Description
What kinds of feelings are archived onto the body? This paper explores how beauty practices, including fashion and cosmetic procedures, among young women in post-independence Kosovo function as living, affective archives of aspiration. In a context shaped by profound socio-political transformation and state-driven ambitions for European integration, the body emerges as a central site for worldmaking. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in fashion academies, designer ateliers, and wedding ceremonies, this study argues that these aesthetic practices constitute significant forms of affective labor. Through beauty practices, women actively negotiate competing ideals of modernity, belonging, and citizenship. Women employ their bodies as "pathways of subjectivity" (Berisha, 2023) to navigate structural precarity. These embodied archives of beauty thus document the everyday politics of belonging and the ongoing pursuit of a future that is simultaneously promised and precarious.
