ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the feminist theories that offers a complex relational analysis of beauty as a site of production of femininity situated in an interaction of multidimensional power relations. Vanita Reddy uses an intersectional and transnational framework to conceive of a "beauty assemblage" that offers a complex model of agency because of the contradictory nature of the experiences, shaped by multiple power configurations in the embodiment and practices of beauty. Beauty pageants are platforms for global beauty corporations to create new markets, but paradoxically, women are also deployed by anti-globalization protests to challenge state and elite control of a society. The chapter deploys beauty as an analytical tool to analyze gender, class, and racialized practices to understand the complexity of beauty as a site of social oppression, injury, and social control, as well as a site of resistance to gender oppression.
