Short Abstract

This panel explores practices of beauty and beauty service work as social, affective, material, and moral relations that shape bodies, selves, and social worlds. It examines how beauty mediates relations and  positions, including those of anthropologists in research encounters.

Long Abstract

Anthropological research has shown that beauty practices like cosmetic surgery, grooming, make-up, and fashion are connected to wider social, economic, political, and affective relations, as well as to hierarchies of gender, class, race, morality, modernity, and citizenship (Craig 2002; Jarrín 2017; Kukuczka & Liebelt 2024). Beauty itself can produce feelings of confidence, shame, desire, disgust, hope, and inadequacy (Liebelt 2023), and beauty work involves not only transforming the body, but also learning how to appear, behave, and feel in ways considered appropriate in particular social contexts (Black 2004; Clarke 2011). Beauty (service) work further requires investments of time, money, knowledge, labour, and effort (Liebelt 2023; Mears 2011). In studies on beauty, the anthropologists’ own bodies are likewise affectively, materially, and morally involved, shaping research encounters and access to the field (Vartabedian 2015; Kukuczka 2026).

This panel is interested in how beauty generates and is shaped by affects, materialities, and “moral landscapes for bodily behavior” (Lock and Farquhar 2007: 21). We invite contributions that deepen our understanding of: 

- How specific bodily markers become tied to moralised ideas of citizenship, propriety, cleanliness, and modernity, and to experiences of belonging, (in)adequacy, and exclusion.

- The affective, material, and moral consequences of beauty (service) work. Who is expected to ‘do beauty’ and be beautiful, and what labour does this entail? What happens to those who fail to meet aesthetic expectations?

- How anthropologists’ own appearances and embodied positions shape research encounters. What happens when researchers are perceived as beautiful or lacking beauty in the context of fieldwork?