Embellishment, media and body construction in children’s narratives

Nuances of an ethnography in the beauty salons

Abstract

This article is born from a doctoral research, whose focus is on the production of the body image of children in the age group between 6 and 12 years, belonging to different social and economic realities, attending beauty salons in the Federal District. It is an ethnography, with an anthropological approach of childhood, from an intersectional perspective with social markers of difference, such as class and race. I will present data that shows the recurrence of children attending salons watching videos on YouTube, which are performed by other children who produce the embellishment of their body images (make-up, haircuts, ornaments). Based on the analysis of children’s dialogues in these videos, we will seek to reflect how these audiovisual contents reverberate in the processes of production of their self-images and subjectivities. The article invites you to think about how the children protagonists and spectators of the videos, are, at all times, negotiating and being crossed by an aesthetic and cosmetic market every day more globalized.