Aesthetic body modifications and feminity in a global city: cultures of beauty in Istanbul (Turkey)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Claudia Liebelt
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2012 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 226148395

Following over two decades of neoliberal restructuring and economic boom, Istanbul has turned into a global city at the gateway of Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. As part of a distinct culture of consumption, an ever-growing beauty industry developed, which includes numerous beauty clinics, fitness centres, cosmetic surgery, as well as hair and nail studios. These are especially attractive for young, female professionals, some of whom are among the first generation of female wage-earners in their families. Within a highly precarious and competitive pink-collar sector, specific forms of female beauty are appreciated and women may invest in modifications of their bodies as a form of bodily capital, with sales-ladies or waitresses in Istanbul´s flashy mega-malls reportedly being hired for their „European looks“. Moreover, highly gendered and racialised, the growing sector of beauty services in Istanbul caters to an increasingly varied clientele, including the urban poor, aesthetic surgery tourists, and an emerging, conservatively Muslim middle class. Drawing from anthropological research, most importantly participant observation in selected clinics and beauty salons in different urban neighborhoods, as well as narrative interviewing with urban residents in varied social positions, the research project ethnographically investigates the cultural meanings and the social embeddedness of aesthetic body modifications and feminity in a complex urban place. By this, the project seeks to contribute to our understanding of culturally informed, gendered bodily practices in their (urban) diversity, in defiance of the assumption of increasingly standardised beauty norms and images in an age of globalisation. Moreover, rather than assuming an increased commodification of individual bodies or body parts, transforming practices of aesthetic body modification will be linked to transforming modes of subjectivity and citizenship. Taking beauty salons, as social spaces, and aesthetic surgery, as social events, as a starting point, the proposed research project seeks to investigate cultural imaginations of morality, public space, modernity, citizenship, technology and health in their relation to changing forms of gender and kinship in a global city. On the background of an increasingly self-confident public presence of women and a new Muslim middle class, the project attempts to provide a more complex analysis of Turkish society, fill significant gaps in the academic literature and contribute original ethnographic data to contemporary debates on the role of the body in globalized consumer capitalism.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants