Emily Sotudeh

Beauty practices play an important role in the daily life of most societies, yet according to Cohen, there has been a 'reluctance [among scholars] to deal with beauty itself as a serious matter' (1996: 6). Beauty is closely tied to culture and power in numerous ways and is defined in multiple variations throughout the world (Cohen, 1996). For example, the practice of fattening women in the Saharan Moors and traditional Japanese breast bounding are diverse 'cultural elaborations of beauty' (Edmonds, 2010: 29). Edmonds argues that the social use of modern beauty practices has an effect that undermines other institutional power systems and social hierarchies, lending beauty an 'objective form of value' (2010: 20). The image of the ideal female body has repeatedly materialised as a sign of the modernity of a nation and is commodified in order to promote particular ideologies (Edmonds, 2010: 30-33). In this way, beauty is an important subject for anthropological study as its conception relates to wider issues surrounding national identity, modernity and globalisation.
This essay focuses on the various ways people in increasingly transnational countries construct their own gendered, national identities through plastic surgery and participation in beauty pageants. The aim is to challenge arguments around the homogenising nature of globalisation in countries outside Europe and North America by demonstrating how modernity is experienced diversely through agentive consumption relating to the body. The essay will begin with a discussion around anthropological theories on globalisation, gender and the consumption of commodities. It will then relate these theories to ethnographic examples examining the appropriation of beauty, including the proliferation of plastic surgery in Brazil (Edmonds, 2010), and several examples of beauty pageants around the world. Throughout, the essay will analyse the ways people construct themselves through their adoption, appropriation and negotiation of bodily commodities, adhering to and subverting both 'traditional' and imposed beauty norms in increasingly global societies and how this relates to wider political contexts relating to nation building and social orders.

This essay explores motives and ideologies behind the choice to homebirth in 'western' locations such as the UK, the US and Australia to examine how they are effected by specific perceptions of motherhood, femininity and resistance to mainstream, biomedical norms. It will analyse the political, social and cultural influences that shape the construction of mothers in homebirth communities, including socio-economic aspects and the idealisation of nature and tradition. The main research aim asks; how far and in what ways is the decision to homebirth a political challenge to biomedical authority as a means of empowerment and social change and how is this radical potential affected by socio-economic status and current childbirth systems? The rationale for choosing these sites is that at certain points in their history, they have all been home to feminist political activism challenging the biomedical model. Differences between maternity systems and levels of activism provide interesting comparisons to investigate how the homebirth movement is changing in relation to state responses. While much literature can be found on the political and social significance of homebirth in the US, less work can be located from within the UK. This paper utilises the evidence found in the US and Australian literature alongside a first-hand account from a community midwife previously working in the UK to analyse and compare homebirth ideologies across these locations.
The first section outlines the history and political rationale of the homebirth movement and examines the effects of historical changes in medical systems and attitudes towards birth on its radical potential. It will question how far this 'alternative' choice challenges capitalist, patriarchal maternity systems in locations in which homebirth is supported to varying degrees. The second chapter discusses homebirth ideologies privileging intuitive knowledge, connection, low technology and knowledge sharing among women. It explores how the romanticised association of femininity with nature and a nostalgic return to tradition appears to undermine radical feminist arguments against patriarchal authority, complicating the movement's activist discourse of progressive ideals. The final section illustrates underlying socio-economic influences, exploring the construction of homebirth mothers as a middle-class identity connected to neoliberal individualism and responsible, moral consumerism to analyse its effect on the movement's political potential.

In May, 2004 over 1,400 digital photos documenting the sexualised, racialised torture of detainees held at Abu Ghraib by American military were unveiled to the public and disseminated rapidly online and in the media (Johnsrud, 2011). The prevailing public discourse focused on their sexual nature (Owens, 2010) concealing racial implications that follow a long history of European and American imperialism and colonization of Other bodies in processes of state-making and the consolidation of power.
This essay will utilise the frameworks of Orientalism, homo-nationalism and necropolitics to argue that the institutional, cultural construction of the terrorist body as simultaneously Muslim, Arab, and sexually deviant through the dissemination of Orientalist images and discourses serves to fix the Muslim/terrorist identity as an immovable category. The construction of this deviant 'type'  reinforces homo-nationalist narratives around the progressiveness of the Global North, as justification for violent interventions abroad. This paper attempts go beyond previous work on homo-nationalism and terrorist imaginaries by situating these themes within the medium of documentary photography and the historical, visual construction of deviant, racialised and sexualised Others during times of conflict and social change.
The first section examines how deviant bodies and sexualities have been constructed in similar ways throughout history to manage collective national identity and maintain social hierarchies. This section uses visual analysis as a tool to discuss the historical treatment of the homosexual body in America and Europe and how colonial photography served Europe's civilising mission of domination through documentation and classification, relating this to recent visual constructions of Muslim/terrorist bodies. The second section focuses on the Abu Ghraib photographs, situating them within the medium of documentary photography to demonstrate how non-western Others are constructed in western cultural imaginations as homogeneous, eroticised types. This abuse conflates political and sexual deviance through acts of torture simulating  'homosexual' acts, demonstrating the simultaneous positioning of Muslim/terrorists as both sexually repressed and sexually deviant in an act of bio-politics that situates the US as sexually progressive in relation to a deviant, premodern 'monster' (Puar and Rai, 2002). The essay concludes with the social significance of this visual construction for Muslim subjectivities and the implications for rights and equality based development projects.

This dissertation investigates whether the fundamental ethical values and political potential of veganism are undermined by its recent popularity on social media. It employs primary research on women's experience of plant-based lifestyles on Instagram to explore the self-construction of idealised, ethical selves through the public display of food choices in order to understand underlying motives and pressures in this online community. The dissertation argues that Instagram users resist veganism's appropriation by capitalist imperatives by dynamically constructing and negotiating their vegan identities in various ways to sustain and strengthen their individual and collective ethical principles within a neoliberal, consumerist environment.

Veiled Sentiments is the result of fieldwork undertaken by Abu-Lughod in the Western deserts of Egypt between 1978-1980 in which she lived amongst the Awlad Ali Bedouin tribes. The ethnography demonstrates the complexity of Bedouin culture through an exploration of the ideals of honour and the politics of sentiment. Abu-Lughod argues there is 'at least two ideologies in Bedouin culture' that people use to express experiences; the honour code and poetry (1986: 258). These seemingly contradictory strands of social life are established as interwoven and vital for maintaining the social order. The book is divided into two parts, the first focusing on ideologies structuring Bedouin society including ancestry, honour, and autonomy, while the second discusses the importance of poetry in everyday life which is used to express emotion and resistance to traditional values. Abu-Lughod exceeds existing work on Bedouin tribes that centre on the world of men and politics by focusing on the domestic social arena of women (1986: 29-30). Despite the wide literature on Arabic poetry, few scholars have attempted to situate the genre into everyday, social experience (Abu-Lughod, 1986: 28). Abu-Lughod strives to investigate the full breadth of social life to theorise on cultural ideologies that structure the Bedouin outlook.

Bourgois' In Search of Respect is the outcome of the authors six year residence in East Harlem between 1985-1991 living among Puerto Rican drug dealers in one of the most impoverished areas of the US. It explores race, class, gender relations, and violence within the community through direct engagement with its inhabitants. The critical acclaim generated from this work in which the anthropologist not only gained unprecedented access into the lives of the community but also longstanding friendships, situates the work as an important moment in ethnographic writing (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Despite the wide literature on the Puerto Rican community, Bourgois has described them as 'the most studied' yet 'least understood' community in the US (1995: 16). Bourgois attempts to go beyond previous work based on qualitative data and places his subjects within the context of their particular history. The book was praised by Wolf for the way it perceptively theorises structural processes of marginalisation alongside the experiences of individuals to situate their struggles within wider political, economic and social contexts (Bourgois, 1995).