Beauty Diplomacy

Introduction

“…This line of literature has largely focused on mapping the socio-economic outcomes of appearance (see, e.g., Hamermesh, 2011;Hosoda et al, 2003;Jaeger, 2011), while also acknowledging that aesthetic capital is convertible to forms of capital beyond economic capital. While this research on socio-economic outcomes has focused on the overall quantitative regularities in the conversion of aesthetic capital to economic capital, other social scientists have investigated how the conversion of aesthetic capital happens on a particular social field, such as the modelling industry (Mears, 2011), the global party circuit (Mears, 2020) or beauty pageants (Balogun, 2020). This line of research has often used qualitative methods, including ethnography, to uncover a field's specific logics of valuation and exchange and to understand how these are navigated and negotiated in contexts where power is unevenly distributed.…”

Racing the Muslim: Strategies for Teaching Race and Ethnic Studies in the Education Curriculum

“…Alsultany’s (2012) work forces us to interrogate how U.S. imperialism needs both the figure of the “good” Muslim along with the “bad” Muslim to salvage the U.S. as a site of racial democracy while justifying U.S. state violence against “Middle Eastern,” “Arab,” and “Muslim” communities (Mamdani, 2005). The production of the “good” and “bad” Muslim is a geopolitical investment in creating notions of the good global subject on the international scene and the good citizen domestically (Balogun, 2020; Thangaraj, 2015b, 2019). Popular culture forces students in education to unpack what they take for granted with the racialized representations of communities of color.…”

“…In the same context, it also opens up a chance for students to see their discomfort with their own performances and embodying racial difference. It makes them come face to face with their own social histories of bodily comportment and performance (Balogun, 2020; Hoang, 2015). With that in mind, I encourage students to write a short paper highlighting first what they had taken-for-granted about their bodily comportment as well as how the preparation for the project pushed them to rethink their own bodily integrity and bodily performances of self.…”