An interview with Giselinde Kuipers on why beauty alienates and divides

[Merlijn Olnon] How did you get here?

[Giselinde Kuipers] I have been a research professor of sociology at KU Leuven since 2019, but I am Dutch and still live in Utrecht. I commute between the two and spend one or two days a week in Leuven.

I studied cultural anthropology at Utrecht University and joined the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research in 1995. At the time, it was based in the building that now houses NIAS, on Spinhuissteeg. My PhD, supervised by Joop Goudsblom, was about humour, and it laid the foundations for my research programme, which examines the social formation of cultural standards and the consequences these standards have for inequalities, identities and interactions. Or, to put it more accessibly: frivolous subjects with serious consequences.

After completing my PhD, I spent some time in the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam, spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania, worked as a postdoctoral researcher in cultural studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and then returned to sociology at UvA. There, I successively held positions as assistant professor, associate professor and professor. From 2009 to 2012, I also held the Norbert Elias Chair at Erasmus University Rotterdam. During that period, I continued to develop my research programme, exploring an ever-wider range of frivolous subjects with serious consequences, including arts journalism, memes, television, translation, cycling, the cultural globalisation of film, fashion, pop music and sexuality. Then, in 2010, I began working on the subject that occupies most of my attention today: beauty. I am currently leading a major international project funded by the European Research Council, investigating beauty and inequality in five global cities around the world: Accra, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Tehran (see sociologyofbeauty.eu). I work with PhD researchers from these cities, as well as a postdoctoral researcher conducting comparative research.

In 2024, I became seriously ill. By late 2025, I was recovering, but the process was slower than I had hoped. At the invitation of Jan Willem Duyvendak, who stepped down as director this spring, I came to NIAS to return to working life and regain the rhythm of my work. It has worked out well: I have a clear working routine again, and I feel part of the academic community once more. It was also very special to return to the building where I worked on my PhD in the 1990s and where I was very happy.

[MO] What has been keeping you busy these days?

[GK] These are turbulent times, both socially and personally. That makes it harder to see the point of the detached, analytical enterprise of academic research. Through my project, I see just how grim and unpredictable the world can be. I have always regarded academia as an alternative global network, connecting people across the world through shared institutions, values, goals and ideals. I have always felt very much at home in that cosmopolitan network. But that system is now under pressure. Part of the reason is that people ultimately also feel connected to their immediate social surroundings, perhaps more strongly than to the academic network, which seems less cohesive than I had thought or hoped. Within academia, too, I see institutions bending and breaking. As a result, I increasingly feel that carrying on with business as usual is not only strange, but also immoral. In academia – as in many parts of the world – we are searching for a new order.

[MO] What, in your view, needs to change about the academic system to make it more resilient to the threats of our time?

[GK] That is a very difficult question. I previously made a case for citizenship as a core principle of the university, as part of WoinActie. That was seven years ago, but the situation is now even more urgent.

What I believe really needs to change is the growing entanglement of academia with a shrinking number of ever-larger corporations making vast amounts of money from scholarly publications and other forms of academic output. I am thinking of publishers, but also of AI-and other technology companies and platforms (such as Canvas), as well as pharmaceutical companies. These predatory capitalists do not merely capitalise on the work of academics; they also profit from public resources, both government funding and the resources of various non-profit organisations. At its core, academia — by which I mean education, research and science communication — is not a directly profit-making enterprise, nor is it something that must always grow. The fact that a logic of growth, profit and returns is increasingly shaping our work poses a direct threat. We need to actively counter it with a public-minded logic of citizenship.

The academic system needs to become genuinely global, meaning that institutions outside Western Europe, North America and East Asia must also become full participants. We need neither a multitude of nationalised academic systems nor a single globalised Western system, but rather a global ecology of different academic systems. So many parts of the existing US-oriented system are falling away at such speed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep the whole thing afloat. Perhaps we would be better off investing in systemic change now. I would say that European institutions and societies should make a greater effort in this direction, and that European academics, too, could show a little more courage while they still can.

It would also help if universities and other academic institutions, as well as individual scholars, paid more attention to the norms and ideals underpinning transnational academic citizenship. These include defending academic freedom and the academic community, but also standing up for universities and academics under threat.

[MO] Could you tell us something about your research at NIAS?

[GK] At NIAS, I have mainly been working on a Dutch-language book for the publisher Das Mag, titled Lelijke mooie wereld. In this book, described by the publisher as a ‘manifesto’, I show how physical beauty has become increasingly important, and why this is destructive. The constant pursuit of looking good and continuing to look good draws us into a competition that exhausts us, our society and our planet. Moreover, this ‘beauty regime’ alienates us from ourselves and our bodies, and deepens social divisions. I explore how this regime has expanded ever further since the nineteenth century, and how we might escape it.

[MO] You speak of a ‘beauty regime’, but in our globalised world, surely there is a multitude of beauty ideals existing alongside and competing with one another? Might that not also mean that the pressure to conform is diminishing and freedom of choice is increasing?

[GK] Beauty is becoming increasingly important but we do not all aspire to the same ideal. There are certain things we broadly agree on: thin is more beautiful than fat, young is more beautiful than old, and firm is better than sagging. But our good taste in matters of beauty is also a way of showing who we are. That is why we differ in what we find beautiful and in how we try to make ourselves beautiful. There is no single beauty ideal — beauty itself is the ideal. Our trained eye for beauty, honed through years of exposure to images of beautiful people (or beautiful images of people), makes us very good at ‘reading’ physical styles. We recognise ‘our own’ people by the beauty ideals they pursue. We also recognise those who strive for an ideal that is not ours, and draw our own conclusions. Take, for example, lip fillers, eyelid lifts and other visible forms of cosmetic surgery. Those who undergo these procedures are often proud of the results, while others look down on such conspicuous or ‘tacky’ ways of improving one’s appearance. The same applies to muscular bodies. Muscularity is currently a widely shared beauty ideal. But for some people, a ‘beautifully muscular’ body means a firm, streamlined physique; for others, it means visibly pronounced muscle mass.

Because we are so good at looking at and judging appearances, we can increasingly use our own appearance to show who we are. We express our identity through the ways in which we make ourselves beautiful: our hairstyles, clothes, make-up (or lack of it), jewellery and other adornments, but also through the parts of our bodies and faces that we emphasise or conceal, whether we strive for perfection or authenticity, sexiness or restraint, a very feminine or masculine appearance, or something gender-neutral or gender-fluid. A person’s styling and grooming often allow us to recognise at a glance where they belong: their social class, age group, ethnic background and sexual orientation, whether they come from a city or the countryside, and where they stand politically.

[MO] How, in your view, does the beauty regime deepen social divisions?

[GK] The beauty regime is destructive in three ways. First, we become caught up in a race to meet beauty ideals that are increasingly unattainable, and this harms us, our society and our planet. Second, we increasingly think of our bodies as aesthetic objects and projects, which alienates us from our bodies and ourselves. Third, we increasingly associate beauty with worth, thereby exacerbating social inequalities. In other words, beauty spirals out of control, alienates and divides.

The beauty regime links physical attractiveness to social, economic and moral worth, as well as to self-worth. In doing so, it sets people against one another and exacerbates inequalities that are already growing. As we attach increasing importance to appearance, beautiful people become richer and more successful. But rich people also become more beautiful because they have greater access to ways of improving their appearance. Think of good hairdressers, expensive beauty treatments and gyms, but also good food, knowledge about the body and better health. It is above all those who are already doing well who can meet the ever-higher standards.

A beautiful, well-groomed appearance has become a status symbol. Less than half a century ago, people in the upper echelons of society looked down on physical exercise (‘A gentleman will walk but never run’). Today, professors, lawyers, politicians, CEOs and captains of industry get up early to spend time on the treadmill — sometimes even at the office, where the boss is, naturally, expected to set a good example.

[MO] And how can we escape this regime?

[GK] I see five strategies for throwing a spanner in the works of this runaway system: enlightenment, responsibility, collective strength (in other words, collective action), resistance and imagination. We need all these strategies, but especially imagination, to address the major question the beauty regime confronts us with: can we shape our desire for beauty — to be beautiful and to see beauty — in such a way that it makes our world more beautiful rather than uglier?

[MO] How does your work relate to other disciplines and fields?

[GK] My work has never fitted neatly within disciplinary boundaries. I sometimes say that I ended up in (cultural) sociology because there is almost nothing you can do that would stop you being a sociologist. That is less true of other disciplines: if you do not conduct fieldwork, as I did during my undergraduate studies, you are no longer really an anthropologist; if you work on something unrelated to the media, you are no longer a communication or media scholar. But in sociology, anything goes. You simply put ‘the sociology of …’ in front of your subject, and it becomes a legitimate field of study. Humour, the subject of my doctorate, is perhaps the most interdisciplinary subject there is. In researching it, I collaborated with people working in fields ranging from computational linguistics to translation studies, evolutionary biology to translation, philosophy to political science, and mathematics to experimental psychology. My other research and teaching also regularly cross disciplinary boundaries, particularly within the broad fields of the social sciences, behavioural sciences and humanities.

[MO] What would you like to achieve through your work?

[GK] At the moment, I would say: to be read. Alongside the Dutch-language book that is about to appear, I published the Handbook of Beauty and Inequality (together with Outi Sarpila) in open access this year. Although they belong to very different genres, both books are intended for a broad audience, not necessarily one with an academic background. I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied with academic publishing culture, with its slow publication processes and often poorly readable texts that are read only by specialists.

What I would like is for people to learn to look at and think about the world sociologically through my work. I want them to experience the sense of wonder that I feel — or used to feel — when reflecting on social reality or learning or discovering something new; the flash of insight that a sociological concept or research finding can provide; the indignation we feel at social injustices; and the energy that comes from thinking about how the world could be better.

[MO] Which three sociological insights do you think would be most helpful to us, as a society and as a global community, right now?

[GK] Goodness me… The great sociological insight, as far as I am concerned, is that we are all connected to one another and all depend on one another. These interdependencies also shape our everyday lives and our sense of self, and therefore what we experience as ‘individual’ emotions, motivations and beliefs — including what we find funny or beautiful. For a long time, I thought that if we shared our sociological insights and showed people how their everyday experiences, including their ‘personal’ experiences (which are not nearly as personal as they might seem), are shaped by the society they belong to, they would begin to see themselves and other people differently. I am now somewhat more sceptical about this: insight is no way out. In a world of constant information and connectivity without genuine contact, insight can also be paralysing and alienating. It can lead to cynical and strategic behaviour, too.

The second sociological insight, which I have also personally championed, is that social processes are most visible precisely in the things that appear frivolous, and that the social order can be continually enacted and renewed through them. It seems ordinary and informal, which is why it flies under the radar. When I first began my research, this was a very different kind of insight from what it is today. Twenty-five years ago, you could genuinely surprise people with observations such as these: humour is not innocent; beauty is also about power; television contributes to globalisation; and the bicycle helps sustain our national myth of equality. But by now, however, these insights have become commonplace. Many people are aware — perhaps too aware — of the importance of soft power and cultural and symbolic capital. This awareness is also being put to use, sometimes quite cynically, in politics for example, in simplistic attacks on the ‘white-wine-sipping Amsterdam elite’, or the idea of the ‘havermelkelite’ (which, incidentally, points to a much subtler analysis than its oversimplified version might suggest). Politics has become so saturated with these forms of cultural power that I sometimes have the disconcerting feeling that politicians (or their spin doctors) are conducting the same research as I am. About ten years ago, I began to notice that the populist right, in particular, made extensive use of humour. More recently, there has been considerable discussion of how politicians signal their political allegiances through their beauty ideals.

If we want to change the world or influence the world, we must always do so together. We cannot do it alone. This is difficult because our current social and economic system is structured in such a way that it continually sets us against one another, encouraging an individualistic logic of competition and constant comparison. Across the social sciences (not only sociology) considerable thought has been devoted to so-called collective action problems. These are social problems that could be solved through cooperation but remain unresolved because people pursue their own self-interest. Many things we now regard, without irony, as social progress — such as the construction of sewerage systems and the abolition of child labour — came about because people overcame precisely this kind of collective action problem. The ways forward are: developing shared norms (including through protest), building institutions; and working together to develop a new way of imagining the things in which we find ourselves trapped. In my new book, I show that these are also the best ways to escape the beauty regime.

This article originally appeared in Dutch in de Nederlandse Boekengids.