Bodies-in-crisis: beauty, narrative, and the management of dispersal

Journal article

This paper investigates how multiple crises facing Greek society are prompting individuals to intensely focus on their bodies, as bodies become perceived as the only palpable object on which humans can have direct control. It argues that crises generate a kind of personal and existential hyper-awareness, making people penetratingly aware of how much their depressed, anxious, ageing and otherwise ‘decaying' bodies might signify a more general sense of degradation. In their effort to maintain a sense of control and prevent dispersal, as it were, these bodies, (‘bodies-in-crisis') become a physical location where affective negotiations for agency, transformation and survivance occur. By engaging with the concept of survivance, feminist and postfeminist scholarship on gender and cosmetic surgery, and the anthropological literature on Greece as well as the work on ‘crisis' and precarity, this paper seeks to reposition the Greek woman who desires cosmetic beautification. By offering rich ethnographic material from Athens, it argues that socioeconomic upheavals may push individuals to focus more intensely and ‘selfishly' on their own selves and bodies, rather than mobilize in order to act in an unselfish manner for the public good. Such self- indulgence in turbulent times should not be dismissed as unserious or unworthy of anthropological study, however, for the practice might equally expose the core of what it's like to live inside profound uncertainty.

Authors: Liakounakou, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Anthropological Society of Oxford
• Journal: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 31-46
• Publication date: 2023-12-19
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-7eajor7mg
• ISSN: 2040-1876
• Language: English
• Keywords: feminism; JASO; crisis; cosmetic surgery; Greece