Claudia Liebelt: "Embodied Transitions - Beauty, an Ethnographic Approach"

Placing young people's engagement with beauty and digital beauty content during the transition from childhood to adolescence within the broader history of ethnographic engagement with beauty, this talk focuses on 'transition' as an embodied aesthetic practice.

Thus, aesthetic body modifications can be regarded as a prototypical transitional practice, characteristically shaped by narratives and imaginaries of the 'before' and 'after'. Whilst scholars of aesthetic surgery have long emphasised its history of racial passing (Sander Gilman), gender studies scholars (Aren Aizura, Eric Plemons) have conceptualised gender-affirming surgeries - which frequently incorporate aesthetic components - as a distinct form of transition. In (post-)Enlightenment thought, aesthetic body modifications are frequently devalued as silly and morally dubious forms of 'tinkering' with one's given body for beauty. Against this background, ethnographic accounts not only emphasised the immense variety in how beauty is defined and made salient across the globe, but also gave rise to an understanding of bodily transitions as a serious concern embedded in people’s everyday lives and rituals.