I’m a Barbie girl

Notes for an anthropology of beauty

Abstract

In the neoliberal Euro-American society we live in, beauty matters. Our image conditions our social and professional opportunities. It constructs our personal identity, shapes our subjectivity, symbolises and produces individual and collective meanings. In this article, I’ll present theoretical reflections on beauty as capital, based on the ethnographic research I’ve conducted over the last five years in the Lisbon metropolitan area with women between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five, using the Barbie doll as inspiration, model and research methodology. Thinking about the ways in which we (re)make our bodies in the current neoliberal context means not only examining desires, imaginaries and technologies of aesthetic enhancement, but also reflecting on the economic and social value of beauty and how, in a climate of extreme competition, the race for perfection confirms and reinforces pre-existing structures of inequality, differentiation and discrimination.