Transformative Possibilities: Politics and Cosmetic Surgery in the Bolivarian Revolution

Abstract

I examine the intersection of politics and aesthetics in a public hospital in Caracas, Venezuela in the first years of the twenty-first century. Given Venezuela's long-standing embrace of physical enhancement and the contradictions of the medical values of cosmetic surgery with those of Bolivarian socialism, the changing surgical practices at a well-established public site offer a significant case for considering how different actors negotiate the dialectics of care. In the face of increasing resource shortages, negotiations of aesthetic care contributed to tensions in the clinical encounter as patients creatively pushed Bolivarian policies to support their pursuits of aesthetic self-improvement.

Allure and the spatialities of nationalism, war and development: Towards a geography of beauty

“…Scholars have powerfully linked these colonial foundations to the past and present ways that beauty is bound up powerfully with economic and social value (Balogun & Dodds, 2021;Oza, 2001;Parameswaran & Cardoza, 2009;Pierre, 2008;Thomas, 2020). For example, scholars show how ideals of morality, respectability, worldliness, and self/national worth surfaces via beauty pageant ideologies and their performances, the dramatic rise in cosmetic surgeries for blepharoplasty, rhinoplasty and breast augmentation, hair weaves, and the huge growth and market share of skin lightening creams across South Asia and Africa (Edmonds, 2007(Edmonds, , 2008Farrales, 2019;Fritsch, 2017;Glenn, 2008;Gulbas, 2017;Ibañez-Tirado, 2016;Nadeem, 2014;Nichols, 2013;Picton, 2013;Thomas, 2012Thomas, , 2020.…”