ABSTRACT

After years of relegating the study of bodies to other disciplines, sociologists have recognized the sociological relevance of the body as a site where status inequalities and boundaries are formed, suffered, upheld, and transgressed. During the past two decades, this work has taken institutional form as the sociology of the body. Scholarship on beauty and fashion should have a central place within the new sociology of the body. Scholars who write about beauty and fashion study the relationships between body ideals and structures of inequality; they also study the ways in which the body and fashion are used in identity work. Yet the large literature on beauty and fashion is marginal within the sociology of the body. How can this marginalization be explained? Critical analyses of beauty ideals originated

in feminist theory and regularly draw on theories of race and intersectionality. Analyses of fashion have a broader, longer history, but the recent scholarship of fashion routinely incorporates analyses of gender and race. A great deal of the work that is considered to focus on the sociology of the body acknowledges feminism, but does not seriously engage with the published work of feminist theorists and tends to ignore theories of race and intersectionality. Consequently, sociological scholarship on the body has developed in a way that leaves studies of race, along with those of beauty and fashion, at its periphery. This chapter begins with a brief sketch of the theoretical foundations of the new

sociology of the body and suggests that scholarship on beauty and fashion can provide a more inclusive way of thinking about those foundations. It then turns to the scholarship on beauty and fashion, considering, first, works about body ideals and structures of inequality and, second, research on fashion and identity.