Why is beauty important in and to the global political economy? Who produces and reproduces beauty? How do images of and ideas about beauty circulate? Who benefits from the global political economy of beauty? And what are the relationships between gender (as well as race, class, and sexuality) and the beauty economy? These are among the questions that Angela McCracken addresses in her unique examination of the globalization of beauty, in which she centrally challenges three prevailing ideas. First, she reveals that the beauty trade, consisting of such industries as cosmetics, clothing and fashion, weight loss and plastic surgery, salons and spas, and advertising, is far from trivial as it constitutes trillions of dollars in sales and investments worldwide. Secondly, she argues against notions of hegemonic cultural globalization which assume that beauty standards are purveyed uni-directionally from the Global North to the Global South and imposed in ways that obliterate local standards and practices. Thirdly, she questions feminist perspectives which cast women as only victims of patriarchally-and commercially-imposed beauty cultures.

To make these arguments, she begins with a case study of the quince, a coming-of-age ceremony for 15-year-old girls, referred to as quinceañeras, practiced most in Mexico since the 1940s, but particularly popularized since the 1980s not only in Mexico but in other Latin American and Latino contexts. McCracken spent 14 months in Guadalajara—a conservative, medium-sized city that is now a regional hub for the retail clothing industry—interviewing and “hanging out” (p. 180) with adolescent girls and boys, experiencing quince preparations and celebrations for this ethnographic study. She finds that even though the quince is historically rooted in the upper classes, Catholicism, and readying young girls for the marriage market, it is now more of a symbol for families aspiring to the middle class, it does not necessarily involve a Catholic mass, and it is often practiced by quinceañeras who are more interested in pursuing careers and at least deferring marriage to do so. It can also take simple and inexpensive forms, such a family meal, or very extravagant forms, costing upwards to $13,000.

Within the context of the more lavish celebrations, tremendous labor, and especially female labor, is expended to ready the quinceañera for her big day in the spotlight. Special dresses are chosen by mothers and daughters through months of sifting through popular culture images and fashion magazines and are made and sold by female entrepreneurs, exercise regimens for weight loss and dancing classes are heavily engaged in by quinceañeras prior to the event, elaborate hairstyles are produced by a myriad of female-run salons throughout the city, and cosmetic make-overs are made possible by the explosion in female direct sales representatives of such multinational companies as Avon. Thus, there is considerable feminine agency and female income generation connected to this beauty trade, troubling narratives that focus only on female victimization by beauty standards. Moreover, McCracken finds quinceañeras place great stock in having a unique look and, thus, she argues that these local youth, even though constantly searching for inspiration from the images of primarily U.S. pop stars, are trend setters themselves by deviating from the conservative dress traditions of the quince and reinventing globalized styles for themselves. In this sense, they are generators, not just passive consumers, of a differentiated, as opposed to homogenous, “beautification” (p. 6) industry, which is what the quince has become as it is increasingly shorn of Catholic and marriage market underpinnings.

While McCracken argues that there are no clear “winners and losers” (p. 3) in this beautification industry, she does detail several downsides of it in terms of the gender, race, class, and sexual power relations that it reinscribes. These include preferences to approximate Western standards of beauty which prize light skin for girls and boys as well as thinness for girls and thin-waistedness for boys, while eschewing looks that smack of ethnicity, indigeneity, and/or the lower classes. Although boys, who constitute the (sometimes paid) escorts and dance partners of the quinceañeras (thus, making this an exclusively heteronormative affair), feel pressure to have athletic figures, gelled hair, lightened skin, and dancing acumen, it is feminine beauty, most often of the Western, white or whitened movie or pop star variety, that is paramount for the quince. Moreover, even as patriarchal Catholic ritual may be downplayed, it is still the father who presents his daughter to society and essentially gives her away to other men on the dance floor. Her coming-of-age is also reduced to a (hetero)sexual one as she sheds her “princess dress” (p. 55) for a sexy outfit for her special solo dance.

In the second half of her book, McCracken interweaves such ethnographic findings through V. Spike Peterson’s analytical framework of intertwined productive, reproductive, and virtual economies and the institutions, ideologies, and ideologies they privilege (A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive, and Virtual Economics, 2003). As the quince has become ever more elaborate and commercialized, the productive market economy it spawns is now massive, yet highly feminized. Not only do women constitute the majority of local service providers, from cosmetologists, hairdressers, and dance instructors to direct salespeople of globally-produced cosmetics and toiletries, but they also are on the lowest rungs of these industries. Much of such local personal service work is performed by women in homes, making it highly informalized labor. Moreover, the gendered assumption that women work only for “pin money” ensures that direct sales representatives are paid low commissions and must make money by recruiting other women (often family members and friends) into an exploitative “pyramid scheme” (p. 160). This commercialization of beautification, which was previously performed in the reproductive realm by female family members, has, however, not reduced, but rather increased women’s unpaid reproductive labor as more time and effort goes into extensive arrangements for the quince, particularly on the part of mothers, daughters, and female friends. The “virtual economy of beauty signs” (p. 141) exerts pressure to engage in labor- and increasingly capital-intensive beautification and privileges U.S. and European standards of beauty and corporate-branded fashions and products.

Still, McCracken maintains that these trends have not dulled young people’s self-expression or supplanted alternative forms of cultural expression. She finds in the rise of subcultural markets in Guadalajara populated by local artisans and frequented by local youth that this kind of commodification is reflective and productive of resistance to both conservative local and homogenizing global culture. Youth subcultures are often still highly gendered, but the styles they are generating are diverse, playful, and sometimes overtly political.

Thus, McCracken’s work significantly contributes to contemporary feminist global political economy and transnational feminist scholarship that uses ethnographic work and discursive analysis to counter totalizing theories of globalization, foreground female agency, critique processes of racialization and sexualization, and blend cultural and political economy analyses to identify contradictions that arise out of social, cultural, and economic restructuring which may have transformative potential. While on balance, the pervasive beauty trade is highly gendered, racialized, sexualized, and exploitative, it is precisely because of this that the critical and somewhat hopeful attention that this book gives to it is so important.