Biopolitics of Beauty

Author(s):  
Alvaro Jarrín

Using ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Brazilian hospitals, this book shows how plastic surgeons and patients navigate the public health system to transform beauty into a basic health right. The book historically traces the national concern with beauty to Brazilian eugenics, which established beauty as an index of the nation's racial improvement. From here, the book explains how plastic surgeons became the main proponents of a raciology of beauty, using it to gain the backing of the Brazilian state. Beauty can be understood as an immaterial form of value that the book calls “affective capital,” which maps onto and intensifies the social hierarchies of Brazilian society. Patients experience beauty as central to national belonging and to gendered aspirations of upward mobility, and they become entangled in biopolitical rationalities that complicate their ability to consent to the risks of surgery. This book explores not only the biopolitical regime that made beauty a desirable national project, but also the subtle ways in which beauty is laden with affective value within everyday social practices—thus becoming the terrain upon which race, class, and gender hierarchies are reproduced and contested in Brazil.

Author(s):  
Barbara M. Benedict

This essay asks when and how did early periodical advertisements identify or solicit consumers by gender? In response to this question, Barbara Benedict analyses the representations and self-representation of women medical practitioners (physicians and apothecaries) and the female body in handbills and newspaper advertisements from 1650 to 1751. It argues that the rough-and-tumble world of advertisement provided women with opportunities to capitalise on their gendered physicality, despite the social and gender prejudices this move entailed. Benedict illuminates how medical ads by women physicians occupy an ambiguous position as simultaneously participants in the public world, the printed marketplace, and as privileged or limited by their special connection to domesticity, and particularly to the body. Print, the essay concludes, enabled early female medical practitioners to compete in the medical marketplace.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vikas Bajpai

Despite the implementation of National Rural Health Mission over a period of nine years since 2005, the public health system in the country continues to face formidable challenges. In the context of plans for rolling out “Universal Health Care” in the country, this paper analyzes the social, economic, and political origins of the major challenges facing public hospitals in India. The view taken therein holds the class nature of the ruling classes in the country and the development paradigm pursued by them as being at the root of the present problems being faced by public hospitals. The suggested solutions are in tune with these realities.


2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa Walton

NBA player Latrell Sprewell’s attack on his coach, P.J. Carlesimo, in 1997, received extraordinary attention in the media. The coverage of the incident and subsequent trial revealed the media’s attitude toward violence within cultural representations of sport. This paper focuses on the way that violence associated with sport can be understood in relationship to the normalization of violence against women in American culture. Specifically, I focus on how the violent acts of athletes and coaches elicit different social responses depending on the social status of the victim. I argue that media representations, framed within narratives that construct their importance around gendered ideas of private and public spheres, work to support current race, class, and gender hierarchies. I also offer alternative ways of understanding the incident given the peculiar work setting of professional sport.


Author(s):  
Claudete Aparecida Conz ◽  
Maria Cristina Pinto de Jesus ◽  
Estela Kortchmar ◽  
Vanessa Augusta Souza Braga ◽  
Renata Evangelista Tavares Machado ◽  
...  

Objective: to understand the path taken in the public health system by people with morbid obesity in the search for bariatric surgery. Method: qualitative research based on the social phenomenology of Alfred Schütz, with 17 hospitalized morbidly obese people, with a scheduled date for bariatric surgery. The phenomenological interview with open questions was used and the statements were analyzed in the light of the theoretical-methodological framework and literature related to the theme. Results: the participants were able to schedule bariatric surgery by referring friends, family and public people. The waiting list for the procedure generated anguish and anxiety due to fear of surgery, weight gain, risk of worsening health and physical limitations, but it helped prepare for its performance. The experience lived in the search for bariatric surgery led these people to want continuity of care in the Basic Health Unit, after the surgery, by professionals trained to meet their needs. Conclusion: the aspects inscribed in the path of people in search of bariatric surgery signal the need to strengthen the assistance-related flows of the public health system and to invest in professional training to reduce the social inequalities in access to bariatric surgery and increased quality of services.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Andréa Simoni Manarin Tunin ◽  
Fernando César Ferreira Gouvêa

This paper presents the Women Thousand Program as a policy of inclusion through education and jobs. It traces the history of public policies designed for women through the Thousand Women Program in the Brazil, and the women’s’ experiences at the Volta Redonda campus. The authors evaluate the public policies that include vulnerable women and efficiently assist them through school. Ethnographical methods were used, based on data obtained from participative observation and detailed monitoring of the daily life of the research participants. Through the lens of critical ethnography, which considers cultural, political, and economic factors, the results show a dissonance between the Thousand Women Program and the daily reality of its participants. In addition, the “salvationist” orientation of the school helps to perpetuate the exclusion of women and gender inequalities within Brazilian society.  


Refuge ◽  
1998 ◽  
pp. 26-30
Author(s):  
Gail McCabe

The objective of this research was to explore the life-world of migrant women health care-aides, focusing on their on their own subjective understandings of caregiving and the market for care in Canada. Qualitative interviews ranging in length from one to three hours produced snapshots of the social and cultural fractures endemic to the migration and settlement process. I argue that women's caregiving practice is an aspect of an ethics of care that allows for moments of empowerment and resistance to an oppressive social context shaped by a matrix of race, class and gender hierarchies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-267
Author(s):  
Amy Brosius

This article gives a close reading of the “avvisi di Roma”—unpublished archival documents reporting on daily life in the city—that record the arrest in 1645 of famous Roman courtesan singer Nina Barcarola. Organized by the political enemies of Nina's main protector, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, the arrest was orchestrated so as to compromise the public honor of both. The reports of the arrest reflect a growing elite interest in female vocal performance in Rome, and attest to a rise in the social value of courtesan singers. Examining details provided in these reports, the article explores various aspects of Nina's life and courtesan singing culture more generally: the public honor and social practices of courtesan singers; the positive effect of singing on courtesan honor; the types of gatherings hosted by Nina; and her politically satirical public performances. It also analyzes Nina's relationship to various areas of contemporary politics—social, state, familial, and gender. The reports reveal that, in the public sphere, Nina, like Barberini's male dependents, served as a symbolic extension of the cardinal. By introducing courtesan singers—a significant, marginalized population—into musicological discourse on seventeenth-century Rome, the article broadens our understanding of Roman singing culture in this period.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-81
Author(s):  
Hilde Rustad

Abstract This article examines issues related to age and gender within the European contact improvisation community (ECIC). In particular, my research interest is to find out more about experiences related to values in the dance genre of contact improvisation (CI), and how they relate to the values associated with democracy understood to be embedded in CI. From 2014 to 2017, I conducted interviews with seven persons who are CI dancers and teachers from different European countries. The interview material shows that a double set of values is communicated in the ECIC: one that is taught, spoken, written and understood to be holding on to and embodying ’the social ideologies of the early ’70s which rejected traditional gender roles and social hierarchies’ (Novack, 1990, 11) and a second set in which traditional gender roles and social hierarchies are active and experienced by European CI dancer-teachers and dancers when participating in CI events.


Temida ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-23
Author(s):  
Vasiliki Artinopoulou

Domestic violence and gender-based violence has been studied and recognised for many years in Greece. Adequate legislation on the criminalization of domestic violence has been implemented since 2006 (Law 3500/2006 on the Confrontation of Domestic Violence). A network of support services has also operated across the country for many years, staffed with professionals trained in the gender-sensitive perspective. However, Greece still faces the impact of the economic crisis that started in 2010 and the critical aspects of the crisis from the reduction of the public budget imposed by the European institutions in the lives of the individuals, the victims and the providers of the social services have not been fully assessed yet. The COVID-19 pandemic created problems in the victims? access to social services and not only. The shadow pandemic describes the alarm on the increase of domestic violence during the pandemic and the isolation of the victims from the providers of social and psychological support. Addressing both the issue of domestic violence through a victim-centered approach before and during the pandemic in Greece and the need for the implementation of evidence-based policies are the general aims of the paper. To this, we present few findings from an original victimological online research on domestic violence during the first lockdown in the country (March to May 2020) and we justify the need for the implementation of evidence-based policies in the criminal justice system in Greece.


1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (4II) ◽  
pp. 669-693
Author(s):  
M. Aynulhasan ◽  
Hafiz A. Pasha ◽  
Ajazm M. Rasheed

Heavy investment in many developing countries in the social sector including health is based on the premise that human capital is vital to the growth and development of a nation. However, Pakistan's spending on this sector has been one of the lowest in the region. In the present environment of high budget deficits, one does not expect substantial public funds to be forthcoming and diverted towards the social sector in the intermediate- or medium-term future. The critical issue facing the public sector should then be to design health policies which must be cost-effective and efficient. This study examines these health policy issues within the context of an optimisation framework for public health system, forecasts future upto (2002-03) and discusses an efficient optimal mix of health inputs, outputs, expenditures, and wage policies under alternative scenarios. The study recommends that, first, growth of health infrastructure building in the urban areas be slowed down in the short-term (two to three years), and some of the resources reallocated towards the rural sector either in terms of building new Basic Health Units or upgrading the existing Rural Health Centres. Second, not only attractive wage policies be formulated for health personnel, but the status of nurses in the public health system be also elevated by giving them higher grades. Third, for every rupee of development expenditure incurred, Public Health Department must plan or keep provisions for recurring outlays. All this reallocation of resources is feasible within the projected actual budget and it will lead to efficiency gains in the order of 8 to 10 percent for the entire public health system.


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