The Eugenesis of Beauty

This chapter, which is based on archival research, demonstrates that beauty developed as a central concern for the Brazilian eugenics movement in the early twentieth century as it became associated with improved hygienic practices and ongoing racial mixture, which eugenicists believed would inevitably whiten the nation as whole. The beauty of women—as the imagined bearers of future generations and as the objects of (male) medical scrutiny—was of particular concern. In other words, female beauty came to be understood as a symbol of the nation's progress, and beautification practices such as plastic surgery were lauded as sensible hygienic practices that aided the work of miscegenation.