“Far from being simply ‘in the eye of the beholder,’ beauty is a morally laden and deeply social affair intricately linked to constellations of power, the imagination of boundaries, and normative regimes,” says Kukuczka. However, external appearances and idealized forms of beauty are not only influenced by trends and the media, but also by state institutions and political regulations. 

What connections are drawn between our daily bodily practices, for example, going to the gym, and who is perceived to be a “good” citizen? And how do developments at the nation-state level influence local power dynamics and the spread of products, images, and technology that make up an increasingly globalized beauty industry? These are just some of the questions that will be critically discussed over the course of the conference. “We want to investigate the connections between (bio)political forms of government and the political aspects of beauty and the beauty industry, for example, how they are expressed in national parades or the physical appearance of state-sanctioned flight attendants,” explains Professor Liebelt.

The three-day conference forms part of the project “Aesthetic Citizenship: Formations of the Gendered Self and Imaginations of Urban Modernity” (2021‒2024), funded by the German Research Foundation.