ISBN:
9781443881432
Language:
English
Pages:
1 Online-Ressource (269 pages)
Edition:
1st ed
Parallel Title:
Print version Adams, Christine Female Beauty Systems : Beauty as Social Capital in Western Europe and the United States, Middle Ages to the Present
DDC:
305.42
Keywords:
Feminine beauty (Aesthetics)--Europe, Western
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Electronic books
;
Electronic books
Abstract:
Female beauty systems everywhere are complex, integrating markers of class, status, power, and sexuality to perform the fundamental function of sorting individuals into categories of "more" or "less" desirable. Heirs to the tradition of courtly love, modern western female beauty systems tend to share the norm of man as pursuer, woman as pursued, having developed around the trope of the madly-desiring poet or knight supplicating his aloof and lovely lady for her favor. The apparent longevity of the courtly love tradition raises the question of whether the way in which it structures male desire in reaction to female beauty is part of a "universal" tendency, an evolutionary adaptation, despite clear evidence that female beauty systems are also, in fact, socially constructed, and reflect enormous ambivalence about the power and performance of beauty. Although modern western female beauty systems are routinely demystified and contested today, the purveyors of culture that support them-institutional, intellectual, artistic, commercial, and popular-continue as they always have to construe women as objects of male desire. Still, within this basic structure, the systems have varied greatly across time and space, with women using beauty as a form of social capital in widely differing ways. Moreover, as individuals have begun to experience their bodies as malleable and endlessly transformable, rather than unruly and unyielding, many have begun to experience beauty less as a given and more as a project. The nine essays collected here examine a number of different Western female beauty systems over the centuries, considering how women have complied with, contributed to, profited or suffered from, and resisted them
Abstract:
Intro -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I: Evolutionary Psychology and Female Beauty -- Chapter One -- Chapter Two -- II: Ambivalence towards Female Beauty -- Chapter Three -- Chapter Four -- Chapter Five -- III: Performing Female Beauty -- Chapter Six -- Chapter Seven -- Chapter Eight -- Chapter Nine -- Notes on Contributors -- Index
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