Beauty and hierarchy: beauty in the organization and reproduction of social hierarchies in contemporary Brazil.

• Grant number: 24/02087-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: July 01, 2024
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Michel Nicolau Netto
• Grantee: Larissa Araujo de Andrade
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

One of the challenges of sociology is to understand the different ways in which social hierarchies are constituted and reproduced. Among the many visible or invisible ways, perhaps appearance is an object of study that best encompasses both forms. The rewards guaranteed by good appearance remain not very studied, but in Brazil, the beauty market grows every year, so that the country has become the fourth largest beauty market in the world. This engagement highlights how much the rewards of beauty are sought in the country. Given this, I propose to investigate beauty in the processes of social stratification, understanding beauty as aesthetic capital and investigating how different classes deal with this capital in their conditions of accumulation, production and generation of rewards. I raise the hypothesis that aesthetic capital is unequally distributed in society and offers unequal opportunities for benefit to different classes, contributing to the maintenance of positions of domination. Methodologically, this research is divided into (I) analysis of data produced by the thematic project 2018-20074-2 in order to identify to what extent and through which mechanisms engagement in beauty practices is related to the classification; and (II) interviews with the respondents of this questionnaire, to understand the meanings attributed to their beauty practices, the available rewards and the oppositions established between the different classes. This investigation can highlight other ways in which Brazilian social hierarchies are organized and reproduced.