Margaret Mead Japan China Religie en seks Moral panics Seks en robots Seksuele ontwikkeling Seksualisering Leeftijdverschillen Geweld en misbruik Consent Sexting Prostitutie Pornografie"Beauty standards are informal: there is no Agency of Beauty issuing official guidelines on our appearance that have been established through carefully arranged committee meetings involving all stakeholders." Claudia LIEBELT, e.a. - Beauty and the norm - Debating standardization in bodily appearance, p. 48-49
Claudia LIEBELT, e.a."Before introducing the contributions to this volume, we begin with a brief history of the notion of the norm and of the closely related debates on standardization and normalization as well as a discussion of the global economy of gendered and racialized bodies."(2)
[Het gaat over lichamen, niet over mensen, weet je wel. Postmodernisme, weet je wel. ]
"Timmermans and Epstein (2010, 71) remark that standardization has a negative ring to it as it is perceived to create worldwide homogenization.(...) the notion of a standard human is rather troubling and may trigger dystopian fears of enforced homogenization, designer babies and cloning. Far from being entirely dystopian, or utopian, for that matter, the notion of a standard human has in some domains long been an everyday reality."(2)
"The history of human standardization is commonly traced back to the emergence of statistics in the mid-nineteenth century, and especially the works of Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), who developed the still powerful concepts of the average man and the body mass index. As ideological tools, these standards of somatic normalcy continue not only to describe, but also to prescribe human bodies today. With their help, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson remarks (2009, 28), generations of women, people of colour, the so-called handicapped and the poor have been measured, observed and evaluated, almost always being ‘found wanting.’" [mijn nadruk] (3)
"As Davis reminds us, in societies with bodily beauty ideals (rather than beauty norms), ‘all members of the population are below the ideal. … By definition, one can never have an ideal body. There is in such socie- ties no demand that populations have bodies that conform to the ideal’ (1995, 25)."(3)
[Zijn idealen geen normen dan? Dat zie ik toch anders. Maar ze legt het niet uit. Idealen zijn per definitie onbereikbaar misschien?]
"The conceptualization of beauty as a norm has thus effected various forms of exclusion for those who fall short of, exceed or violate the normative parameters or else escape the pressure to ‘correct’ those aspects of their body that defy the norm. In his profound cultural history of aesthetic plastic surgery, Sander Gilman (1999, xvii) describes the basic motivation for aesthetic surgery as the desire to correct such ‘deformations,’ in the language of medical experts, and to ‘pass’ visibly."(4)
"The global beauty market is often described as dominated by Western or Caucasian ideals of beauty promulgated by the mass media and multinational players. From such a perspective, beauty practices such as skin bleaching or toning, hair straightening or surgery such as the so-called ‘correction of the negroid nose’ (cf. Edmonds 2010, 145) or ‘double eyelid surgery’ in Asia and among Asian Americans are attempts to mimic Western or Caucasian beauty ideals (Jha 2016). While hegemonic beauty norms and images, for example, in respect of body weight and skin colour, clearly exist globally, the present volume argues for a nuanced reading of their diverse meanings and effects on and for bodies across the globe. In doing so, our volume contributes to an emerging debate in recent studies on the local ramifications and biopolitics of the global beauty boom as a transnational phenomenon." [mijn nadruk] (5)
"Accordingly, all the contributors to our volume are part of an emerging debate among scholars on the representation of gendered and racialized bodies, as well as transnational beauty cultures and practices in an increasingly global market."(6)
"With the aid of aesthetic techniques, and speaking subjectively, aes- thetic surgery aficionados, trans-people and those labelled as deviating from bodily norms—indeed, anyone who is ready to subject themselves to the demands of the market—may strive to become not ordinary, but outstanding, even spectacular."(6)
[Wat is dat meer dan je aanpassen aan die normen voor aantrekkelijkheid om erbij te horen en dan te zeggen dat je echt helemaal zelf wilde?]
"For women entering the large beauty and entertainment employment sector, aesthetic body modifications are ‘to a certain degree expected’ (ibid., 194). In a recent volume on beauty politics in neoliberal times, Elias et al. (2017) argue that, by accumulating aesthetic capital, women are expected to become ‘aesthetic entrepreneurs,’ ever-vigilant about their outward appearance."(7)
[Ja, en wat vinden we daar van? Want uiteraard komen die normen van mannen. ]
"Norms of beauty and appearance affect both men and women, but not for nothing has there been a focus on femininity in the social science literature on beauty. While statistics suggest that men are also indulging in cosmetic surgery and spending on beauty products and services in growing numbers (Jones 2010, 294, 335), women continue to be its main consumers and make up the majority of cosmetic surgery patients."(7)
"Finally, female breasts and noses are scrutinized by a patriarchal society that seeks control over the sexual female body; by altering them, women hope to reduce dominating stares at their bodies"(12)
[In Turkije dus. In de rest van de wereld willen vrouwen juist versterken dat er naar hun gestaard wordt.]
"In India, where Kullrich studied skin colour politics and beauty practices, normative beauty, especially for women, is ever more closely linked to fairness of skin, despite awareness campaigns such as ‘Dark Is Beautiful’ rejecting and fighting the ideal of fairness and warning of the health risks of bleaching."(14)
[Het idee dat je zelfs je huidskleur wil laten veranderen om bij de normen van de witte mensen te horen, vreselijk. ]
"My approach thus differs from that employed by George L. Mosse in his influential The Image of Man (1998). In this work, Mosse describes the modern masculine ideal as a set of definite characteristics that emerged during the Napoleonic wars of 1803–1815 and that continued to affect European society up until the mid-twentieth century. Rather, my conceptualization of masculinity adheres to the ideas of Connell and Messerschmidt (2005), noted above, which give greater space to dynamic change, negotiations of power hierarchies and the multiplicity of masculinities."(26)
"There is a consensus among historians of disability that bodily normality is a concept that emerges around the middle of the nineteenth century, chiefly defined by statistics and modern medicine, which gradually influenced European society (Davis 1995)."(27)
[Postmodern gezeur. ]
"We can see the shape of someone’s nose, the colour of someone’s skin, the style of someone’s hair, but our eyes cannot establish someone’s exact weight; for that, we require a set of scales. Yet, when we as scholars analyse weight as a beauty standard, we often focus on the visual: we understand the desire to lose or gain weight as a desire to change our appearance and as something propagated by visual representations of the body in magazines, movies or music videos."(45-46)
[Je hoeft iemands exacte gewicht niet te hebben om iemands voorkomen te kunnen beoordelen als 'vet', 'dik', 'mager' en in lijn daarmee als '(niet) mooi', '(niet) aantrekkelijk'. Daarmee zeg ik dus meteen ook dat dat historisch bepaald wordt. Of gewicht een indicatie is voor gezondheid?]
"Fat studies scholars have shown that the current dominance of the body mass index, which is based on body weight, as a health indicator is not the inevitable result of biomedical research but instead the contingent outcome of social and historical processes (Dawes 2014; Fletcher 2012, 2014; Gard and Wright 2005; Jutel 2005, 2006; Lupton 2013; Saguy 2013)—or even, some argue, a profitable lie nurtured by big pharmaceutical companies (Campos 2004; Oliver 2006)." [mijn nadruk] (46)
"In this chapter, I show that in addition to not being a self-evident standard for health, weight is also not a self-evident standard for body size." [mijn nadruk] (46)
[Maar natuurlijk is er wel een relatie tussen. Wordt dit een politiek correct verhaal vanuit "vet / dik is oké"?]
"Beauty standards are informal: there is no Agency of Beauty issuing official guidelines on our appearance that have been established through carefully arranged committee meetings involving all stakeholders. Their informality makes it harder to track their history, and this may tempt us to take them for granted, but informal standards are neither more natural nor less powerful than formal standards." [mijn nadruk] (48-49)
"Quantitative standardization of the body has been studied extensively by historians and sociologists of medicine (Czerniawski 2007; Dawes 2014; Fletcher 2014; Jorland et al. 2005; Jutel 2001, 2006; Porter 1995), but mainly in the domain of medicine and health. Quantitative standardization of the body in the domain of beauty, the topic of this chapter, has received less attention. Yet the introduction of quantitative standards poses specific challenges for actors in this domain.(...) The mechanical objectivity produced by scales contrasts with a crucial aspect of beauty: beauty is about being seen through the subjective eyes of other individuals— exactly the human observers that mechanical objectivity aims to exclude." [mijn nadruk] (49)
"Historians of the body have dated the rise of being slim as the dominant beauty ideal in Western Europe and the United States in the mid- to late nineteenth century (Stearns 2002). The Netherlands seems to fit this pattern.(...) Advertising campaigns for slimming remedies from the early twentieth century show that slimness had by then been firmly established as a beauty ideal."(50)
"In other ads, it was not so much being beautiful as looking young that counted—being slender was strongly linked to appearing young, an important value at the time." [mijn nadruk] (51)
[Dat klopt aardig met de praktijk denk ik. Jong is ook meestal slanker én mooier. En ja, waarschijnlijk ook gezonder.]
"Most of the advertising campaigns discussed in this chapter addressed both men and women, although not to the same extent: the majority of the advertisements, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, focused on women." [mijn nadruk] (51)
"As we have seen, being slim had already become a qualitative ideal of beauty: it was simply not yet measured in quantitative terms. This changed in subsequent decades."(54-55)
[Je had dus lichaamsgewicht niet nodig om waardeoordelen te hebben over dik en dun wat wel degelijk waarneembaar is.]
"In what follows, I focus not on the causes of the emergence of weight as a standard of beauty but on one of the consequences, namely that it complicated the character of beauty by objectifying beauty mechanically and thus separating it from the gaze of others. Nevertheless, as we shall see below, slimming remedy advertisers still relied on this gaze as an incentive for their potential customers to reduce weight, while at the same time propagating weight as a standard of beauty in their advertisements." [mijn nadruk] (55)
[Simpelweg omdat er een relatie tussen bestaat. Je ziet het zelf in de spiegel, anderen zien het bij je in bed of aan het strand of in de sportschool of als je op een feest je cocktailjurkje draagt. Ik begrijp het probleem van de auteur niet. Andere mensen zien misschien niet je exacte gewicht maar zien wel dat je 'bent afgevallen'. En dat kan al als je een paar kilo bent afgevallen, afhankelijk van hoe goed mensen anderen waarnemen.]
"As Ian Hacking (1990, 160–69) has explained, the modern concept of ‘normal’ is a not a neutral description referring to a statistical average, but a morally loaded term prescribing how things ought to be. Defining the ‘normal’, healthy body then becomes a way to exert what Foucault (1990) has called biopower, i.e. control over people’s bodies (either indi- vidual bodies or populations). When advertisements mentioned a ‘normal weight,’ they referred to a standard that their readers had to make their bodies adhere to. The fact that the term was used regularly in advertise- ments shows that people were now familiar with this standard, that they knew their own ‘normal’ weight and that they were aware they should strive for it." [mijn nadruk] (57)
"Just as thermometers objectified fever and separated it from the doctor’s subjective judgment, scales objectified slimness, enabling it to be established without relying on the subjective judgment of others."(60)
"Thus, one needed to see oneself through the eyes of others to determine whether one was fulfilling the prevailing standard of beauty. This could be done either by actually encouraging others to judge, or through imitating their judgment by looking in a mirror. Either way, there was a strongly subjective, interpersonal element in assessing beauty as determined by body size. When slimness came to be quantified and the scale partially replaced the eye as the judge of beauty, one no longer needed to be seen to establish to what extent one met the beauty standard. This partially separated beauty from looking and thus to some extent individualized the assessment of beauty. In so far as body shape was concerned, all one required was an instrument; involving other people became superfluous." [mijn nadruk] (61)
[Wat een onzinnige redenering. Schoonheid is alleen maar belangrijk in een sociale dimensie. Je gewicht meten doe je niet alleen voor jezelf als het daar om gaat. Als het om je gezondheid gaat misschien wel. ]
"The advertisements’ stress on the importance of beauty for social inclusion is somewhat at odds with their propagation of weight as a beauty standard. Since weight as a standard objectifies and individualizes beauty, it separates it from the judgments of others."(62)
[Dat is gewoon niet waar.]
"The advertisements commonly confront readers with situations in which fatness cannot be hidden, even if they keep their weight a secret from others. Particularly popular for this purpose were advertisements situated at the beach..." [mijn nadruk] (62)
[Nou dan. ]
"Apparently, weight is not the only beauty standard that matters in relation to body shape and size; there is another, qualitative standard of slimness as well, which can be judged by subjective observers, through looking."(67)
[En nogmaals: Nou dan! ]
"Albinism is a contested phenomenon. Biomedicine nowadays regards it as a congenital condition resulting in a lack of pigment in the skin, hair and/or eyes that is sometimes considered a disability because it impairs vision and because of the need to protect the skin from the sun to prevent skin cancer. Many social activists have also taken this stance, not least to oppose an older and competing understanding of albinism as having an other-worldly quality. Around the world, the very humanness of the hypopigmented body was and sometimes still is not fully acknowledged and is even denied." [mijn nadruk] (78)
[Zoals duizend andere zaken waarin mensen van anderen kunnen afwijken tot ongenoegen van de 'normale' meerderheid.]
"Four years later, seeing models with disabilities on international catwalks is no longer perceived a ‘shocker’, but rather as a designer’s commitment to ‘alternative beauty’. So, to repeat, what happens when ‘disabled’ bodies are commodified in an attempt to represent ‘alternative beauty’? What would you argue is the ‘gain’ involved?"(106)
[Andere afwijkingen — handicaps — die men probeert 'normaal' te maken vanuit het gevoel van politieke correctheid. Ik denk dat de personen zelf daar weinig aan hebben. Sterker nog: door mensen met een handicap als 'normaal' neer te zetten verdwijnt voor anderen ook de noodzaak de samenleving aan hun behoeften aan te passen (betere toegang, betere hulpmiddelen, en zo meer).]
[Meer van hetzelfde.]
"Against the background of neoliberal urban restructuring, the feminization of the urban service sector and an expansion of the urban middle classes, aesthetic body modification and surgery have become ever more normalized forms of consumption. There are specific bodily concerns in Turkey that are the product of history and that tie a particular bodily appearance to imaginations of modernity, femininity and urban citizenship. ‘Heavy’ female breasts and ‘large’ or ‘hooked’ noses, whose surgical treatment is the focus of this chapter, are clearly among these." [mijn nadruk] (155)
[En uiteraard doen de plastisch chirurgen graag mee met al die pogingen om er al of niet etnisch bij te horen.]
"Against this background, my ethnographic data suggest that surgery may also be a tool for women hoping to reduce ‘dominating stares’ on their bodies by ‘normalizing’ them."(156-157)
[O, het is om de mannelijke blik te vermijden dat vrouwen zich overgeven aan de kwellingen door mannelijke plastisch chirurgen. Je doet niets aan je eigen onzekerheid, maar wel iets aan je lichaam. Het recht om normaal te zijn? Belachelijk. Alsof het een vrije keuze is om dat soort — vaak riskante — ingrepen te ondergaan.]
"Tesettür is an inclusive term that refers not only to the religiously inspired Muslim dress, but also more broadly to the cultivation of a modest pious self that is not restricted to clothing. Beyond the binary of veiled and unveiled sartorial styles, fashioning a pious, modest self requires a more complex and nuanced way of managing one’s appearance. Instead of examining how Turkish-Dutch Muslim women deal with the stigma of being members of a sartorial minority in the Netherlands, my research explores the ambivalent meanings and contested practices of being visibly Muslim by focusing on a more commonly shared practice: the application of makeup among tesettürlü women." [mijn nadruk] (177)
[Erg belangrijk onderzoek ... zucht. ]
"In this conversation with Anisha H. Soff, Nairobi-based artist Syowia Kyambi reflects on her performance, ‘Working Title: Beauty and the Norm Sketches’, which was staged on two consecutive days during the conference that preceded this publication. In this work, Kyambi approaches the topic of beauty norms from the perspective of identity, memory and the self in relation to the wider society."(203)
[Totaal vaag. Weg ermee. ]
"Feminist theorizing on beauty has gained an important place amongst critical scholars, as attested by a wide range of insightful research on the subject. However, beauty’s meaning in women’s lives continues to be a scholarly problem. On the one hand, feminists have argued that beauty ideals and practices reflect patriarchal domination (Bordo 1993; Wolf 1991). These analyses stress slightly different arguments but seem to coalesce on the point that beauty practices act as a means of social control over the female body. On the other hand, beauty is also seen as a potentially pleasurable instrument of female agency (Cahill 2003; Davis 2013; Gimlin 2002). These writers emphasize women’s subjective experiences of beauty and how they might derive personal satisfaction from cosmetic surgery, beautification and self-stylization. This view of beauty as a tool of female agency has proved illuminating for my work, as beauty was an important means through which respondents could have an impact on their everyday experiences. Indeed, recent scholar- ship demonstrates a push towards what Maxine Leeds Craig (2006) calls a more ‘complicated’ stance on beauty, generating a new wave of work that takes an intersectional approach and explores ‘the lure of beauty’ (Felski 2006)." [mijn nadruk]
[Opnieuw een poging om onzekere verkeerde keuzes van vrouwen weer te geven als 'empowerment'. ]
"In this chapter, I elaborate on the politics of skin colour in contem- porary Delhi. Desires for fair skin in India are interrelated with local and global discourses on beauty and with religious and caste identities, as well as with colonial and global capitalist (colour) hierarchies. Whereas ideals of beauty have always differed between Indian regions and shifted over time, recent research on the New Indian Woman, 4 Indian beauty queens and Bollywood cinema have demonstrated that the white standard of beauty has indeed become a globally powerful imperative, not despite, but precisely because it incorporates constructs of ‘diversity’ that are mostly defined by closeness to ‘European whiteness’ (e.g. Osuri 2008; Parameswaran 2005)." [mijn nadruk] (246)
"Skin bleaching as social practice is predominantly performed within the context of beauty and body work—hence, my analysis starts from the perspective of beauty. For my interviewees, to bleach their skin meant to also bleach facial and body hair—typically in a beauty parlour—or to apply facial creams or body lotions at home. The general notion that ‘the beauty is the fair and the fair is the beauty,’ as expressed by one interviewee, prevailed in most of the interviews I conducted in Delhi 2014."(249)
"Moreover, fair skin tones were commonly associated with North Indian regions, as well as with Pakistani or Iranian origin, with Islam and the Mogul Empire. They were further linked to the upper castes and upper- class status, as well as to women and the feminine body."(268)
"In this contribution, Shirley A. Tate and Katharina Fink converse on skin colour politics and the White beauty standard. Critical to the discussion is art and its potential to mobilize revolt. This conversation evolved as a series of vignettes exchanged in the digital sphere."(283)
[Wat tot eindeloos geklets leidt. Waar is het academisch niveau van dit boek? ]