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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book examines the prevailing notions of beauty in Brazil by combining ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and readings of popular culture. The research was carried out over three nonconsecutive years: between 2006 and 2008 and between 2009 and 2011. The main argument is that beauty matters in Brazil because it produces forms of affect that condense race, class, and gender inequalities onto and through the body, generating an aesthetic hierarchy that produces a scale of value ranging from the beautiful and normative to the ugly and abject. It is hoped that this work provides a turning point in the scholarship about race in Brazil, which has long suggested that aesthetic evaluations are central to daily experiences of racism, but which has not fully examined beauty as a social category.

This chapter analyzes the affective and biopolitical structures that produce low-income patients as willing experimental subjects. It argues that the experimental settings of plastic surgery create medical and legal rationalities that externalize the risks of surgery onto the bodies of patients, diminishing the risks assumed by surgeons. It illuminate the ways in which surgeons favor innovation over safeguarding their patients by focusing on the ongoing controversy regarding bioplasty, a surgical technique that has a considerable number of backers despite its long record of causing serious health problems. In a broader sense, the chapter explores how affect complicates our understanding of rationality, and how it helps us trace the ways in which patients and their surgeons become lashed into biopolitical networks of knowledge production.

In this article, I trace the historical and sociopolitical construction of plastic surgery as a basic health need in Brazil. I argue that plastic surgeons deploy "plastic governmentality" in order to portray their work in public settings as humanitarian in nature, while simultaneously using poor patients as experimental subjects to train new surgeons and develop new techniques. This seemingly contradictory positioning is only possible because aesthetic surgeries are relabeled as reconstructive surgeries, producing a pliable form of statecraft that uses statistics and medical discourse to reinforce the support of the state and civil society for the practice. The form of governance I describe elucidates how the state can become instrumentalized in the benefit of private interests under neoliberalism, and how unprofitable public health needs are rendered invisible by the very biopolitical forms of governance that claim to address those needs.

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This article explores the geographies of desire that inform contact between gay Brazilian tourists and the men they encounter abroad. It argues that Brazilian men largely embrace the sexualized image of themselves that circulates globally and value foreign men according to their proximity to whiteness. By studying tourists who hail from the Global South, their imaginings of the Global North, and the ways they exoticize themselves, the article brings a new perspective to the scholarship on tourism, which usually focuses on North-to-South travel.

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This article employs Bruno Latour's notion of “translation” to examine the ways by which anglophone discourses of transsexuality are deployed in the Brazilian context. The author argues that transsexuality is utilized by the medical class in ways that refuse to medicalize the bodies of travestis, delegitimize their access to health care, portray them as inauthentic and improper women, and render their identity untranslatable and thus invisible. In order to get access to medico-legal rights, travestis and transsexuals have formed a united political front that seeks to reduce the importance of sex-reassignment surgery as a signifier of authentic gender variance, while at the same time asserting travesti subjectivity as unique and distinct from both transsexuality and transgender identity. The author concludes that the academic community needs to develop new methods of analysis to critique the pathologization of gender-variant identities in different sociocultural contexts, avoiding a Eurocentric frame of reference.