attention to how this relationship is textured by appearances and embodied aesthetics. Our understanding of the state is informed by a relational approach that builds on Poulantzas (1969) insight that the state is a ‘social relation’. Such an approach emphasizes the relational modalities and the boundary work that constitute the state as a multiple, ever-evolving political formation, ‘a way to bridge the gap between images and practices’ (Thelen, Vetters, and von Benda-Beckmann 2014, 2). As we shall see, embodied aesthetics form an important role in the making and reproduction of images and practices, both ‘stately’ ones and those that are considered subversive and oppositional.

Somatic forms of belonging: the body, the senses, and affect

Aesthetic citizenship as outlined above is tied to belonging in two primary ways. On the one hand, the notion of belonging highlights how state institutions and actors employ a ‘politics of belonging’ in their political projects in order to create normative regimes of national inclusion and exclusion that are embedded in larger constellations of power (Anthias 2016; Yuval-Davis 2006, 2007). On the other hand, we built on anthropological works that examine belonging as a multi-dimensional, embodied and deeply affective relationship to places, people, communities and political formations. Such feelings of belonging result from ‘doing belonging’, that is, from embodied everyday acts of care and other relational practices (Mattes and Lang 2020; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2011, 2013; Hirschauer 2014; von Poser and Willamowski 2020).

By approaching aesthetics as a somatic form of belonging (or non-belonging and exclusion from belonging, for that matter), we are in dialogue with recent scholarship that examines state-subject relations, citizenship and related processes of self-making by foregrounding embodied and intimate encounters with the state and its actors as they are embedded in individuals’ and communities’ everyday lives. Thus, notions such as ‘sensory citizenship’ (Trnka, Dureau, and Park 2013), ‘visceral citizenship’ (Montsion and Tan 2016), ‘corporeal citizenship’ (Lee 2019) and ‘affective citizenship’ (Ayata 2019; Di Gregorio and Merolli 2016; Fortier 2010, 2016) all point to the importance of thinking with and through the body, the senses and affect when exploring the making of political belonging and the social hierarchies and inequalities that it (re)produces. By analysing political subjectivity, belonging and boundary-making as somatic and relational processes, scholars have demonstrated how bodily, sensuous and affective dynamics become meaningful in the production of differential regimes of inclusion and exclusion, i.e. in the making of (un)desirable and (un)deserving citizens (Ayata 2019; Fortier 2010; Netz et al. 2019).

Moreover, we wish to stress that embodied aesthetics are always already tied up with sensory perception. The senses and their perceived naturalization form one crucial domain for analysing political belonging, subjectivity and citizenship (Trnka, Dureau, and Park 2013). Discussing the intersections between sensory phenomena and regional, national and supra-national forms of belonging, Trnka, Dureau, and Park (2013) stress sensory knowledge in relation to bodily norms as they pertain to everyday practices such as notions of hygiene and taste, for example, in the cooking and smelling of food. We argue that these socio-cultural phenomena, which are normatively framed and affectively charged, also have deep implications for state-subject relations. For example, in analysing a ‘cook and share a curry campaign’ in response to Chinese Singaporeans’ complaints about their Indian neighbours’ food (and its smell), Montsion and Tan (2016) show how contemporary meanings over Singaporean citizenship are battled out by means of olfactory judgments that reinforce perceptions of self and other along racial lines in the multi-ethnic city-state. Like odours, and in fact often tied up to odours, multisensorial beauty may trigger strong bodily affects and desires, as well as function as a motor for gendered becoming. As the contributions to this special issue will go on to show, a body that is recognized as a model for national and other forms of belonging relies on multisensorial skills and techniques, on continuous attention to and investment in bodily (and political) formation. This relies on the idea that the body is understood as malleable and as in a state of becoming (cf. Alaimo 2010; Alaimo and Hekman 2008), being dependent on relationships and sensorial encounters that are always embedded already in larger biopolitical regimes. Thus, moving beyond the visual as ‘a mode of power’ (Trnka, Dureau, and Park 2013) – the visual being the sense that has arguably been most prominently analysed in the (aesthetic) state-citizen-relationship – enables us to grasp more fully the sensorial grounding of somatic belonging and citizenship.

Finally, affects and emotions constitute a crucial dimension of aesthetic citizenship. Following Ahmed (2004, 2010), we are interested in what affects do rather than in what they are, such as when revulsion is triggered by ugliness or desire by beauty. What constitutes beauty and ugliness is, of course, negotiated socially and tied to social norms and hierarchies. In this context, Ahmed speaks of ‘affective economies’ in which ‘emotions do things, … align[ing] individuals with communities – or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of their attachments’ (Ahmed 2004, 119). While Ahmed is interested in the work that emotions do to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, we put a spotlight on the political aspects of this relationship in the aesthetic and somatic formation of (model) citizenship and state-subject relations. Speaking with Ahmed, one could say that multisensorial, embodied and highly affective aesthetics are the stuff that creates attachments ‘by sticking figures together (adherence), a sticking that creates the very effect of a collective (coherence)’ (Ahmed 2010, 119). In Berlant’s (1997) reading, the late twentieth-century collapse of what is considered private or intimate and what is considered public or political is part of a far-reaching neoliberal restructuring, one that relies on ‘public emotions’ and affective but also, we contend, aesthetic regimes of power in ‘intimate publics’.

Fortier (2010) has likewise argued that neoliberal states ‘govern through affect’ by targeting ‘the affective subject for certain strategies and regulations aimed at designing people’s behaviours and attitudes in the public domain’ (ibid., 17). While citizens and non-citizens alike are commonly disciplined via affect and might even be required to feel a certain way (Wielander 2018; Yang 2014, 2015), they may also resort to affective – and, as this special issue argues, aesthetic – acts to make claims towards the state, create a sense of rightful belonging, or contest the state’s attempts to govern through affect (Ayata 2019).

To summarize, the dynamics of somatic belonging inscribe themselves into and are negotiated and contested by embodied subjects in a variety of ways. By centring the sensory, the embodied and the affective in relation to the aesthetic, we put the spotlight on the biopolitical and intimate yet simultaneously public dimension of citizenship in the making. In the following, we shall consider two fields that exemplify the affective, embodied and multisensorial dimensions of aesthetic citizenship, beauty politics and the state.

Representing and embodying the gendered nation

The aesthetic state-subject relationship becomes especially palpable when confronted by national beauty pageants or state parades, in which gendered and racialized subjects are made to embody and represent the nation state. Both beauty pageants and state parades may be seen as attempts by the state to map particular forms of gendered and moral identities onto stable outer appearances. The scholarly literature on beauty pageants and state parades has long argued that these events help to construct images of national unity and citizenship, typically in gendered terms (see, for example, Cohen, Wilk, and Stoeltje 1996; Balogun 2012; Gabriel, Lentz, and N’Guessan 2020; Mbembe 2001). Focussing on Miss America, Banet-Weiser contends that national beauty pageants embrace ‘both a gendered and a nationalist hold on representation’ (1998, 167). Functioning as highly mediated civic rituals, they often form part of larger commodity cultures that are ready to be utilised by particular publics to tell stories about themselves (ibid.). In international contests, nation states seek to secure for themselves a symbolic place in the ‘families of nations’ (Banet-Weiser 1998, 168), reproducing patriarchal notions by showcasing ‘their’ ideal, often female, citizens.

In nation states with a conservative approach to politics and gender, new fashions or heightened investments in beauty among women and young people – possibly triggered by or becoming visible during beauty pageants or public holidays – may result in moral panics, perhaps even in vigilante actions that aim at policing deviant gender performances, including appearances, in public (see Zhao, this volume). This can be seen from the recurring protests against the Miss World competition, the biggest beauty contest globally, for example, in Bangalore, where right-wing Hindu nationalists protested at the 1996 Miss World Pageant for over two months by arguing that it threatened Hindu values and traditional gender roles (Ahmed-Ghosh 2003); in Kaduna, Nigeria, where in 2002 riots in the run-up to the contest left more than 200 people killed (Astill 2002); or in Jakarta, Indonesia, where in 2013 Islamist groups forced the event to relocate to the Hindu resort island of Bali, even after the organizers, in an attempt to appease moral concerns, had replaced the swimsuit competition with one that featured less-revealing beachwear attire (Quiano and Park 2013). Vigilante actions are often backed by and may even be led by state actors, as in Iran, where the so-called Guidance Patrol and other government-sponsored vice squads commit violence against women for unveiling in public or otherwise violating the official dress code (Molana, Ranjbar, and Razavi 2023). Thus, national discourses of decency and propriety commonly target (younger) women, following up on the logic that women are the ‘symbolic bearer of the collectivity’s identity and honour’ (Yuval-Davis 1997, 45).

On the other hand, engagement in beauty and fashion may also function as a form of elite nationalism, especially in so-called developing societies, where notions of women’s empowerment are informed by neoliberal development discourses. For example, in her work on spectacular femininity in Lagos, Dosekun (2020) notes how one of her research participants suggested ‘that by patronizing fashion and beauty services in Nigeria, she played a role in economically empowering and uplifting the working-class women who labor in these sectors – women who still needed empowerment, unlike her’ (Dosekun 2020, 16). For Venezuela, Ochoa (2014) has likewise described a political economy that places beauty at its very centre, with trans women and beauty pageants both willing to invest in ‘spectacular femininity’, a particular national brand of femininity. Hegarty (2022) describes a similar concept of national development and citizenship deployed by the Indonesian state, which relies on naturalizing the gender binary of ‘male’ and ‘female’ alongside cultural binaries such as a contestation between what is asli (authentic) and what is palsu (false; ibid., 30). As historical brokers between these classifying systems, trans feminine warias, according to Hegarty, shaped the contours of modern notions of Indonesian selfhood even while being positioned as not conforming to them. By engaging in feminine beauty and cultivating a distinctive style of national glamour, Indonesian warias thus become an integral part of the ‘made-up state’, helping us ‘to understand how citizenship is forged through recognition as part of a technologically mediated public’ (ibid., 51).

Aesthetic governance and the (bio-)politics of beauty

Given that embodied aesthetics are tied to notions of normativity that manage and govern bodies, beauty can in fact be conceptualized as a form of biopower which is embedded in larger politics and histories of violence. Discussing the setting up of a Beauty Academy in war-torn Kabul by an American NGO called Beauty Without Borders, Mimi Thi Nguyen (2011) argues that, in the context of humanitarian imperialism, beauty in the early 2000s was being ‘recruited to go to war’ (ibid., 360) in Afghanistan. In this context, beauty assumed a moral and ‘civilizational’ dimension on a supra-national scale, albeit backed by state regulation and infrastructures. According to Nguyen, body aesthetics have become an effective new form of global biopower in the context of humanitarian imperialism, a geopolitical war ‘by other means’ (ibid., 364).

Within nation states, citizens’ bodies are shaped by pedagogical and disciplining projects in a multitude of ways, for example in campaigns targeting the educational sector, sports, or public health and hygiene. Interventions into citizen’s embodied aesthetics often cut across these various domains of social life. Through Indian government and NGO campaigns against matted hair (jade) among the female religious practitioners of a South Indian goddess (devi) cult, Lucinda Ramberg (2009) shows how state and civil-society actors attempted to remake these women’s bodies to fit the postcolonial state’s vision of modernity in the early 2000s. For devotees, matted hair is a manifestation of the goddess’ presence in women’s bodies and as such a prerequisite for entering possession states and giving oracles. With the medicalization of jade as a manifestation of disease and dirt rather than the devi, as well as jade-cutting campaigns, which were accompanied by the handing out of shampoo and state-sponsored micro-lending programs, reformers tried to radically refashion female devotees’ religiosity. In doing so they aimed to create reformed and deserving citizens who embodied new forms of female respectability, domesticated sexuality and modern femininity (ibid.: 519–20). By pointing out the association between devotees’ matted hair and their (supposedly) non-normative sexuality, Ramberg reveals how the politics of gender, sexuality and religiosity in South India are intimately tied together, focussing on bodily appearances in what one could call aesthetic governance.

This form of biopolitical governance becomes even clearer when looking at China. Here multi-million-dollar investments in beauty pageants, salons and training initiatives by the state form part of a historical trajectory of ‘somatic engineering’ (Gimpel 2013) rooted in the expectation that each citizen should visibly embody social norms such as ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’. Yang (2011) describes the growing investment in bodily beauty in contemporary China as part of an increasingly market-oriented consumer behaviour and as a biopolitical, even ‘cosmetological’ (Yang 2023) strategy of domination. Earlier biopolitical regulations included a large-scale sterilization campaign in the mid-1980s and the one-child policy implemented until 2015, both of which significantly shaped Chinese citizenship (Greenhalgh 2004). Yang notes the central role of aesthetics in the Chinese understanding of aesthetic governance (2011, 341–343), which has profound effects on subjectification, bodily practices and China’s integration into the global market. Within this specific form of governmentality, the beauty economy operates as a form of aesthetic and affective pedagogy (ibid., 342) that creates dominant aesthetic norms within China’s heterogeneous population and simultaneously provides technologies for their production. Indeed, to ‘govern’ women and ethnic minorities – in particular, Uyghurs – the Chinese Communist Party and local officials in the province of Xinjiang have not only banned Islamic veils and introduced legislation that prohibits men with ‘long beards’ from entering public spaces and transport (Grose and Leibold 2016), but also set up ‘Project Beauty’ (2011–2016). This US$8 million multi-media initiative included the organization of beauty pageants, fashion shows, beauty training and lectures on ethnic attire and social etiquette (Grose 2019).

While it is difficult to assess the ‘success’ of such projects from the perspective of the state, it is safe to assume that practices of personal grooming and beauty assume new meanings in such contexts. Writing about beauty in relation to changes in the political system and government-led transformations towards more pious forms of hegemonic femininity in Turkey, Liebelt (2019b) shows how seemingly mundane forms of self-fashioning and aesthetic body modification such as the wearing of red lipstick or the sporting of tattoos in public may take on political meanings and transport subversive messages against the government and its (beauty) politics.

The contributions to this special issue demonstrate further how aesthetic governance may be employed as an ordering principle by states and state actors to reproduce social inequalities and marginalization within gendered, classed and racialised hierarchies, made concrete and palpable through embodied aesthetics and bodily self-making. They also show how gendered and racialised subjects navigate public terrains to conform, but also to subvert and challenge dominant beauty norms, be they explicit or tacit.

In what follows, we briefly introduce the individual articles and highlight their contributions to debates on aesthetic citizenship, beauty politics and the state.

Contributions to this special issue

Thinking of citizenship as processes of aesthetic self-making and being made enables us to analyse how the (aesthetic) labour required from citizens to claim rights and be recognised in their belonging to the nation state is distributed unevenly along various axes of embodied difference, regardless of whether they hold legal citizenship. Several contributions to this special issue zoom in on this inequality and the related body work or ‘aesthetic labour’ (Mears 2014) that differently positioned subjects (need to) engage in. They remind us that notions of beauty are far from monolithic or universal, even if the body images in circulation suggest so, but are intricately shaped by local and other ramifications of race, class, and gender (Craig 2006, 2021). What kind of bodily appearances are considered beautiful, appropriate, or employable varies according to context, a fact that may seem obvious but requires intricate knowledge and processes of learning by navigating actors. Accordingly, the contributions show that investments in beauty and body work need to be negotiated socially in relation to what is permissible, respectable and desirable in particular social situations and sometimes towards state officials such as those encountered at the borders of the nation state (Lensu, this volume). This holds especially true for those on the margins of the state whose aesthetic investments are the focus of several contributions to this special issue, namely for young rural-urban migrants (Zhao, this volume), cis- and transgender female sex-workers from working-class backgrounds (Lensu, this volume) or variously positioned young unmarried women who aspire to become flight attendants (Kukuczka, this volume). At the same time, citizens may of course also contest and creatively modify the state’s images, regulations, and normative assumptions regarding embodied aesthetics to realize alternative visions of somatic belonging. As we shall see, such alternative visions often link gendered and sexual subjectivities to potentially subversive aesthetic desires and imaginaries, as in the case of global fashion, which is seen as a threat to hegemonic masculinities in Uzbekistan (Zhao, this volume), or an excessive, multimodally meditated ‘aesthetics of surplus’, as performed by the U.S. American pop icons known as the Kardashians (Jones, this volume).

The special issue begins with a contribution that focuses on the historical shifts of state regulations in regard to embodied aesthetics, namely in the field of dental aesthetics. In her contribution on profit-oriented dental aesthetics, Maxine Craig (this volume) shows how, in an increasingly privatized U.S. health sector, the state operates indirectly by biopolitical means, for example, by organizing access to services unevenly, or by introducing policies that foster belonging for some and exclusion for others. Thus, due to their high costs, dental aesthetics have become increasingly accessible for middle-class and wealthier children especially, resulting in ‘perfect smiles’ as a socially expected, yet exclusive social standard. According to Craig, here aesthetic citizenship is tied to normative embodiment: that is, the perfected smiles that are now ‘emblematic of the American middle class’ afford civic belonging to those who possess not only the willingness, but also the economic means to consume orthodontic treatment to ‘correct’ seemingly deviant teeth.

In her contribution on young women’s participation in state parades in Yaoundé, Cameroon, Ewa Majczak (this volume) likewise adopts a historical perspective to show how the affective images and ideologies of the postcolonial state have been shaped in the longue durée and are tied to particular histories of violence and domination, with outer appearances forming a constitutive element of gendered citizenship. Majczak finds that, by becoming ‘glamourous citizens’ amidst socio-economic precarity, young women go to great lengths to perform in parades for a malfunctioning state because it affords them a sense of national belonging and citizenship. As ‘aesthetic Cameroonian citizens’, Majczak’s interlocutors feel that to them the right to have rights is due (Isin and Nielsen 2008, 2). Indeed, following their glamourous performances in state parades enables them to access state benefits as citizens who otherwise might be out of reach.

The two ensuing contributions likewise deal with the theme of feminine self-transformation in relation to notions of citizenship, focusing on service workers. Drawing on ethnographic research with young Nepali women training to become airhostesses, in her contribution Anne Kukuczka (this volume) shows how these learn and are taught to craft themselves as ‘modern Nepali citizens’ visually, vocally, and olfactorily. By acquiring new orientations and habits, trainees are encouraged to overcome gendered norms that are seen as traditional and backward, while adhering to others to embody a particular national vision of employable modern femininity. Kukuczka finds that, at the training school, becoming an aesthetic citizen who ‘radiates’ urban modernity and who might one day represent the nation as an employee of a national or international airline is linked to details such as not only applying, but also embodying and becoming comfortable with the right shade of vibrant red lipstick and nail polish. Kukuczka shows the tensions that these ‘acts of citizenship’ in a multiethnic state create for her variously positioned interlocutors between on the one hand the conflicting demands for communal female respectability, and on the other hand professionalism in the global service economy.

Suvi Lensu’s contribution (this volume) discusses how, in post-genocide Rwanda, two recent government policies, namely increased taxes imposed on European second-hand clothing and prohibitions on the sale and importation of harmful skin-bleaching products, unproportionally affect marginalized citizens in the lower socio-economic strata. Against the backdrop of the state’s vision to create national harmony and ‘model citizens’ across ethnic lines, Lensu argues that both government initiatives supposedly aimed at creating a new African modernity effectively increase the precarity of those whose livelihoods depend on aesthetic labour, including her sex-worker interlocutors. As sex-workers navigate public spaces in the capital Kigali and attempt to cross national borders to neighbouring countries for work, their consumption of European second-hand fashion and skin-whitening products is not only a crucial material manifestation of their self-understanding as cosmopolitan, it also, and importantly, enables their spatial mobility in the first place. Lensu demonstrates how her interlocutors challenge narrow notions of aesthetic citizenship in present-day Rwanda by crossing national borders and creatively bypassing what they perceive as the state’s bans on beauty.

Yang Zhao’s contribution (this volume) focuses on the sartorial practices of rural-to-urban migrant men in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Zhao shows how, amidst a nationalist and heteronormative political climate that mirrors a global conservative shift, his working-class interlocutors are confronted with gender anxieties in public spaces, educational institutions and among their peers that (re)produce a hegemonic notion of ‘proper’ Uzbek masculinity. Acts of scrutinizing and policing (co-)citizens’ gender performances through both tacit and explicit dress codes contribute to a widely shared sartorial preference for muted colours among his interlocutors that reflect heteronormative gender norms. Zhao shows that the practice of men opting for more colourful clothing, understood as a harmful (zararli) fashion tied up with ‘foreign’ gender ideologies, risks their social exclusion in a society where same-sex sexual activities between men are illegal. In a society where engagement with beauty and fashion is considered feminine and ‘somewhat gay’, Zhao demonstrates, urban newcomers commonly opt to de-beautify their appearance and dress in gender-conforming ways so as not to stand out from the crowd and to overcome their marginal position as working-class migrants.

At the opposite end of aesthetic citizenship, so to speak, mass mediated global pop stars such as the Kardashians use their glamourous performances to embody an aesthetics of excess and surplus, which are difficult to reach for their followers, who nevertheless try to emulate them in bodily terms. The Kardashians’ amalgamation of ‘core entrepreneurialism, prosperity Christianity, and purchased beauty’, Jones (this volume) argues, is far removed and yet intricately tied to ordinary, disembodied, ‘neutral’ US citizenship. Instead, it ‘plays with’ surplus citizenship, including – as Jones shows by focusing on one of the Kardashians’ alleged aesthetic procedures, the so-called ‘Brazilian butt lift’ (BBL) – its symbolical association with Black embodiment, albeit from a position of white privilege. Through their cultural appropriation and commodification of Blackness during a particular political moment and later, through its reduction, the Kardashians function as both cultural creators and mirrors of US citizenship.

To conclude, each of the contributions draws on a range of examples to attend to the multi-layered relationship between embodied aesthetics, gendered norms, and everyday ‘acts’ of citizenship. Proposing the notion of ‘aesthetic citizenship’, we investigate the processes of somatic self-making and being made in relation to the state as a social relation in and of itself. By highlighting how state institutions, actors and biopolitical regimes of power shape and are shaped by gendered, classed and racialized forms and norms of appearance, we seek to shed light on the affective power of multisensorial beauty. Furthermore, we wish to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the processes through which embodied subjects engage in projects of self-transformation or fashioning to conform to the images of the nation state and global consumer culture as modern, urbane and developed. We do this by attending to the technologies and skills of these projects as ‘acts’ of citizenship. By modifying their bodies, actors may strive towards recognition and the claiming of rights as citizens regardless of their legal status, while also potentially gaining access to social mobility, belonging and economic participation that are otherwise difficult to attain. At the same time, as this special issue also shows, citizens may contest and creatively transgress the state’s acts of governance with regard to their aesthetic endeavours, thereby realizing alternative visions of themselves and pointing to the affective potential of beauty for change.

Lastly, foregrounding affective, multisensorial and embodied aesthetics affords us a crucial, yet often overlooked lens with which to zoom in on the dynamics between state images and practices in their interrelatedness and as they are embedded in everyday life. By doing so, we contend that, in contemporary neoliberal consumer capitalism, beauty has become a major ‘spectral technology’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001) with far-reaching impacts on notions of citizenship, political power and the crafting of national and transnational forms of belonging.

Acknowledgments

This special issue results from the international conference ‘Beauty and the State: Bodily Self-Making, Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging,’ which we co-organized in July 2023 at the Freie Universität Berlin. We wish to thank all conference participants for their valuable and insightful contributions and our inspiring collective discussions. Moreover, we would like to thank Peter Nyers for his support throughout the publication project and all peer reviewers for their constructive engagements with the individual articles. Special thanks goes to our student assistants, Ruyue Qiu and Theresa Elisabeth Thuß, who supported the conference and special issue in various ways.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This special issue was made possible as part of a larger research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant number [433753905].