Digital Object Identifier
Today’s capitalist society is one driven by profits and economic viability, and people adapt the most lucrative strategies to survive. This trend manifests itself even at the personal level. It influences one’s decisions in life that affect one’s physical and mental well-being. Beauty is one such goal that many find irresistible. Its standards are decided by demand in society, and meeting them is a business model at this point. Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs is a story set in Japan and which deals with the theme of pursuit of beauty, and autonomy. It presents the case of a bar hostess who contemplates cosmetic surgery to improve her professional life. Alongside her is her sister who asserts her reproductive rights by choosing IVF conception, entirely of her accord, offering readers a contrarian case of assertiveness. This paper investigates this story with the help of the theoretical framework of biopolitics propounded by Foucault, and consider the beauty capitalism that encourages alterations of the kind presented in the book.
Karthika Aravind. “The Body as Enterprise: A Foucauldian Investigation of Beauty Capitalism and Embodiment in the novel Breasts and Eggs.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 787–800. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.51.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
the-criterion.com