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Paper short abstract

This paper draws on ongoing doctoral research into Kosovar women’s beauty practices, showing how fashion and cosmetic surgery serve as tools for personal agency and as responses to structural precarity that demand ongoing labor and self-regulation.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on ongoing doctoral research into the beauty practices of Kosovar women after the state’s independence in 2008. It examines fashion, cosmetic labor, and private surgical interventions as everyday spaces where global political projects are interpreted and contested. Following conflict and international intervention, Kosovo has pursued state-building efforts to cultivate national subjects who embody “modern” ideals. This study explores how young women navigate state-driven discourses of modernity while balancing local social norms related to family, kinship, and social status.

Drawing on fieldwork in fashion academies, ateliers, wedding ceremonies, and aesthetic centers, this research explores the polarized meanings attached to these body modifications. It demonstrates how they serve both as tools for personal agency and as responses to structural precarity that require ongoing individual labor and self-regulation within a “not-yet-state.”

Visual ethnography is central to this study and is used to capture the symbolic grammar of appearance. By combining photography, video recording, and post-production editing with participant observation and interviews, the research documents the gestures, visual codes, and spatial arrangements through which beauty is enacted, performed, normalized, and contested in everyday practices.