Traci Yoder

Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil

mandy — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

In this well-crafted ethnography, anthropologist Alexander Edmonds explores narratives and practices surrounding plastic surgery in contemporary Brazil. Cosmetic procedures, or estetica, have been increasing rapidly among the urban populations. Rather than simply lamenting the increase of plastic surgeries in a country famous for embracing the sensual, Edmonds instead explores the reasons why estetica has become so popular across race, class, and gender lines. Examining beauty culture in Brazil from an ethnographic perspective, he suggests in Pretty Modern that it is essential to understand what beauty means and does for differently located social actors.

Arguing that anthropologists have typically ignored the aesthetics and erotic allure of beauty, he instead takes practices such as plastic surgery seriously for what they can reveal about the fears and aspirations of urban Brazilians. He begins from the premise that perceptions and acts of beautification can only be understood within specific moments and relationships, and he set out to explore the locations where definitions of beauty are defined and negotiated: cosmetic surgery clinics, public hospitals, TV studios, favelas, cafes, and homes.

Edmonds interviewed and observed plastic surgeons, celebrities, fashion models, low-income domestic workers, media producers, and housewives in order to make sense of the increasing popularity of plastic surgery. He shadowed doctors, students, and patients in hospitals and clinics to observe consultations, surgeries, and trainings. Additionally, he engaged with images and stories of plastic surgery in popular culture through ethnographic observations of media production sites and textual analysis of magazines dedicated to estetica.

Throughout Pretty Modern, Edmonds follows two simultaneous lines of analysis. First, he uses the specific socio-historical circumstances of contemporary Brazil to shed light on the significance of beauty and cosmetic surgery. At the same time, he uses the desire for beauty as a point of entry to examine the larger tensions and anxieties of modernizing Brazil, specifically the effects of the global capitalist economy, market inequalities, and consumer culture.

The book is organized into three interrelated sections, which each focus on plastic surgery in relation to a particular domain of modern experience: medicine and psychology, race and nation, and gender and sexuality. First, Edmonds provides a genealogy of self-esteem and shows how this concept has allowed plastic surgery to be mobilized as treatment for mental suffering. He situates this analysis in the longer history of medical and therapeutic techniques of self-governance in Brazil and examines how the redefinition of cosmetic surgery as a method of “aesthetic health” has produced a language of rights around these practices.

Next, Edmonds contextualizes current beauty practices through Brazilian nationalism and local racial politics, and explores the historically specific ways that color, beauty, and power intersect. He unpacks the aesthetics of race and the scientific racism that imbues discussions of beauty and appearance in past and present Brazil.

Finally, Edmonds examines the role of cosmetic surgery in relation to the larger political economy of female reproduction. Specifically, he shows the ways that plastic surgery highlights the tensions between women’s roles as sexual and maternal subjects and argues that plastic surgeries have become naturalized as part of women’s health along with cesareans and tubal litigations.

Edmond’s thorough analysis is shaped by his engagement with broader literatures on Brazilian history and anthropology, capitalist modernity, neoliberal subjectivity, and the political economy of desire. However, Pretty Modern also reflects the best aspects of ethnographic research and writing: thick descriptions of personalities, spaces, and encounters; detailed accounts of conversations with a wide array of people; and a refusal to ignore or explain away the contradictions that shape people’s perceptions and practices in everyday life.

Written by: Traci Yoder, April 5th 2011

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire

andrea — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Bruce Erickson, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands

Indiana University Press

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire explores the intersections of queer studies and environmental studies and aims to trouble dominant discourses of nature and sexuality. The authors in this collection argue that we should adopt a queer ecological perspective, a “transgressive and historically relevant critique of dominant pairings of nature and environment with heteronormativity and homophobia.” Drawing on science studies, environmental history, queer geography, ecocriticism, critical race theory, cultural studies, landscape ecology, and LGBTQ theory, this interdisciplinary anthology presents the various possibilities for “queering ecology and greening queer politics.”

What do queer ecologies and greener queer politics look like? To answer this question, the essays use various theoretical and methodological strategies to explore how understandings of nature shape discourses of sexuality and how understandings of sex and reproduction shape perceptions and uses of the environment.

The chapters delve into topics as diverse as animal sexuality, hermaphrodite frogs, eco-porn, biophilia, lesbian rural communities, pollution and overpopulation, and penguins as environmental icons. Several themes weave throughout the entire collection, including critical analyses of homophobic and racist evolutionary narratives and the ways that particular spaces become imbued with sexual meanings. Overall, Queer Ecologies critiques the heteronormative, racist, nationalist, and colonialist narratives that structure popular environmentalist discourses.

The volume approaches these issues through three sections. In the first part, "Against Nature? Queer Sex, Queer Animality," the authors examine how sexual natures are produced through dichotomies such as animal/human and nature/culture. These essays argue that the question is not whether queer acts are “unnatural,” but rather how definitions of nature and culture (and the boundaries between them) are produced and mobilized.

The second section of the book, "Green, Pink, and Public: Queering Environmental Politics," explores the intersections of sexuality and nature as sites of engaged political action. These contributions critique the heteronormativity and whiteness of environmental politics and offer possibilities for radical ecologies and sexual environmental justice.

The final part of the book, "Desiring Nature: Queer Attachments," speaks to the pleasures and losses of engaging with the “more than human” world. The authors in this section explore the links between the regulation of sexuality and the destruction of non-human life. One of the most profound essays in the collection is by editor Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, who writes on the subject of mourning in queer writing about nature. Drawing on a politicized melancholic sensibility from lesbian and gay experiences of AIDS, she attempts a queer re-thinking of environmental destruction, arguing that few, if any public rituals exist to express mourning over the loss of the environment.

Overall, this collection moves forward conversations in queer and environmental literatures, and makes important connections between discourses of sexuality and nature that offer promising possibilities for productive political coalitions and more critical theories. While the authors are careful to note the materiality of bodies and spaces, the volume relies predominantly on textual analysis. The authors examine familiar cultural texts such as mainstream movies like Brokeback Mountain and Happy Feet, popular documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth, and the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt.

Readers will come away from Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire with a complex understanding of the dangerous assumptions that shape environmental discourses, as well as the importance of environmental considerations to queer theorizing and movement building. The queer ecological framework offered in this collection has valuable insights for readers across a broad spectrum of interests.

Written by: Traci Yoder, January 5th 2011

Paradoxes of Utopia: Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires, 1890-1910

mandy — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Juan Suriano, Chuck Morse

AK Press

In Paradoxes of Utopia, social and labor historian Juan Suriano explores the Argentinean urban anarchist movement at the fin de siecle. Drawing on archival sources, Suriano analyzes libertarian theory and practice in Buenos Aires through an analysis of anarchist books, newspapers, lectures, rallies, propaganda tours, fundraisers, theater groups, songs, rites, symbols, educational projects, and union organizing campaigns.

Suriano situates the urban anarchist movement in Argentina in the context of a rapidly modernizing nation and explores the influence of international anarchist figures and publications on the Argentinean movement. Arguing that historical studies have ignored radical politics prior to 1945, he focuses on explicitly anarchist institutions and publications, distinguishing anarchism from socialist and worker struggles while still acknowledging the relationships and overlap between these movements. He shows the many ways that anarchists in Buenos Aires contested the state, legal system, nationalism, religion, army, and electoral politics through cultural and study circles, alternative schools, radical presses, social events, worker organizing, and direct action.

Suriano describes the rise and eventual collapse of the anarchist movement in Buenos Aires. He outlines the many obstacles anarchists faced, including ideological conflicts, lack of coordination and trust between anarchists, a reluctance to analyze the specifics of Argentinean society, and the eventual marginalization of libertarian politics in favor of the more reformist agenda of socialist and worker groups. He also examines the effects of state repression in the form of Residency and Social Defense Laws, which curbed anarchist groups by criminalizing many of their activities.

While Paradoxes of Utopia outlines and analyzes in detail the political and cultural practices of urban anarchists in Buenos Aires, Suriano’s analysis falls short from a feminist perspective. The book offers tantalizing evidence that women were intricately involved in the anarchist movement as workers, wives, mothers, intellectuals, and comrades, yet he fails to fully consider the effects of women’s roles in shaping the movement. For example, at various points Suriano briefly touches on anarchist ideas concerning marriage and family structure, women’s liberation, sexual equality, and the persecution of prostitutes, but he does not fully explore these aspects of the anarchist movement.

The absence of women in Suriano's analysis does not seem to indicate that they were not involved in anarchist theory and practice. He mentions in passing the existence of an Anarchist Women’s Center and newspaper (Women’s Voice), women’s involvement in tenant strikes and social events, and the renown of several female anarchist lecturers and intellectuals. While dealing with archival sources can limit the scope of analysis, it does not appear that women’s role were completely obscured from the historical record. The lack of analysis regarding women's involvement in Paradoxes of Utopia points to the need for more studies on the role of women in radical social movements.

Despite this critique, Paradoxes of Utopia has a great deal to offer readers interested in historical and contemporary radical politics. Indeed, many of the difficulties faced by the anarchists in urban Argentina a century ago sound surprisingly similar to those that arise in radical social movements today: splintering based on ideological differences, state repression, lack of resources, high turnover, and competition with reformist social movements. This well-researched study is a valuable read for those interested in Latin American history, anarchist theory and practice, and labor movements.

Written by: Traci Yoder, September 25th 2010