Global Beauty, Local Bodies

What do the words global, transnational, national, and local mean when talking about beauty, which is simultaneously abstract and ephemeral, embodied and concrete? How do ideas and images of beauty circulate in a globalizing world, and how do people's bodily practices respond to them? Rather than simply examining how beauty is thought about and aspired to in international settings, this collection of original scholarly work and first-person accounts takes globalization processes and the transnational links these processes create as the jumping-off point for an examination of what it means to be, have, or aspire to a beautiful body.

Afshan Jafar is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Connecticut College, USA. Her first book from Palgrave Macmillan, Women's NGOs in Pakistan (2011), uncovers the overwhelming challenges facing women's NGOs and examines the strategies used by them to ensure not just their survival but an acceptance of their messages by the larger public.

Erynn Casanova is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Cincinnati, USA where she is also a Faculty Affiliate of the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. She is the author of Making Up the Difference: Women, Beauty, and Direct Selling in Ecuador (University of Texas Press, 2011), which won the National Women's Studies Association's Sara A. Whaley Book Prize.