Maxine Leeds Craig is a professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Davis, USA. She is the author of Sorry I Don't Dance: Why Men Refuse to Move (2014) and Ain't I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (2002). She studies the politics of beauty, of dancing and not dancing, or, in other words, the ways in which social structures of race, gender, and class are lived in day-to-day embodiment.

Part One: Theorizing Beauty Politics; 1 Introduction; Maxine Leeds Craig; ; 2 Neoliberal Beauty; 3 Beauty and Class; 4 Transnational Feminist Approaches to Beauty; 5 Philosophy and the Politics of Beauty; ; 6 Picking Your Battles: Beauty, Complacency and the Other Life of Racism ; Part Two: Competing Definitions of Beauty; ; 7 Democratizing Looks: The Politics of Gender, Class and Beauty in early 20th century United States; 8 Some's Thin, Some's Voluptuous But They All Fine: Feminine Beauty in Black Publications 1827-1909; 9 Colorism and the Racial Politics of Beauty; 10 Beauty, Colorism, and Anti-Colorism in Transnational India; 11 Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Body Size; 12 Beauty Standards and Body-Image Issues in the West and Japan from a Cultural Perspective; 13 Body Aesthetics & Beauty Politics in 21st Century Africa: Case of the Sudan; 14 Fantastic Bodies: Navigating Ideals of Beauty in Cosplay; Part Three: Beauty, Activism, and Social Change; ; 15 The Rise of Disability Aesthetics: Reframing the Relationship between Disability, Beauty, and Art; 16 "There is Something Chic about Women Wearing Men's Clothes": Lesbian Activists as Fashionable Women in the Fight for the Rights of Sexual Minorities in the United States, 1955-1972; 17 Fat Activism and Beauty Politics; 18 Bumpah Politics: The Thick Black Female Body in the US and Caribbean Academic Discourses; 19 Rooted: On Black Women, Beauty, Hair and Embodiment; 20 I do not see myself as anything else than white: Black resistance to racial cosplay blackfishing; 21 The Beautiful Body in the Age of #metoo; Part Four: Body Work; ; 22 Genital Aesthetics; 23 Body hair removal: Constructing the 'baseline' for the normative gendered body in the contemporary Anglophone West; 24 Negotiating "Islamic" Beauty in Turkey, or Conceptualizing the Complex Entanglements Between Beauty and Religion; 25 Botox and Beauty Politics; 26 Orthodontics as Expected Beauty Work; 27 Cosmetic Surgery and the discourse of Westernization of Korean Bodies; 28 The Racial Politics of Plastic Surgery; Part Five: Beauty and Labor; ; 29 Size Matters (In Modeling); 30 Tattooers at Work: An Emotional and Permanent Body Labor; 31 Beauty Pageants and Border Crossings: The Politics of Class, Cosmopolitanism, Race and Place; ; 32 Retail Work, Race and Aesthetic Labor; 33 Hourly Beauty: Aesthetic Labor in China; Part Six: Beauty and the Lifecourse; ; 34 Girls and Beauty (Pageant) Culture; 35 The Politics of Looking Old: Older Adults and the Aging Body; 36 The Incredible Invisible Woman: Age, Beauty and the Specter of Identity; ;