Of Beasts and Beauty: Gender, Race, and Identity in Colombia

摘要

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 nor-mativities 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 unsetding present at different moments in Colombian history from 1845 until 1985.