Of Beasts and Beauty is an absorbing and attractive book: it either pulls you towards its fascinating angle into Colombian history or pushes you to think about how a certain mainstream understanding of beauty can be weaved through a historical formation in a specific context. Although I am writing this review from the disadvantaged point of being neither a historian nor a Colombian specialist, I was captivated by the opportunity to learn about the intricate relationship between beauty, gender and race that Stanfield lays out, and particularly the ways in which beauty standards, gendered normativities and racialised appearance expectations can be correlated to politics, violence, inequality and exclusion. Stanfield reveals how beauty appears at the centre of power struggles to ‘sedate’ a nation in terms of its gendered organisation and its conflictive and unsettling present at different moments in Colombian history from 1845 until 1985.
The book provides a detailed analysis of beauty pageants, fashion development and elite versus popular concerns with physical appearance throughout this period in Colombia: from the Carnival and costume balls in mid-eighteenth-century Cartagena (p. 47) and the large number of periodicals written by or for women between the 1860s and 1870s celebrating different versions of women's beauty and supported by the free-press advocacy of the Radical Liberals at the time (like Biblioteca de Señoritas – what an amazing name!); to the bicycle craze of the 1890s, which defied elite society, striving to liberate ‘women from stifling dress and social restriction as it gave more freedom astride a modern and snappy conveyance. It filled their lungs with the clean air of the countryside as it developed their muscles and added color to anemic cheeks’ (p. 67); the emergence of Cromos (equivalent to LIFE magazine) in 1916 as a key modernising thermometer and ‘photo album of the nation’ (p. 74), still alive and kicking to this date; the first Miss Colombia contest in 1932; the horrors of La Violencia from 1948 to 1958, alongside the emergence of mass spectator sports and the popularity of beauty pageants at the regional, national and international levels, with its accompanying commercialisation; the national happiness over the crowning of Luz Marina Zuluaga as Miss Universe in 1958; the tensions around keeping Señorita Chocó as the incarnation of the excluded black Colombia amongst growing worldwide openness to breaking the ‘colour barrier’ (it was only in 2001 that the country crowned its first black Miss Colombia); the drug production and trafficking from the 1970s onwards and the ‘new money’ that began to mark politics and beauty pageants alike; and the unfortunate events surrounding the November 1985 Reina Popular competition, when the M-19 guerrillas took control of the Palace of Justice, unleashing a terrible massacre, and the Nevado del Ruiz volcano exploded, killing around 23,000 people in the worst natural disaster in Colombia's history (p. 209). The book ends with an epilogue to 2011 in which Stanfield notes some further developments, some within the media, that keep Colombia in the world's eye with specific reference to beauty concerns. These developments include the soap opera Yo soy Betty, la fea and its US version Ugly Betty, and Shakira's makeover from dark to blonde, and Sofia Vergara's from blonde to dark, to appeal to global markets.
In terms of analytical contributions to concepts of beauty, the book struggles to move away from mainstream understandings, but what is more interesting, at least for me, is what beauty does: what kinds of power struggles are bestowed under its name, what social arrangements, hierarchies and fashions are arbitrarily set up and reproduced to maintain such mainstream understandings? Overall, for Stanfield, beauty is memorable, seductive, feminine, moral, virtuous, civil, uplifting, peaceful and hopeful. More importantly for his argument, beauty is the constant opposite of the beast, which is institutional, elitist, dysfunctional, violent and chaotic. Indeed, this is the key conceptual line that runs through the book: that beauty serves as both an antidote and a sedative to the violent and demoralising Colombian political, social and economic life, which is both male and bestial. For Stanfield, female beauty is there to save the country from the ravages of the male beast and to make those ravages more bearable. His overall conclusion is that one of the uses of beauty in Colombia is in its capacity to give a ‘shared positive national identity especially in periods of [the country's] history when systems and institutions failed so spectacularly to become more inclusive and democratic and as alternatives went down in flames’ (p. 210).
While this line of thought is compelling, it also raises several questions. The contraposition of beauty and power, of beauty and the beast, and assertions such as the above or that ‘women have dressed for seduction while men have dressed for status’ (p. 26) could be at times problematic. There is a strong assumption that what supports the need for beauty, lived through endless beauty pageants, as a national obsession and as an alternative and positive expression, is the lack of Colombia's clarity in developing a ‘modern political agenda’, a reliable government or a corruption-free political and economic sphere. This presupposes that concerns about beauty have no merit in themselves. The main issue is that the author opposes beauty to modernity and appears to reduce beauty to an uncivilised, unimportant, unserious realm. It is as if beauty is already known and defined ‘in advance’ of its empirical experience and its exploration in this historical survey of Colombian life. Maybe this was all that was methodologically possible from this historical exploration, which draws on newspapers, journals, magazines such as Cromos, travel accounts and a variety of visual sources such as photographs, prints and cartoons. It is hard to hear the voices of the Afro-Colombians or of the indigenous peoples, or of the rural poor or lower-class mestizos, as if these people are just affected by, but not really active producers of, other experiences of beauty. While there are some accounts of the popular uprisings supporting the few black beauty queens, we hear more of the standpoint of the white elites, the keepers of the archives, the writers of the travel accounts, the subjects photographed for Cromos. We do not quite know who the ‘Colombians’ are with precision throughout the text as there is a conflation of the multiplicity of experiences and positions that exist in this diverse country.
One of the most interesting contributions to debates on beauty is Stanfield's proposal to think of beauty as ‘relational, comparative and dynamic’ (p. 29), and I wanted to hear more about this. Can the world of beauty that Stanfield describes also be seen as a beast? Can we think of beauty as both dynamic and contradictory? Could the opposition be inside its own logic? Are any of the workings of beauty present in political dealings, in resistance, and in social struggle? It would also have been interesting to follow through with Stanfield's proposition that beauty definitions in the specific context of Colombia are plural. In the period from 1845 to 1885, Colombia's late engagement with modernising processes meant that it ‘followed the logic of a multi-ethnic and regional reality, one formed in the colonial era and maintained in the nineteenth century, where rural ideals competed with urban ones, where caste, color and nationality informed a plural but still hierarchical sense of beauty alternatives’ (p. 50). Unfortunately this line of thought slowly dissipates. At times it seems that Stanfield blurs the distinction between analysing beauty as a social construct, as a category and as a concept to grapple with, and beauty as a fact, a verifiable truth of bodies that can be memorable – as a fact that can be found walking on the street.
Having said this, the compilation and weaving of materials in the book contains a wealth of rich detail that offers a novel history of Colombia while proposing a model to investigate the circulation of beauty concerns within broader historical processes and specific social and political contexts. It is a text that will be of interest to historians, gender specialists and scholars looking for ways to take beauty seriously. This book offers us a great example of how we might think about how spectacles, wider cultural industries, individual bodies and idealised body images are used politically not only to distract from social tensions but also to recreate national goals and ideals. Each of the chapters traces a chronological exploration of specific moments of Colombian history and how a certain version of the beauty complex was developing alongside these in a tightly knit co-stimulating relationship.
