The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics 9780367246570, 9781032043319, 9780429283734

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO BEAUTY POLITICS

The growth of the service economy, widespread acceptance of cosmetic technologies, expansion of global media, and the intensification of scrutiny of appearance brought about by the Internet have heightened the power of beauty ideals in everyday life. A range of interdisciplinary contributions by an international roster of established and emerging scholars will introduce students to the emergence of debates about beauty, including work in history, sociology, communications, anthropology, gender studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and psychology. The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics is an essential reference work for students and researchers interested in the politics of appearance. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into six parts: • • • • • •

Theorizing Beauty Politics Competing Definitions of Beauty Beauty, Activism, and Social Change Body Work Beauty and Labor Beauty and the Lifecourse.

The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics is essential reading for students in women and ­gender studies, sociology, media studies, communications, philosophy, and psychology. 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.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO BEAUTY POLITICS

Edited by Maxine Leeds Craig

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Maxine Leeds Craig; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Maxine Leeds Craig to be identifed as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-24657-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-04331-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28373-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of fgures List of contributors

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PART ONE

Teorizing beauty politics

1

1 Introduction Maxine Leeds Craig

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2 Neoliberal beauty Rosalind Gill

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3 Beauty and class Helen Wood

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4 Transnational feminist approaches to beauty Oluwakemi M. Balogun and Gracia Dodds

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5 Philosophy and the politics of beauty Monique Roelofs

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6 Picking your battles: beauty, complacency, and the other life of racism Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa

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Contents PART TWO

Competing defnitions of beauty

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7 Democratizing looks: the politics of gender, class, and beauty in early twentieth-century United States Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

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8 Some’s thin, some’s voluptuous but they all fne: feminine beauty in Black publications 1827–1909 Sabrina Strings

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9 Colorism and the racial politics of beauty Margaret Hunter 10 Beauty, colorism, and anti-colorism in transnational India Vanita Reddy 11 Cross-cultural perspectives on body size Viren Swami

85 94 103

12 Beauty standards and body-image issues in the West and Japan from a cultural perspective Yuko Yamamiya and Tomohiro Suzuki

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13 Body aesthetics & beauty politics in twenty-frst century Africa: case of the Sudan Nada Mustafa Ali

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14 Fantastic bodies: navigating ideals of beauty in cosplay Erynn Masi de Casanova and Jeremy Brenner-Levoy

PART THREE

133

Beauty, activism, and social change

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15 The rise of disability aesthetics: reframing the relationship between disability, beauty, and art Ann M. Fox

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16 “There is something chic about women wearing men’s clothes”: lesbian activists as fashionable women in the fght for queer rights in the United States, 1955–1972 Malia McAndrew vi

157

Contents

17 Fat activism and beauty politics Carla A. Pfefer

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18 Bumpah politics: the thick Black female body in US and Caribbean academic discourses Kamille Gentles-Peart 19 Rooted: on Black women, beauty, hair, and embodiment Kristin Denise Rowe 20 “I do not see myself as anything else than white”: Black resistance to racial cosplay blackfshing Shirley Anne Tate 21 The beautiful body in the age of #MeToo Bernadette Wegenstein PART FOUR

177 186

205 215

Body work

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22 Genital aesthetics Eric Plemons

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23 Body hair removal: constructing the “baseline” for the normative gendered body in the contemporary Anglophone West Melisa Trujillo

238

24 Negotiating “Islamic” beauty in Turkey, or conceptualizing the complex entanglements between beauty and religion Claudia Liebelt

247

25 Botox and beauty politics Dana Berkowitz

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26 Orthodontics as expected beauty work Maxine Leeds Craig

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27 The body, cosmetic surgery and the discourse of “westernization of Korean bodies” Joanna Elfving-Hwang 28 The racial politics of plastic surgery Alexander Edmonds and So Yeon Leem

273 284

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Contents PART FIVE

Beauty and labor

295

29 Size matters (in modeling) Amanda M. Czerniawski

297

30 Tattooers at work: an emotional and permanent body labor Dustin Kiskaddon

306

31 Beauty pageants and border crossings: the politics of class, cosmopolitanism, race, and place Karen W. Tice

316

32 Retail work, race, and aesthetic labor Kyla Walters

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33 Hourly beauty: aesthetic labor in China Eileen Otis

336

PART SIX

Beauty and the lifecourse

347

34 Girls and beauty (pageant) culture Hilary Levey Friedman

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35 The politics of looking old: older adults and the aging body Laura Hurd

357

36 The incredible invisible woman: age, beauty, and the specter of identity Brenda R. Weber

365

Index

377

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FIGURES

5.1 Doris Salcedo, A for de piel, 2011–2012. Rose petals and thread. Approx. 246 7/8 × 433 1/16 in. (627 × 1100 cm). © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Ben Westoby) 5.2 Doris Salcedo, A for de piel, 2011–2012. Rose petals and thread. Approx. 246 7/8 × 433 1/16 in. (627 × 1100 cm). © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Ingrid Raymond) 5.3 Kara Walker, Daylights (after M.B.), 2011. Graphite and pastel on paper. Left side: 95.75 × 72 inches (243.2 × 182.9 cm). Right side: 91.75 × 72 inches (233 × 182.9 cm). © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers 5.4 Wangechi Mutu, Histology of the Diferent Classes of Uterine Tumors (detail), 2006 Digital prints and mixed media collage. 23 × 17 inches - Each, Portfolio of 12. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels 5.5 Remedios Varo, Creation of the Birds (Creación de las aves), 1957. Oil on Masonite. 54 × 64 cm. © 2020 Remedios Varo, DeA Picture Library/ Art Resource, New York, and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VEGAP, Madrid 7.1 “Thirty Years of ‘Progress!’,” Life, October 1926. Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission 7.2 Carla Lemlich. ca. 1910, Kheel Center, Cornell University 7.3 “Find Yourself,” N W Ayer Advertising Agency Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution 15.1 Ann Millett-Gallant, Still Life with Apple, Snow Peas, Mandarin Oranges, and Ann’s Hands Ink Drawing, acrylic and ink on paper on canvas, 16 × 20 in., 2019b 19.1 An illustrated example of a hair typing chart featured on CURLS.biz

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64 67 70

153 199

Figures

21.1 Three Stills from Beniamino Barrese’s flm The Disappearance of My Mother (2019) depicting his mother, former model Benedetta Barzini, and her “disappearance” from society. https://www.kinolorber.com/flm/view/ id/3610 Permission by the flmmaker 21.2 Valie export. © Valie export, Bildrecht Wien, 2020, Foto © Werner Schulz. Courtesy Valie export. TAPP und TASTKINO 1968. s/w – Fotografe 21.3 Images from Renata Flores’ 2018 Quechua song Tijeras. Permission by the artist 21.4 TT the artist: Three images from the series “Black Pop Art: Hip Hop Divas” portraying Cardi B, Aunt Jemima, and TT herself in front of the series. Permission by the artist 21.5 TT the artist: Painting of Kim Kardashian’s famous “Break The Internet” pose. Permission by the artist

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219 222

224 225

CONTRIBUTORS

Oluwakemi M. Balogun  is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Sociology at the University of Oregon. She is the author of the book Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation. Her research and teaching interests include gender, nationalism, globalization, race, immigration, and embodiment. Dana Berkowitz, PhD,  is an associate professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Botox Nation: Changing the Face of America (NYU Press). Jeremy Brenner-Levoy is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Cincinnati. His research focuses on the interaction between gender discrimination, heterosexism, racism, and identity construction in nerd cultural spaces. Erynn Masi de Casanova, PhD,  formerly Professor of Sociology at the University of Cincinnati, works for the American Sociological Association. She has researched and written about beauty, bodies, and dress in the Americas for more than two decades. Maxine Leeds Craig  is a professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Sorry I Don’t Dance: Why Men Refuse to Move (Oxford 2014) and Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (Oxford 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. Amanda M. Czerniawski is an associate professor in Sociology at Temple University. She is the author of Fashioning Fat: Inside Plus-Size Modeling and actively writes for both academic and non-academic audiences and appears on television, flm, and radio. Gracia Dodds is an undergraduate student studying Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She resides in the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. Her research interests lie in identity formation, sexuality, and gender-based violence.

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Contributors

Alexander Edmonds is Professor of Social and Medical Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His research has examined beauty practices, race, consumption and plastic surgery in Brazil and mental health, veterans, and military institutions in the UK and US. He is the author of several publications on plastic surgery, including Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex and Plastic Surgery in Brazil (Duke University Press). Joanna Elfving-Hwang (PhD, The University of Sheffield) is the director of the Korea Research Centre of Western Australia and an associate professor of Korean Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on the body in Korean culture and society, and in particular how beauty work relates to embodied and material expressions of performing social class, gender, status, and race. Jo has also published on K-pop idols and beauty, men’s grooming as a form of somatic entrepreneurship, as well as social meanings attached to beauty work in later life in Korea. Ann M. Fox is a professor of English at Davidson College, where she specializes in literary and cultural disability studies, modern and contemporary drama, and graphic medicine. She regularly curates disability arts exhibitions and has widely published on disability and representation. Kamille Gentles-Peart  is an associate professor of Communication & Media Studies at Roger Williams University. Her research focuses on Black Caribbean women and racialized body politics. She is author of Romance with Voluptuousness: Caribbean Women and Thick Bodies in the United States. Rosalind Gill is a professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City, University of London, and a professorial fellow at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. She is author or editor of more than 10 books concerned with media, culture, new technologies, and labor. Her recent books include Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (with Ana Elias and Christina Scharff, Palgrave, 2017) and Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture (Polity, 2018), and she is currently completing a monograph for Duke University Press that looks critically at “confidence.” Her work is animated by questions about power and social justice and the relationship between culture and subjectivity. In 2020 she will be visiting EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris to develop her work on the psychic life of neoliberal capitalism – discussing ideas about the commodification of emotions, the selling of rebellion, and the psychological turn in neoliberalism. Margaret Hunter is the senior director of the Centers for Educational Justice and Community Engagement at the University of California, Berkeley. She conducts research on colorism in the African American and Latinx communities, cosmetic surgery, and skin bleaching. In addition, her work focuses on education and urban inequality, and media representations of women of color. Laura Hurd  is a sociologist in the School of Kinesiology at the University of British ­Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her research considers the intersections of aging, gender, health, and embodiment with a focus on ageism and social exclusion and marginalization. Dustin Kiskaddon is a tattooer and PhD candidate. His tattooing book project offers an autoethnographic explanation of the affectual character of tattoo labor in order to explain the cultural production of a cultural producer. He teaches at Berkeley City College. xii

Contributors

So Yeon Leem  is a research professor at Sookmyung Research Institute of Humanities, Sookmyung Women’s University, South Korea. Her research interests are in plastic surgery, human enhancement, diversity, and gender issues in STEM, and feminist science and technology studies. She has published single- and co-authored articles in Social Studies of Science, East Asian Science, Technology and Society, Medical Anthropology, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. Hilary Levey Friedman  is a sociologist who teaches in the Education Department at Brown University. Her books include Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture and Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America. Claudia Liebelt  is an associate professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth. Her research interests are in the Anthropology of the body and the senses, the biopolitics of beauty, embodied normativities, Islam, postsecularism, and new materialities, with a regional focus on the Middle East and Turkey. Malia McAndrew is an associate professor of History at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. She studies women, gender, and race in modern America. Dr. McAndrew wrote this essay while on sabbatical at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a senior lecturer in Sociology, a fellow in Social Sciences at Downing College, and the race equality co-champion at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the lived experience of “race” and racism in Mexico and Latin America; antiracism and academic activism; feminist theory; and the interconnections between beauty, emotions, and racism. Monica is an award-winning teacher and pioneering advocate of education as a form of social change and since 2010 she co-leads an organization, the Collective for the Elimination of Racism in Mexico, COPERA, dedicated to making racism a public issue. Nada Mustafa Ali teaches in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department and is faculty fellow in the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has written and published extensively in English and Arabic. Her book Gender, Race and Sudan’s Exile Politics was published in 2015 by Lexington Books. She received her PhD in government from the University of Manchester. She has a BA and an MA, both in Political Science from Khartoum University and the American University in Cairo, respectively. Eileen Otis  is an associate professor of Sociology at Northeastern University. She is the author of the award-winning book Markets and Bodies: Women, Service Work and the Making of Inequality in China. Her research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Politics and Society, Gender and Society, and The American Behavioral Scientist, among other journals. She is currently working on a book about Walmart retail workers in China. Carla A. Pfeffer is an associate professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on contemporary families, genders, sexualities, and bodies considered marginal, as well as social actors’ management of stigma and discrimination. Eric Plemons is an associate professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on the surgical management of sexed and gendered bodies. xiii

Contributors

Einav Rabinovitch-Fox teaches history at Case Western Reserve University. Her research examines the intersections between culture, gender, politics, and modernity. Specifcally, her book Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism examines how women used fashion to claim freedoms and promote feminist agendas during the twentieth century. Vanita Reddy  is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture (Temple UP 2016) and has published journal articles on the intersections of race, diaspora, fashion, and beauty. Monique Roelofs  is a professor of Philosophy of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where she also heads the Program Group of Critical Cultural Theory. Her research focuses on the relation between aesthetics and politics, with special attention paid to the dynamics of race, gender, coloniality, and the global. She is the author of Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and The World (Columbia UP, 2020) and The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (Bloomsbury, 2014). Roelofs has recently completed a new book manuscript titled “Aesthetics, Address, and the Politics of Culture.” She is currently coauthoring a book on aesthetics and temporality in Latin(x) America and coediting an anthology on Black Aesthetics. Kristin Denise Rowe  is an assistant professor of American studies at California State University, Fullerton. She earned her PhD in African American and African studies from Michigan State University. Her research interests include Black feminism(s), beauty culture, hair politics, embodiment, Black art and popular culture, and new media. Currently, she is writing a book on art and pop culture in the context of Black women’s contemporary natural hair movement. Sabrina Strings, PhD,  is an associate professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her best-selling book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia has received multiple awards and commendations. Follow her on Twitter @SaStrings. Tomohiro Suzuki is an associate professor at the School of Child Psychology, Tokyo Future University in Japan. He received his PhD in Sociology from Toyo University. He specializes in social and personality psychology. His recent research topics pertain to appearance, body, adornment, and mind-body correlation. Moreover, his specialty includes clinical psychology, and expertise is body-image problems and eating disorders. Recently, his research focus also extends to embodied cognition. Viren Swami  is a professor of Social Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), United Kingdom, and the director of the ARU Centre for Societies and Groups, as well as the Centre for Psychological Medicine at Perdana University, Malaysia. Shirley Anne Tate is Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Feminism and Intersectionality and Professor in the Sociology Department, University of Alberta, Canada. Her area of research is Black Diaspora Studies, focusing on institutional racism, decoloniality, bodies, and mixed race.

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Contributors

Karen W. Tice  is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageants, Student Bodies, and Campus Life (Oxford University Press, 2012). Melisa Trujillo recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, where her doctoral research was supported by a full Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) studentship. Her PhD examined the body hair removal practices of young feminist-identifying women in the United Kingdom and interrogated the links between feminist identifcations and women’s embodied experiences and choices. As well as conducting multiple research projects during her studies in the felds of gender and embodiment, she was the co-author of a research project commissioned by Mary Honeyball, Member of the European Parliament, on the links between newspaper adverts for sexual services and trafcking for sexual exploitation. Kyla Walters is an assistant professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University. She studies and teaches race, gender, labor, and education politics. Her co-authored book with Joya Misra about retail clothing work will soon be published by University of California Press. Brenda R. Weber is provost professor and the Jean C. Robinson scholar in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her monographs and collections include Makeover TV, Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century, Reality Gendervision, Latter-day Screens, and Ryan Murphy’s Queer America. Bernadette Wegenstein  is an Austrian-born linguist, media theorist, and documentary flmmaker. Her work brings together her feminist thought and her interest in human-centric storytelling. She is a professor of Media Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.  https:// www.bernadettewegenstein.com Helen Wood is a full professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Lancaster UK. She has published widely on class and gender in the media including the books Reality Television and Class and Reacting to Reality Television with Beverley Skeggs. She has edited Television for Women: New Directions with Rachel Moseley and Helen Wheatley and the book The Wedding Spectacle across Media and Culture with Jilly Kay and Melanie Kennedy. Her recent work on representations of the working-class girl can be found in Feminist Media Studies and British Journal of Cinema and Television. Yuko Yamamiya  is an adjunct professor in Psychological Studies at Temple University, Japan Campus. She obtained her PhD in Experimental Psychopathology from the University of South Florida. Her expertise is body-image disturbances and psychological disorders associated with body-image problems, especially eating disorders. Moreover, she crossculturally examines the mechanism of body-image development, such as how sociocultural factors and cultural values infuence body image. Recently, her research focus also extends to a positive body image.

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PART ONE

Teorizing beauty politics

1 INTRODUCTION Maxine Leeds Craig

Beauty is political. It is the prize claimed by the victors of struggles over human worth. The sting of ugliness is a weapon used by those at the top of social hierarchies to assert superiority over groups they deem inferior and therefore ugly. Celebrating the beauty of one’s people has been a way to fght back. Most of the time women are the beauties crowned in these struggles over collective worth. Beauty politics are gender politics. Trends in marketing and in the nature of work may have made contemporary men more concerned about their own appearance than in earlier generations, but the extent to which beauty defnes women remains greater. The pressure imposed upon women to appear beautiful has in many ways intensifed. Strangers and intimates scrutinize women’s appearance across settings of leisure, love, and work. And because gender is always co-constructed with race and class, beauty politics are racialized, classed, gender politics. Beauty is political, but beauty culture can also be fun, the basis of teen girls’ solidarity, a source of sensual pleasure, a practice of care, a foothold in the economy, or just an accessible way to feel good. The puzzle of how to understand a set of practices and associated meanings that are simultaneously sites of oppressions and pleasures has drawn historians, sociologists, psychologists, media scholars, art historians, philosophers, literary critics, and others to study beauty. This book invites readers into that conversation.

Organization of the volume There are many possible ways to organize a multidisciplinary, international volume on the politics of beauty. This book could have been organized by geopolitical location, social identity, academic discipline, or even body part. I rejected those possible arrangements in order to foster conversations across disciplinary, geographic, and other categorical divides, and to encourage more complex, de-centered, multi-faceted debates. The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics has six sections. The chapters in “Theorizing Beauty Politics” take the broadest view, providing approaches that can be used to frame an array of specifc issues associated with the meaning and consequences of beauty ideals and practices. Rosalind Gill’s chapter, “Neoliberal Beauty,” sets the stage for much of what follows. Contemporary beauty practices take place in the context of the expansion of the market into every corner of life. Neoliberalism fosters an individualistic and competitive 3

Maxine Leeds Craig

ethos in which people, and especially girls and women, learn to perpetually monitor their appearance, and their feelings about their appearance, to produce their “best” selves. New technologies have intensifed the ways in which the body has become the focus of endless labor and ceaseless consumption, both of which marketers and popular media present as selfcare. Helen Wood examines the centrality of economic class to judgments regarding appearance and the ways in which women, especially working-class women, risk disparagement for how they engage with style. Oluwakemi Balogun and Gracia Dodds expand the frame of reference to transnational politics in a chapter that looks at how nations use beauty pageants to elevate their status in global hierarchies. Monique Roelofs invites readers to look at artists whose work reveals inescapable contradictions in the race and gender politics of beauty. Mónica Moreno Figueroa focuses on how everyday assessments of being “lighter than” or “darker than” in racially mixed contexts function as part of the operational life of racism.

Competing defnitions “Competing Defnitions of Beauty” brings together chapters that address how specifc places, times, and communities can sustain or lead to transformations in defnitions of beauty. Across these contexts, size, shape, and skin tone are attributes that defne beauty. Readers will see patterns in this group of chapters, which may seem to arise from cultural hegemonies that transcend borders and saturate diferent contexts. Yet they will also fnd that beauty is not defned in the same way everywhere, and that similar patterns must be understood in their local contexts. For example, women in diferent places may desire pale skin, but for distinctly diferent reasons. Beauty politics are not just about freeing women from beauty standards, or making beauty ideals more inclusive. The politics are also about how women have used beauty, and claimed beauty, to control how they were perceived. The chapters by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox and Sabrina Strings provide historical perspectives on beauty standards in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Both chapters show beauty standards as an unsettled set of beliefs, which despite their exclusionary natures, become the focus of popular aspirations. Margaret Hunter’s chapter presents colorism, or the favoring of light skin within communities of color, as an enduring system of discrimination in the United States. Vanita Reddy examines colorism in India and the limits of recent challenges to it. A chapter by Viren Swami and one by Yuko Yamamiya and Tomohiro Suzuki examine how preferences regarding body size do or do not circulate across national boundaries. Nada Mustafa Ali provides an overview of beauty politics in Sudan, where size and color matter in the perception of beauty. Ali introduces scent, and the collective production of perfumes as an important part of Sudanese women’s beauty culture. Together the chapters in this section refute notions of universal beauty standards. They show local beauty cultures as informed by globally circulating imagery, but not fully dominated or displaced by it. The fnal chapter in this section, by Erynn Masi de Casanova and Jeremy Brenner-Levoy, takes us to the fantasy world of cosplay, where fans of anime, comic books, video games, and other forms of popular culture gather to wear costumes that enable them to take on the appearance of their favorite characters. Casanova and Brenner-Levoy ask if the beauty standards, which have so much force in everyday life, reign inside the alternative universe created in cosplay conventions.

Activism and social change Cultural hegemonies are always unstable balances, and at any moment, in any place, in any context, beauty standards compete for dominance. Though a perception of beauty may feel 4

Introduction

spontaneous, idiosyncratic, or innate, it is way of seeing that is a product of that competition. Sometimes social movements directly work to change the public’s way of seeing beauty. Often beauty advocacy arises as an unintended extension of a broader movement. As part of fghting size discrimination, which has especially harsh consequences for women, activists proudly claimed the often reproachful word fat, and celebrated the beauty of fat women. In the early 1960s, young Black women activists in the Civil Rights Movement began to perceive the widely accepted Black women’s practice of hair straightening as an attempt to conform to a white supremacist society. They stopped straightening their hair and over time, Black women beyond activist circles saw the beauty of unstraightened hair textures. New ways of seeing beauty arise among transformed people in changed societies. The chapters in “Beauty, Activism, and Social Change” address the ways in which social movements have altered beauty standards and reshaped aesthetics. Of the sections in the book, this one engages most directly with organized social movement politics. It displays the wide range of outcomes that can result when activism and beauty meet. The chapters ask which beauty practices should be considered counterhegemonic and examine whether assimilation can be a strategy of resistance. They reveal the importance of community institutions for nurturing new ways of seeing beauty and look at responses to new forms of racism. Beauty politics are as complicated and riven by confict as the movements from which they grow. Ann Fox systematically explicates a defnition of disability aesthetics as a practice of social justice. Malia McAndrew explores the way in which lesbians in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s strategically used conventional dress to make a place for themselves within a homophobic society. Carla Pfefer’s chapter on fat activism and the politics of beauty asks us to consider whether we would be better served by embracing a politics of ugliness. Ugliness haunts beauty. It lurks behind every word describing the beautiful. While social movements usually advocate expanding narrow defnitions of beauty, Pfefer questions why beauty has become a necessary achievement. The physical spaces, oral traditions, and print and digital media through which people fnd and make community are the sites where people imagine, describe, and nurture alternative ways of seeing beauty. Critiques of the racism of beauty standards preceded second-wave feminism. The longer history of critique is visible in the literature of anticolonial and anti-racist movements, and found popular expression in song and folklore. Kamille Gentles-Peart explores how Black women in the United States and the Caribbean have resisted racist disparagement of their bodies. White racist imagery made Black women’s bodies the focus of ridicule. Gentles-Peart shows how Caribbean folklore and Jamaican dancehalls were vehicles for envisioning and nurturing anti-racist aesthetics. Social media provide perhaps the dominant contemporary vehicle for disseminating popular aesthetics. Social media infuencers have a particularly commanding place in the sea of voices and images that tell us how to see beauty. Shirley Tate follows the battle over the worth of Black women’s bodies to Instagram where vloggers challenge white appropriation of forms of beauty for which Black women have won recognition. Bernadette Wegenstein situates beauty politics inside feminist debates regarding the politics of appearance.

Body work The chapters in the “Body Work” part consider the social meanings of an array of ways that people alter their bodies to meet social expectations for appearance. In a deliberate juxtaposition, presented to prompt readers to consider how boundaries of acceptability are formed, the section places chapters on practices widely treated as routine, or even necessary, 5

Maxine Leeds Craig

alongside chapters on interventions typically seen as extreme. Eric Plemons’ comparative survey of genital-altering procedures ofers a framework for thinking about conficts that characterize contemporary debates about genital aesthetics. Melisa Trujillo examines research on body hair removal in the Anglophone West and fnds increasingly stringent social expectations for hairlessness across zones of the body. Claudia Liebelt’s chapter on Muslim women’s beauty practices in Turkey, which involve hair removal and the use of cosmetics, challenges simplistic understandings of the relationship of religious faith to beauty. Kristin Rowe surveys the politics of Black women’s hair. Amid shifting political contexts and using the products and techniques available to them, Black women’s aesthetic choices often signify political stances regardless of their intent. Dana Berkowitz writes about the implications of Botox treatments as an increasingly normative practice. Initially marketed as a way to mask the signs of aging, a range of medical and non-medical practitioners now promote Botox to younger consumers as a preventative treatment. I contribute a chapter about orthodontics as the beauty practice that is so medicalized and normalized that it has escaped the attention of beauty scholars. Two chapters, one by Joanna Elfving-Hwang, and the other co-authored by Alexander Edmonds and So Yeon Leem, address the racial politics of cosmetic surgery in Korea and Brazil.

Labor Within sociology, beauty scholars have turned their attention to the labor of beauty, and labor scholars have begun to pay attention to beauty. “Beauty and Labor” brings together chapters that examine the aesthetic pressures of work, including the labor of producing beauty, the experiences of professional beauties in modeling and pageants, and the aesthetic demands of poorly paid service work. Amanda Czerniawski’s chapter examines the limited place for and physical constraints placed upon “plus size” models in the fashion industry. Dustin Mabry focuses on the emotionally laden aesthetic labor of tattooers, whose artistry permanently alters the appearance of their customers. Karen Tice examines beauty pageants as institutions that are simultaneously formulaic and fexible, anachronistic, and forward-looking. Mobile apps and other innovations in entertainment have provided new vehicles that extend the reach of pageant culture beyond contestants into everyday lives. Despite social change and critique, pageants endure and people aspire to enter them because pageants have found ways to cover the institution’s political faws with veneers of inclusion and purpose. Kyla Walters’ survey of research on the aesthetic demands of retail employment reveals the ways in which racism inheres in the appearance norms that shape retail hiring. Eileen Otis examines how service workers in China must transform their appearance to meet customer and managerial expectations. Otis examines the complexity of workers’ experiences who fnd pleasures in new forms of embodiment that facilitate their movement across class boundaries.

Age The book concludes with three chapters that look at the politics of those seen as too young or too old to engage in beauty work. Hilary Levey Friedman examines the sexualization of girls in children’s beauty pageants. Laura Hurd surveys the social cost of looking old in a youth-oriented society. The penalty for appearing old is especially harsh for women. Brenda Weber examines the ways in which Hollywood magnifes the social rejection of aging women. 6

Introduction

Unsettled debates Some of the authors in this volume cite each other, because their work has been in conversation for a long time. The volume also brings together scholars writing within theoretical traditions that rarely interact. The chapters in this volume approach similar questions from varied disciplines, theoretical foundations, national perspectives, and vantage points. Some authors point to gaps in the literature and begin to fll them in. Many of the chapters engage popular media because often, that is where the beauty politics of hair, color, weight, and cosmetic surgery spectacularly play out. Moving across chapters, readers can follow shifts in the forms of media that tell the public how to see beauty. While magazines, runways, flms, and pageants continue to shape beauty ideals, social media have introduced beauty infuencers and vloggers, and opened spaces for cosplayers. Recurrent tensions and emergent trends arise in diferent contexts across chapters. Authors address the ways in which technologies have intensifed the demands of beauty, the partial and depoliticized uptake of feminist critiques of beauty by the beauty industry, and the politics of inclusion of limited forms of diference by beauty and fashion industries. They examine the ways in which beauty practices become entangled with moral stances, as women who engage in beautifying practices get placed on a continuum that stretches among the points of hygiene, respectability, self-care, and vanity. Anti-racist and feminist social movements in the late 1960s drew attention to the racism and sexism embedded in ideals of beauty and in the social expectations that compelled women to aspire to be beautiful. Though the critiques they articulated had been voiced by earlier generations of activists, suppression of earlier movements meant that many heard the critiques as if they had been spoken for the frst time. The critiques voiced in the 1960s emerged at a moment when they could inspire decades of scholarship across a range of felds. Anti-racist and feminist politics have never been simple or monolithic. They have been vibrant sources of debate regarding the causes of inequalities and oppression and the tactics that must be used to create a better world. Accordingly, critical beauty scholars take divergent positions as they theorize how structures of inequality work through beauty ideals and practices, and tease out the complicated relationships among pleasure, compulsion, inequalities, and resistance in our engagement with beauty practices. Authors in this volume take sides in debates about the racial meaning of cosmetic surgery, the centrality of whiteness to beauty ideals, and which forms of engagement with beauty culture they view as resistance. The chapters refect the current lively and unsettled state of scholarship on the meanings and consequences of beauty practices. The debates highlight the importance of understanding the politics of beauty from the perspective of local places and specifc communities situated within historical contexts and broader economies. Beauty and ugliness are ways in which women experience racism, sexism, elitism, ableism, and other forms of oppression in our bodies. Investigations of hair straightening, slimming diets, or eyebrow-shaping tutorials can provide insight into processes of domination and resistance, and the transformations of political economies as they touch individual lives. After years of studying beauty, I have discovered that when I start by looking closely at a beauty practice I always fnd my way to larger social structures.

Acknowledgements This volume began with an invitation from Alexandra McGregor, the editor of the Gender Studies list at Routledge, to consider editing a volume on Beauty Politics. I am grateful to Alex for her advocacy of this project through its long journey to publication. Along the 7

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way, Danshi Li helped me to locate authors at the beginning of the project. Mara Cayarga provided excellent editorial assistance, which made the unwieldy task of editing more manageable. Finally, I am most grateful to the authors who responded to my invitations to join this volume. It began before the Covid-19 pandemic but developed while we were all coping with it and the anxiety and isolation it caused. The chapter submissions and revisions arrived at a time when my home, ofce, gym, and beauty salon were all the same place. Reading these chapters and corresponding with the authors provided me with nourishing connections to a global community of scholars.

8

2 NEOLIBERAL BEAUTY Rosalind Gill

“Forget foundation. Choose confdence” asserts an advertisement for Chanel, currently prominent on my Instagram feed. “Be optimal” exhorts another for Martiderm, promoting serums, fllers, and other cosmetics for “smart aging.” “Aubrey is feeling 11/10” declares a poster for a hipster-oriented “wellness service” which ofers at-home beauty treatments that will help you to “glow.” A fourth advertisement, ubiquitous in London’s tube train network, shows a manicured hand in which one of the polished red nails has (horrors!) chipped varnish: “You don’t have time for this” empathizes the bold copy – but luckily Treatwell has got your back. These advertising messages, all seen in the few days before beginning work on this chapter, ofer a glimpse of some of the contradictory images and ideas that constitute contemporary discourses about beauty in the West. A plethora of diferent trends is circulating: the increasing entanglement of the beauty industry with surgical, pharmaceutical, and genetics industries; a growing overlap between beauty and “wellness,” including “clean eating” and positive health discourses; an emphasis upon feeling good as well as looking good, and on beauty as a “state of mind” (pace Dove) linked to confdence and authenticity; the impact of smartphone technologies on the way in which we learn about and practice appearance work  – from social media micro-celebrities and infuencers to beauty apps that can flter images, evaluate our appearance, and recommend or book beauty treatments; the diversifcation of mainstream beauty ideals to include bigger, older, and disabled models as well as women of color, queer, and non-binary models across media; and yet, simultaneously, an intensifcation and extensifcation of beauty pressures, and their institutionalization as a compulsory form of “labor” for women, and, increasingly, men and non-binary people. This complicated terrain has generated multiple perspectives and programs of work from scholars interested in beauty and appearance. In addition to well-established psychological and Foucauldian studies framed by questions about body image and bodily discipline (Bartky 1990; Bordo 1993; Cash & Smolak 2011; Paxton 2014) there are a growing number of productive avenues for research, drawing variously on afect theory, Deleuzian approaches, intersectional and critical race perspectives, transnational, postcolonial and decolonial approaches, as well as by third-wave and afrmative approaches (see Elias et al. 2017 for discussion of these perspectives). As Ashley Mears (2014: 1330) has put it “beauty is having a moment in the social sciences” – evidenced by new journals, calls for special issues, thematic 9

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sections of professional associations as well as by the proliferation of novel empirical studies, for example, of fat beauty, bridal beauty, and queer beauty. In this chapter I contribute to this vibrant feld of scholarship through a critical account of neoliberalism and “aesthetic entrepreneurship” that is built from research in labor studies, surveillance studies and psychosocial studies. The chapter is divided into two broad parts. In the frst part, I ofer an introduction to neoliberalism and its gendered (and racialized and classed) iteration as postfeminism, highlighting its relevance to beauty. Then in the second part of the chapter, I look at three dynamic trends, which this theoretical approach makes visible: the intensifcation of beauty pressures, its extensifcation or spreading out across time, space, and parts of the body, and its move into the interior with a focus on cultivating a “beautiful self.” The conclusion draws together these arguments with a focus on aesthetic entrepreneurship.

Everyday neoliberalism Neoliberalism is a contested term, and also one that is used in a myriad of diferent ways. While the most prominent accounts of neoliberalism are historical, political, and economic (Harvey 2007; Giroux 2015), stressing privatization, deregulation, and a rolling back of the state from social and welfare provision, a growing body of work applies the notion to social, cultural, and psychological phenomena. Jo Littler (2017: 4) discusses neoliberalism less as a grand overarching political rationality than as a quotidian ideology – the new normal – in which distinctively neoliberal notions of choice, entrepreneurialism, competition, and meritocracy have insinuated themselves into “the nooks and crannies of everyday life.” Wendy Brown (2015) analyzes neoliberalism’s “stealth revolution” across the demos such that the market has become the model for all forms of human action. From a similar perspective, an “economisation of subjectivity” (McNay 2009: 59) can be observed, as people are exhorted to think about their lives through notions of enterprise, calculation, and personal responsibility. In dating, for example, ideas of market value, consumer choice, and investment have become common ways to think and talk about intimate relationships (Illouz 2007; O’Neill 2018). An important body of research in media and cultural studies has contributed to this understanding of neoliberalism, showing how it attempts to remodel and makeover the body and subjectivity. Many media have been involved in this: constructing the individual as an entrepreneurial and “responsibilized” subject invested in self-transformation, for example, to become more slim, more beautiful, to look ten years younger, or to become more date-able (see, for example, Ouellette & Hay 2008). Much work in this vein is built from textual analysis of some kind, but Christina Scharf’s (2016) interview and ethnographic research with female cultural workers demonstrates how these mediated ideas are lived and experienced in daily life. Her rich analysis shows that neoliberal ideas are not just limited to cultural texts, but are increasingly shaping accounts of everyday life and subjectivity. She notes the way that neoliberal ideas come to be the taken-for-granted of working life, with her respondents referring to the self as a business to be worked on and optimized; being constantly active in the pursuit of their goals; embracing risks; repudiating or minimizing injuries or difculties; and expressing the belief that they have an obligation to “stay positive” whatever happens. What is striking is the extent to which these ways of talking about themselves were widely shared, profoundly individualized, and also – crucially – psychologized. Most work on neoliberalism assumes a generic human subject. However, it is clear that the resources to become a neoliberal subject are unevenly distributed and vary by class, race, 10

Neoliberal beauty

and gender (Ringrose & Walkerdine 2008; Gilroy 2013; Allen 2014) – as well as in relation to age, health status, and disability, it can be assumed. Some research contends that women – and young women in particular – are positioned as ideal subjects of neoliberalism – hailed, as Angela McRobbie (2009: 15) puts it, as “subjects of capacity” who are rendered responsible not just for their individual lives and success but also for broader social change. Moreover, consumption and self-transformation are entangled with neoliberalism and are profoundly gendered, with women called on disproportionately to makeover and manage their bodies. Postfeminism has become a key term that speaks to distinctive gendered features of the current cultural conjuncture. In earlier formulations, postfeminism was defned by its relationship to feminism – its assumed “pastness” whether that pastness is “merely noted, mourned or celebrated” (Tasker & Negra 2007: 3). This relationship has long been understood as complicated – involving incorporation, repudiation, and commodifcation. Increasingly, however, postfeminism seems to have “cut loose” from a particular relationship to feminism – not least because of the resurgence of a “popular feminism” in the West since 2014 and particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement. There is not space here to discuss this but there are passionate debates about precisely how to characterize the current moment – whether it is one of popular feminism (Banet-Weiser 2018), neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg 2018), gendered neoliberalism (Henderson & Taylor 2019), or postfeminism (see, for example, Gill 2016, 2017; Keller & Ryan 2018; Banet-Weiser et al. 2019). For my purposes here, the term is less important than the critical orientation to the sensibility – a sensibility that is structured by individualism and by an absence of structural or institutional accounts of injustice, as well as by a perspective that ignores other axes of power such as those relating to race, class, and sexuality. Furthermore, whether it is characterized as postfeminism, popular feminism, or neoliberal feminism the broad contours of the sensibility are clearly capitalism friendly rather than critical, and easily assimilable into corporate life. A number of other relatively stable and patterned features of this sensibility have been identifed recurrently across studies and contexts. These stress the signifcance of the body in postfeminist culture; the emergence of “new femininities” (Gill & Scharf 2011) that break with earlier signifcations in important ways; the prominence given to notions of choice, agency, autonomy, and empowerment as part of a shift toward entrepreneurial modes of selfhood (Banet-Weiser 2012); the importance of makeover and self-transformation, linked to the psychic life of neoliberalism and postfeminism (Gill 2016; Scharf 2016); the distinctive afective tone of postfeminism, particularly its emphasis upon the upbeat and the positive, with the repudiation of pain, injury, insecurity, and anger (Gill & Orgad 2015; Kanai 2015; Scharf 2016), and fnally, the importance of surveillance of the female body to neoliberal and postfeminist cultures. One widely noted feature is the prominence accorded to the body in postfeminist culture  – less for what it can do than for how it appears, which is fgured both as the locus of womanhood and the key site of women’s value – displacing earlier constructions of femininity, which highlighted particular roles or characteristics (such as motherhood or caring). These were of course highly problematic, but today – and no less so – the body takes center stage. As Alison Winch (2015: 21) puts it: “In the hypervisible landscape of popular culture the body is recognized as the object of women’s labor: it is her asset, her product, her brand and her gateway to freedom and empowerment in a neoliberal market economy.” With this shift, the “beauty imperative” has gained ever more traction with arguments that sexual attractiveness is the ultimate measure of a success for a woman – whatever else she is, she must also be beautiful and normatively strive for perfection (McRobbie 2015; Widdows 2018). This is underscored by the radical expansion of appearance surveillance in contemporary 11

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culture as we are incited relentlessly to surveil women’s bodies, and trans and non-binary bodies, with a range of gazes that may be anxious, desiring, envious, appreciative, or hostile. This is facilitated by magazine close-ups, arrows, red circles, magnifcation, highlighted areas: centered on cellulite dimples, visible panty lines, messy brows, and other purported faws. In a Deleuzian frame, McRobbie (2009) argues that patriarchy has been “re-territorialized” in the fashion-beauty complex, creating unlivable pressures. These produce a particular kind of melancholia and “illegible rage” expressed through “postfeminist disorders” that include bulimia, anxiety, depression, drinking, and forms of addiction. Here I want to suggest that in this distinctively postfeminist and neoliberal moment, beauty pressures have intensifed, extensifed, and also moved into the realm of subjectivity in new and pernicious ways, facilitated by new technologies and by aggressive consumer capitalism that is colonizing women’s bodies. It is to this that I turn next.

No outside? Te extensifcation of beauty pressures Beauty pressure is extensifying or spreading out in at least three signifcant ways in contemporary Western culture. First, it can be noted that the requirement to “look good” is extending to new temporalities or moments in a woman’s life that might previously have been considered “outside” or “beyond” beauty pressures. It has shifted deeper into childhood, as media, cosmetics, and fashion companies have moved in on younger age groups with beauty-focused teen magazines and product ranges. Clarins’ (2019) slogan is “Beautiful at every age” and advertising and in-store branding include the pull quote “In beauty it is never too early and never too late” by the company’s founder/director Jaques Courtin-Clarins. Interestingly, a Google search for this quote reveals a number of consumer questions about just when is too early to start using products containing acid peelers and retinol. The other end of life is also comprehensively colonized; indeed, mobilizations of fear and anxiety about aging are the beating heart of the beauty-industrial complex, as shown by Michelle Lazar’s (2017) analysis of cosmetics advertising where the fxation on youth correlates with the denigration of aging. Moreover, if at one point, pregnancy represented, for some women, an escape from or relaxation of the demands of beauty (Tyler 2011), this is no longer the case, at least in the West. Analyzing the visibility of the maternal in contemporary culture, Shani Orgad and Sara de Benedictis (2015) show how aesthetic labor has become a central feature demanded of the good “stay-at-home” mother. In fact, getting back to your pre-baby weight is increasingly represented in the media as a far greater achievement than giving birth or parenting, with predictable efects on women such as increased fear and anxiety around weight and appearance (Nash 2014). A second form of extension of beauty pressure is to be found in the expansion of areas of the body requiring product-service-solutions. “Upper arm defnition” became a major preoccupation in the late 1990s; armpits were a new target in the mid-2000s (see, for example, Dove’s video An Open Letter to the Armpit). These campaigns were closely followed by more focus on the eyebrows, the suggestion of the “thigh gap” as a new standard of bodily desirability, alongside the invention of new disciplinary constructs such as the “bikini bridge,” the “underboob,” and the “thigh brow.” The beauty industry has also increasingly moved “inside” the body with a range of products – starting with vitamins and mineral tablets and now extending to heavily promoted daily “drinks” that promote the “beauty immune system,” collagen, and anti-oxidant defenses, and so on. Developments in genetics represent another new focus for cosmetics companies – promised to female consumers as scientifc interventions that work with your personalized DNA profle (see, for example, Geneu.com). 12

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A third trend that represents an extension of beauty and a diminishing of any “outside” is the dramatic move of beauty treatments out of the salon or clinic and into the home. Facilitated by smartphone apps whose GPS makes location-based services easy to access and to “push” via notifcations, the home beauty market is an expanding development, which makes beauty “mobile.” Looking at advertising for beauty service portals such as Urban.com and Treatwell.co.uk it is fascinating to see how services are promoted through an emphasis on time-famine (for example, “you don’t have time” for that broken nail/scrappy eyelash extension), professionalism (you need to look right) and – revealingly – for services that can be booked without having to speak to anyone (for example, Treatwell promises “It’s 2019you don’t have to phone”). What is striking then is not simply how this potentially changes the meaning of a beauty treatment or procedure, quite literally domesticating it, but also how the interpellation precisely assumes the busy, responsible, self-optimizing subject that neoliberalism promotes – in this way constituting this neoliberal subjectivity in the moment of hailing.

Forensic beauty: intensifcation As well as spreading out and extending over places, times of life, and sites of the body requiring work, the beauty industrial complex is also intensifying dramatically. This is facilitated by a “surveillant imaginary” that is “expanding vertiginously” (Andrejevic 2015). More than a decade ago, writing a book about Gender and the Media I argued that “surveillance of women’s bodies … constitutes perhaps the largest type of media content across all genres and media forms” (Gill 2007: 255). In the 2020s that is not only still true, but surveillance is operating at ever fner-grained levels, becoming forensic in its gaze. It is striking that microscopes, telescopic gunsights, peep holes, calipers, and set squares have become ubiquitous in beauty advertising. Images of cameras and of perfect “photo beauty” or of “HD-ready” skin also proliferate. Most common of all are the motifs of the tape measure (often around the upper thigh) and the magnifying glass, used to scrutinize pores, sun damage, or broken capillaries, but – more importantly at a meta-level – underscoring the idea of women’s appearance as under constant (magnifed) surveillance. This surveillance is not only top down or emanating from media or beauty industries. It is also increasingly “horizontal” or “peer surveillance.” Alison Winch (2013) coined the term “gynaeoptic surveillance” to talk about the “girlfriend gaze” in which women and girls police each other’s looks and behaviors in a way that is characterized simultaneously by judgment, afection, and “normative cruelties”(Ringrose & Renold 2010). This relational surveillance, in person and on social media, requires much further analysis. Ana Elias (forthcoming) ofers an interesting initial study. She notes the forensic selfsurveillance young women in her research practiced, and dubs it “nano-surveillance” because of the fneness and intensity of the scrutiny involved. Indeed, women’s self-examination could routinely involve careful scrutiny of eyebrows, magnifcation of pores, as well as submission of selfes to apps that measure and deliver a score of facial symmetry. Elias’ young female participants based in the United Kingdom and Portugal also felt themselves subject to constant evaluation from other people, particularly women. One woman vividly described her feeling that there was a “checklist gaze” enacted by most women she met, which involved a quick but sweeping scrutiny of her entire body checking from her footwear to the top of her head and forming an instant evaluation. It would seem that – partly as a result of the afordances of smartphones and the associated dramatic turn to the visual in contemporary culture – new visual literacies are developing, particularly for the face. I notice that 13

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my own “ways of seeing” are quite diferent from those of my young students – with my own practice of looking at someone being both less intense and more benign. When I hear younger women talking in detail about contouring, brow defnition or about diferent mascara efects – upon only having seen an image of a face for a fraction of a second – my own “glance” is revealed to me as something like a blur, so little information does it ofer. It is as if newer visual literacies generate high defnition digital pictures, while my own rendered image is a low resolution one, which generates an overall impression but none of the specifcity. This is a not related to eyesight but is a cultural efect – one which is quite literally changing the way we look and see. Brands are clearly involved in both creating and capitalizing on these new sophisticated visual literacies, for example, by expanding everyday skin care and make-up sets dramatically. M.A.C. now recommends following eight steps just for coloring the lips! The last few years has also seen beauty brands rapidly moving onto smartphone app platforms to ofer beauty tutorials, personalized make-up and hair care solutions (“your own personal beauty advisor on your phone”), and other services. These sit alongside other beauty apps such as surgery “try-out” apps that ofer the opportunity to “visualize a whole new you” after surgical enhancement, teeth whitening, eyebag removal, etc.; aesthetic benchmarking apps that give the – algorithmic – answer to questions such as “how hot am I?” or “how old do I look?”; and apps which use the camera functions of smartphones to scan the body for faws and problems, for example, broken capillaries, sun damage, or the efects of smoking. As we have argued elsewhere (Elias & Gill 2017: 157), beauty apps “increase the extent to which the female body and face are rendered visible as a site of crisis and commodifcation.” Increasingly they also produce feedback loops in which cosmetics (for example, foundation, tightening serum) are claimed to (re)produce on actual embodied faces and bodies the flter/ surgical efects produced by these apps: “a defnite case of life being forced to imitate art/ ifce” (Elias & Gill 2017: 159). Another way in which we can gauge how beauty pressures are intensifying is by looking at what happens to women who are designated as living outside these norms – whether by choice or not. In a world in which a focus on appearance is so dominant, the costs of non-compliance are amplifed. This is felt disproportionately by some more than others – for example, trans rather than cis women, disabled rather than able-bodied women, fat rather than slim women. Breanne Fahs’ (2014) work has been powerful in showing how small must be the deviations from “normative femininity” in order to be read as “transgressions.” In her research she encouraged her female students not to remove body hair for the duration of the semester in which they studied her course. Her students accounts’ of their own feelings and experiences, as well as the reactions of others to their “hairier” bodies, vividly illustrates the punitive force of ideals of female hairlessness and what she calls “the regulatory politics of disgust” (Fahs 2017). More broadly, there seems to be some kind of “infationary” process going on in which the most minor acts of resistance to expectations of female appearance are heralded as “radical,” and “revolutionary” acts – perhaps part of the vernacular defance that characterizes popular and celebrity feminism (Gill 2016). In this context the most trival acts  – for example, going without mascara or having a visible panty line when wearing leggings – get treated as if they are revolutionary gestures that threaten to bring down patriarchal capitalism as we know it. Elsewhere (Elias et al. 2017) we have documented some examples of this, showing how celebrities can attract characterizations as “ferce,” “sassy,” and “badass” just for going without a bra or wearing sneakers rather than heels while out in the city. Clearly, again, this is deeply shaped by factors other than gender: the parameters allowed to diferent women are shaped by racism, classism, ageism. 14

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Te psychic life of neoliberal beauty culture As well as intensifying and extensifying, beauty culture is also increasingly moving into the domain of the psychological – exhorting women not only to focus on their appearance but also to believe that they’re “worth it” (L’Oréal) and realize that beauty is “a state of mind” (Dove). The industry’s seemingly inexhaustible focus on self-esteem and confdence has become known as “femvertizing” or “LYB” (love your body) messaging. The trend has been important for challenging or interrupting the stream of hostile messages about women’s bodies, focused on “faws,” “battles,” what is “wrong,” and how women could improve themselves. It is also signifcant in facilitating a more diverse corpus of images of women – in terms of body size and shape, race and ethnicity, age, and disability. More recent campaigns have also featured genderqueer people, and a wider range of images of sexuality and religious diversity – L’Oréal and H&M have both recently used images of women wearing hijab in advertising campaigns in the United Kingdom, which is signifcant in the context of increasing racism, Islamophobia and right-wing nationalism. While this body diversity and body positivity is clearly to be welcomed, there are also numerous reasons to avoid uncritical celebration of femvertizing. These have been discussed extensively elsewhere (Gill & Kanai 2019) but include the “fakeness” of the LYB visual regime; its decontextualization or hollowing out of diversity in such a way as to negate the force and history of racism or homophobia; its persistent re-citing of body-shaming and hateful discourse, for example, “fat talk”; its cynical commodifcation of female empowerment; and the fact that many of the same companies now exhorting us to love our bodies are precisely those most deeply invested in promoting dissatisfaction with our bodies (for example, Weightwatchers, Special K). In addition to these critiques, I would highlight the way in which current anti-beauty beauty discourses blame women for their own unhappiness or discontent – suggesting that female body dissatisfaction is women’s own fault – women “do this to themselves” (see Dove’s advertisement Patches for a vivid example). Feeling fat, feeling ugly, disliking your own hair, or feeling that you don’t look right and can’t ft in or pass – all these are constructed as women’s own individual problems. Women’s (sometimes) difcult relationships to their own embodied selves become both dislocated from structural features of patriarchal racial capitalism and shorn of their psychosocial complexity (see also Lynch 2011; Murphy 2013), as if painful feelings can simply be sloughed of with a boost of positive energy or an inspirational slogan. Above all LYB discourses are implicated in a wider “confdence cult” which operates as a new “cultural scafolding” (Gavey 2005) for the regulation of women suggesting that physical beauty is no longer enough. Women must also “upgrade” their subjectivity so that they are confdent, happy and positive subjects – no matter how they actually feel. Rather than representing a loosening of the grip of punishing appearance standards for women, it is an escalation – the additional move of beauty into the arena of subjectivity. This resonates with wider tendencies in neoliberalism which requires subjects who work on their characters and psychic dispositions, and follow appropriate “neoliberal feeling rules” (Gill & Kanai 2018).

Conclusion: neoliberal beauty and aesthetic entrepreneurship In this chapter, I have argued that a neoliberal sensibility shapes contemporary beauty culture. I have suggested that the beauty industrial complex has extended and intensifed its grip and has also moved deeper into women’s psychic lives, calling on women to be smart, responsible, self-optimizing subjects who work on their appearance and on their character and dispositions 15

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to cultivate a beautiful body and an appealing, positive mental attitude. Of course the way in which these neoliberal injunctions are felt and experienced, and the degree to which they are taken up, varies signifcantly, and empirical research is needed to explore this. Moreover, the beauty practices with which women engage, while often culturally demanded, are not passively enacted; women are not cultural dupes or automata. On the contrary, I would argue that the distinctive features of neoliberal beauty precisely require a subject who is active, creative, and ingenious: she maximizes her time, looks for the right deals, uses apps on her smartphone to alter her photos or experiment with a new look, undertakes various anticipatory labors, practices forms of vigilance and aesthetic rest (Dosekun 2016) (for example, letting nails “breathe” in between applications of varnish or acrylics, giving hair a rest between extensions or a weave). She may sometimes watch what she eats and drinks; she may shop for “ethical” products; she may undertake various forms of psychological practice such as repeating positive afrmations, working on developing “gratitude,” or defending against feelings of shame for not being pretty enough, slim enough, curvy enough. She will not do all these things (and they are clearly unevenly distributed at the level of time and money). And if she undertakes some of these activities, then she will not do so all the time. But what is clear is that both signifcant work and an enterprising mindset are required by contemporary neoliberal beauty culture – we are increasingly called on to be aesthetic entrepreneurs. The notion of aesthetic entrepreneurship builds from the critical approaches to neoliberalism set out in this chapter, with their focus on neoliberalism as a project designed to remake subjectivity. It also develops from the “turn to labor” in contemporary sociology and cultural studies which seeks to unpack the multiplicity of forms of laboring that go into any form of work – whether the “emotional labor” of the fight attendant (Hochschild 1983), the “creative labor” of the media worker (Hesmondhalgh & Baker 2011) or the “aesthetic labor” of the barista. Most research on aesthetic labor looks at employment – particularly in the service industries – with an emphasis upon the ways that organizations seek to recruit for and manage “the way employees feel and look as well as the way they behave” (Grugulis et al 2004: 7). What Elizabeth Wissinger (2015: 3) calls “glamour labor” is especially relevant, as she demonstrates how the models she studied were not just focused on appearance but also worked on “‘cool’ quotient – how hooked up, tuned in, and ‘in the know’ one is. Glamour labor involves all aspects of one’s image, from physical presentation, to personal connections, to friendships and fun.” I want to conclude by arguing that “glamour labor” is not just the labor of models or others in the beauty business, but is increasingly a labor in which we are all expected to participate (whether we do so or not). This is clear in fashion design, in clothes and beauty retail, in many sections of media, music and entertainment, among the growing numbers of people who post pictures of their daily outft online, in the booming “industry” of beauty vlogging – and in many other kinds of “work” (Elias et al. 2017). But, more than this, some form of aesthetic labor is increasingly demanded of all women (and increasing numbers of men), as we live in societies that become ever more dominated by new forms of visuality, appearance, and looking, and in which more and more of us partake in the endless labor of “curating a visible self” on and ofine (Dobson 2015). The notion of aesthetic entrepreneurship captures the labor and creativity involved in this, tying it back to wider accounts of neoliberalism. Like the neoliberal subject more generally, the aesthetic entrepreneur is called on to be autonomous and self-regulating in the pursuit of beauty, and to manage its demands, risks, and injuries as well as to enjoy its pleasures.

Related topics Beauty and class 16

Neoliberal beauty

References Allen, Kim. 2014. “‘Blair’s Children’: Young Women as ‘Aspirational Subjects’ in the Psychic Landscape of Class.” Sociological Review 62(4): 760–779. Andrejevic, Mark. 2015. “Foreword.” In R. E. Dubrofsky and S. A. Magnet (eds.), Feminist Surveillance Studies (pp. ix–xviii). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2012. AuthenticTM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. New York: New York University Press. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg. 2019. “Postfeminism, Popular Feminism and Neoliberal Feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in Conversation.” Feminist Theory 21(1): 3–24. Bartky, Sandra L. 1990. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge. Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Cash, Thomas F. and Linda Smolak. 2011. Understanding Body Images: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Guilford Press. Dobson, Amy Shields. 2015. Postfeminist Digital Cultures: Femininity, Social Media, and Self-representation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dosekun, Simidele. 2016. “Standpoint: The Weave as an ‘Unhappy’ Technology of Black Femininity.” Feminist Africa 21: 63–69. Elias, Ana Sofa. Forthcoming. Beautiful Body, Confdent Soul: Young Women and the Beauty Labour of Neoliberalism. Unpublished PhD thesis, submitted to King’s College London. Elias, Ana Sofa and Rosalind Gill. 2017. “Beauty Surveillance: The Digital Self-Monitoring Cultures of Neoliberalism.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 21(1): 59–77. Elias, Ana Sofa, Rosalind Gill, and Christina Scharf (eds.). 2017. “Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism.” In Aesthetic Labour (pp. 3–49). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fahs, Breanne. 2014. “Perilous Patches and Pitstaches: Imagined Versus Lived Experiences of Women’s Body Hair Growth.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 38: 167–180. Fahs, Breanne. 2017. “Mapping ‘gross’ Bodies: The Regulatory Politics of Disgust.” In Ana Sofa Elias, Rosalind Gill, and Christina Scharf (eds.), Aesthetic Labour (pp. 83–99). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gavey, Nicola. 2005. Just Sex? The Cultural Scafolding of Rape. London: Routledge. Gill, Rosalind. 2007. Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity. Gill, Rosalind. 2016. “Post-postfeminism? New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times.” Feminist Media Studies 16(4): 610–630. Gill, Rosalind. 2017. “The Afective, Cultural and Psychic Life of Postfeminism.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(6): 606–626. Gill, Rosalind and Akane Kanai. 2018. “Mediating Neoliberal Capitalism: Afect, Subjectivity and Inequality.” Journal of Communication 68(2): 318–326. Gill, Rosalind and Akane Kanai. 2019. “Afrmative Advertising and the Mediated Feeling Rules of Neoliberalism.” In M. Meyers (ed.), Neoliberalism and the Media (1st ed., pp. 131–146). London: Routledge. Gill, Rosalind and Shani Orgad. 2015. “The Confdence Culture.” Australian Feminist Studies 30(86): 324–344. Gill, Rosalind and Christina Scharf (eds.). 2011. New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilroy, Paul. 2013. “‘… We Got To Get Over Before We Go Under…’ Fragments for a History of Black Vernacular Neoliberalism.” New Formations 80–81: 23–38. Giroux, Henry. A. 2015. Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed. Abingdon, OX: Routledge. Grugulis, Irene, Chris Warhurst and Ewart Keep. 2004. “What’s Happening to ‘Skill’? In Chris Warhurst, Irene Grugulis and Ewart Keep (eds.), The Skills that Matter (pp. 1–18). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Rosalind Gill Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Henderson, Margaret and Anthea Taylor. 2019 Postfeminism Down Under: The Australian Postfeminist Mystique. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Hesmondhalgh, David and Sarah Baker. 2011. Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Hochschild, Arlie. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley /London: University of California Press. Illouz, Eva. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Kanai Akane. 2015. “WhatShouldWeCallMe? Self-branding, Individuality and Belonging in Youthful Femininities on Tumblr.” M/C Journal 18(1): 1–3. Keller, Jessalynn and Maureen E. Ryan (eds.). 2018. Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture. New York: Routledge. Lazar, Michelle M. 2017. “‘Seriously Girly Fun!’ Recontextualising Aesthetic Labour as Fun and Play in Cosmetics Advertising.” In Ana Sofa Elias, Rosalind Gill, and Christina Scharf (eds.), Aesthetic Labour (pp. 51–66). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Littler, Jo. 2017. Against Meritocracy. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Lynch, Meghan. 2011. “Blogging for Beauty? A Critical Analysis of Operation Beautiful.” Women’s Studies International Forum 34(6): 582–592. McNay, Lois. 2009.” Self as Enterprise: Dilemmas of Control and Resistance in Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics.” Theory, Culture & Society 26(6): 55–77. McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. McRobbie, Angela. 2015. “Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times.” Australian Feminist Studies 30(83): 3–20. Mears, Ashley. 2014. “Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work, Gender and Beauty.” Sociology Compass 8(12): 1330–1343. Murphy, Rewa. 2013. (De)Constructing “Body Love” Discourses in Young Women’s Magazines’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Victoria: University of Wellington. Nash, Meredith. 2014. “Picturing Mothers: A Photovoice Study of Body Image in Pregnancy.” Health Sociology Review 23(3): 242–253. O’Neill, Rachel. 2018. Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Orgad, Shani and Sara De Benedictis. 2015. “The ‘Stay-at-home’ Mother, Postfeminism and Neoliberalism: Content Analysis of UK News Coverage.” European Journal of Communication 30(4): 418–436. Ouellette, Laurie and James Hay. 2008. Better Living through Reality TV. Oxford: Blackwell. Paxton, Susan J. 2014. Evidence, Understanding and Policy: A Perspective from Psychology. Presented to the Body Image Summit, Government Equalities Ofce, London. Accessed https://www.gov. uk/government/publications/body-confdence-a-rapid-evidence-assessment-of-the-literature Ringrose, Jessica and Emma Renold. 2010. “Normative Cruelties and Gender Deviants: The Performative Efects of Bully Discourses for Girls and Boys in School.” British Educational Research Journal 36(4): 573–596. Ringrose, Jessica and Valerie Walkerdine. 2008. “Regulating the Abject: The TV Make-over as Site of Neo-liberal Reinvention toward Bourgeois Femininity.” Feminist Media Studies 8(3): 227–246. Rottenberg, Catherine. 2018. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scharf, Christina. 2016. “The Psychic Life of Neoliberalism: Mapping the Contours of Entrepreneurial Subjectivity.” Theory, Culture & Society 33(6): 107–122. Tasker, Yvonne and Diane Negra (eds.). 2007. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tyler, Imogen. 2011. “Pregnant Beauty: Maternal Femininities under Neoliberalism.” In Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharf (eds.), New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity (pp. 21–36). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Widdows, Heather. 2018. Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Winch, Alison. 2013. Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Winch, Alison. 2015. Brand Intimacy, Female Friendship and Digital Surveillance Networks. New Formations 84: 228–245. Wissinger, Elizabeth. 2015. This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour. New York: New York University Press.

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3 BEAUTY AND CLASS Helen Wood

Introduction The body is a key site of social calibration, where symbolic markers draw the boundaries of social hierarchies. The classed body is not only a telling sign of access to wealth and economic resources, but it is also a signifer of labor and toil, a site for social distinctions of taste, and most importantly a key means of communicating social “value” and therefore also a site of struggle and contestation. The classed body is also always a racialized body and key intersections are threaded together by the varying intensities of “respectability politics”: the struggle for oppressed groups to claim some access to legitimate citizenship while being subject to the governing logics of propriety that function as structures of power and exclusion. Beauty cultures are at the heart of these struggles: as Jacques Ranciere reminds us, “Politics, before all else, is an intervention in the visible and the sayable” (2010: 37). In this entry, I will show how histories of the symbolic production of bodies, through colonialism and the production of the bourgeois individual direct the way in which beauty cultures and regimes still fgure in the ongoing battles of social regulation. We move through the related formations of classifcatory systems, taste cultures, forms of expertise, and questions of respectability politics. But we end with the possibilities of transgression and the reframing of classed bodily “excesses” as politicized (if not political) acts of hyperbole in the media frame.

Classical and grotesque bodies Dominant Western standards of beauty can be traced from ideals about what constitutes the “classical” body as framed in Renaissance culture and art. Many of our contemporary classifcatory struggles of which bodies do, and do not, hold value are underpinned by boundary markers between the “classical” and the “grotesque” body – where the classical body is associated with transcendental aesthetic and ethereal efects, while the grotesque body belongs to the earth, bound to animalistic connotations. In Mary Russo’s key (1995) text The Female Grotesque she draws out these distinctions: The images of the grotesque body are precisely those which are abjected from the bodily canons of classical aesthetics. The classical body is transcendent and monumental, 19

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closed, static, self-contained, symmetrical, and sleek; it is identifed with the “high” or ofcial culture of the Renaissance and later, with the rationalism, individualism, and normalizing aspirations of the bourgeoisie. The grotesque body is open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and changing; it is identifed with non-ofcial “low” culture or the carnivalesque, and with social transformation. (Russo 1995: 8) These descriptions outline classed boundary distinctions that are also operationalized at a political level as they help to formalize bourgeois ideas of morality. Cast outside the frameworks of “normal,” alternative bodies then deserve approbation and must carry shame. In Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s (1986) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, the slum living conditions of the poor in the nineteenth-century city afectively shaped the determination of their bodies as “grotesque” where dirty and diseased bodies threatened to pollute the health and purity of the middle classes. Stallybrass and White (1986) suggest that these bodies are “transcoded” as they literally become the “dirt” and “disease” of their existence. Therefore, historically, while the lumpenproletariat were actually marginal to forms of production, they became central to a potent symbolic imaginary in the formation of middle-class normalizing values, justifying their moral superiority and by extension their power. Ideals of Western beauty have tended to replicate these moral grounds of subject formation, whereby appearances are coded to connote ideas of propriety, which help to justify the inequalities generated in the political/economic realm.

Te formation of taste The formation of the bourgeois subject therefore as a controlled, contained and future-oriented singular subject is the product of a broader project of middle-class personhood (Skeggs 2004). French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1987, 1984) provides us with the broad understanding of the ways in which alternative forms of capital (that is, as well as the economic) help to produce these class distinctions in subject formation. Bourdieu outlines the use of cultural capital as access to higher forms of culture that are also institutionalized through education. Social capital refers to the resources based on connections, networks, and memberships, which reinforce social groups and help individual advancement. Symbolic capital refers to processes of legitimation, whereby certain forms of culture and social practices are endorsed and institutionalized – they carry enough symbolic power in order to be capitalized upon and converted into economic capital. Therefore, for Bourdieu, people are distributed in overall social space according to the volume, composition, and weight of their forms of capital, which, in turn, grants them alternative trajectories through social space. Resources such as culture and language, for instance, are important in this context and help to solidify and cement the formations of class, which operate alongside access to economic wealth. The most cited of Bourdieu’s comments is the statement that taste “classifes the classifer” (1984:  6) through which he argues that the declaration of one’s taste physically establishes one’s social location in a world. Beauty cultures are therefore a minefeld of these taste calculations, which visibly send clues and help to establish our place in social hierarchies. In Debra Gimlin’s (2002) ethnographic work in a number of diferent sites for body-work, she discussed the classed operations at work at the hair salon. Diferent hair styles were themselves associated with symbolic

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markers of class and with moral ideas of propriety associated with the middle-class clients’ professional status. One client says of her shorter professional style: It’s a sort of conservative accountant look. It’s not tacky; it’s a classy hairstyle. It looks more like a nice middle-class hairdo, you know than say, a fashy hairdo. It’s feminine without being too frilly. [It’s] feminine and simple. (2002: 37) We can see here the operationalization of taste capitals and professionalized resources, which literally draw on references to the “classical” as opposed to the “tacky” – or consider the other usual epithet – the “trashy” which also quite literally evokes a reference to waste. Keeping things simple, self-contained, and sleek is read as more “neutral” because of the way it draws its dominance in hierarchies of style and class, against the more vulgar, “secreting” (circa. Russo 1995) – read “fashy” – aesthetic appreciations of other women.

Beauty service workers not cultural intermediaries Beauty services themselves, like the hair salon, are spaces where class distinctions are practiced in every day contexts. In Bourdieu’s work, he discusses how forms of expertise in cultural hierarchies generate a group of experts that we might refer to as “cultural intermediaries”: those who help to mediate and legitimate the “right” tastes – fashion gurus, interior designers, wine sommeliers, and so on, who have access to legitimated (often institutionalized) forms of knowledge about taste. You might think that the hairdresser is such an “expert,” given their closeness to prevailing shifts in fashion and style. However, in Gimlin’s (2002) study the working-class women working in the hair salon more often could not advise their clients’ tastes. This is because their considerable knowledge of fashion and taste was not “legitimated” by any other forms of capital – economic, social, or cultural. Their profession deemed them more as “service” workers rather than arbiters of cultural taste and their role was more to ofer the middle-class women emotional services that undermined their claims to any higher forms of cultural capital. Beauticians are called on to bring an emotional component to their beauty work, to nurture their clients and, in this nurturing, to subjugate their professional expertise and knowledge to the clients’ wishes. (2002: 18) We might refect upon how this might difer when particular forms of masculinity or “metropolitan” capitals of the city are brought to bear on hair dressing as “art” and who can and who cannot operationalize the cultural capital of hair knowledge. As Lisa Adkins (2001) fnds in the feminization of the workplace, men can more easily operationalize feminine skills as capital to their advantage. But this points to an important cleavage in the beauty industry between those with the fnancial and cultural means to access all it has to ofer and those who work in its largely poorly paid and increasingly more precarious jobs. Many hair stylists rent chairs in salons, must own all their own equipment, and their employment is often low-paid and precarious. Sociological work on beauty salons has demonstrated the “emotional labor”

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(Hochschild 1983) that is involved in working in the body-service industry, where this “invisible labor” goes largely unrecognized or undervalued in terms of its professional status (Sharma and Black 2001). Similarly, at the intersections of class and ethnicity, Asian women have been overrepresented as beauty workers as they have been coveted as docile workers whose “nimble fngers” make them both desirable and exploitable (Ong 1987). Miliann Kang’s (2003) ethnographic work charts the experience of Korean immigrant-women nail technicians in three diferent types of salon in New York. She analyzes how the “feeling rules” expected relate to the classed and raced location of the clients, with middle-class white women’s expectations in an uptown salon relying on an attentive emotional service while Black women in a downtown salon rely on a more expressive labor related to the role of the salon within the community. For Kang, “patterns of body labor conform to the racial and class positions of the customers and the associated feeling rules that defne their service expectations” (2003: 835), thereby pointing to the role of the beauty industry in the uneven patterning of the global service economy.

Respectability politics Working-class women are therefore more often to be found as beauty “service” workers and not as valued and legitimated cultural intermediaries with greater access to professionalized forms of cultural and beauty capital. This lack of access to legitimated forms of culture has been entrenched through the development of the middle-class civilizing mission in the entwined histories of the development of capitalism and colonial expansion. Dominant colonial ideologies attempted to secure the social stability of the nation through ideals of the virtuous woman – where dangerous, exotic, sexualized “others” threatened white middle-class purity. Constructions of Black sexuality as excessive and deviant were established through rationalizing models in science and medicine in attempts to legitimate colonial expansion. Such conceptualizations, entwined with the fgure of the working-class prostitute, were used as markers against which the middle classes could physically and morally distance themselves (Ware 1992). In response then, through developing forms of social work and social intervention policies, members of the working class have learned to “tell themselves” in appropriate and morally “proper” ways in order to access forms of poor relief (Steedman 2000). In other words, the experience of class has often been characterized by the need to appear morally respectable in order to appear more “deserving” of social aid and support. Living with the continual judgement of others produces the internalized afect of ‘shame’ for the working-classes. Respectability therefore is still a key site of struggle in beauty politics. As Bourdieu argues, the body is a ubiquitous signifer of class – taste, toil, dispositions, and culture are all written on the body and the “respectable” body in Western culture is always white, de-sexualized, hetero-feminine, and usually middle class. In Beverley Skeggs’ (1997) ethnographic work with working-class women, she describes the way in which they self-consciously monitored their appearance to appear “respectable.” For example, Theresa in her study says: You know you see them walking round town, dead fat, greasy hair, smelly clothes, dirty kids, you know the type, crimplene trousers and all, they just don’t care anymore, I’d never be like that. (1997: 81) 22

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The women in Skeggs’ study are all conscious to show that they have not “let themselves go” and have regulated and maintained their bodies in order to appear “respectable.” Theresa here talks of an understanding of not wanting to look “tarty” (sexualized) and is reaching for a more middle-class “elegant” look that carries more value in the social milieu. Engaging in respectability politics comes from understanding that you already occupy a position of social inferiority and must therefore show deference to a white middle-class norm. This is also a racialized politics where Other bodies are bound to political stigmatization. Maxine Craig (2002) discusses how the politics of hair for African American women works through similar frames of respectability politics. Untreated “nappy” hair was seen to signify a lack of grooming and self-work, and various treatments, some of them painful, were undertaken in privacy as “natural” hair was interpreted as shameful and could not be worn in public. Eurocentric beauty ideals, which included straightened hair and lightened skin, were therefore morally coded with middle-class ideals of respectability, chastity and purity. The emergence in the 1960s in the United States of a “Black is Beautiful” imaginary as part of civil rights activism saw the taking back of the beauty of Afro hair, seeking to replace ideas about respectability with self-respect and solidarity. These struggles over respectability politics continue into contemporary beauty politics and we shall return to them later.

Neoliberal beauty projects – the denial of structure and of labor Contemporary beauty work is saturated with respectability politics, stemming from older violent projects to maintain symbolic authority through the Enlightenment and colonialism. In many ways, powerful distinctions have actually only intensifed in relation to the contemporary political project of neoliberalism whereby “the self ” as a site of personal responsibility is foreground. In late-capitalist Western societies, the state has relinquished some of its duty of care and repealed post-war welfare contracts with its citizens, replacing them with the market as the central determining force of social progress. Under these broader economic and political regimes, it becomes one’s own personal project to continually remake and reorient oneself around the needs of the market to survive, rendering any failure an intensely personalized faw of the individual. We can see the ideology of self-responsibility clearly in the beauty industry – take the famous quote by beauty tycoon Helena Rubenstein, “there are no ugly women, only lazy ones” cited in Adams (1989: 37). This presumes an “ideology of democracy” of beauty (Banner 1983) where idealized beauty standards are open to all if only one puts in the requisite labor. This type of mantra is writ-large across contemporary media beauty culture and advertising because it serves the interests of capital with the message to work harder, purchase the right products, develop the right skills and adopt the right advice, in order to secure a more “legitimate” place in the world. Consider the make-over regimes of media culture in recent decades whereby (mostly) women are encouraged through all manner of magazine advice and television programs to transform their bodies, through the right clothes, hair and cosmetics or even literally through surgery, to reveal their “true self.” The paradoxes of these appeals to an “authentic self ” via aesthetic change in the service of neoliberal citizenship are drawn out in Brenda Weber’s (2009) book Makeover TV. It is the project of transformation itself that claims to be authentic drawing on pedagogies of shame to reinforce (mostly) women’s deferral to traditional beauty “norms.” Gender “normalization” is achieved by erasing markers of class and race: signs on 23

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the body of hard work, lack of access to healthcare, alternative tastes and style, and so on, which must be removed or “neutralized” in the interests of the transformative “reveal.” […] gender is here an umbrella term that imports “normative” values of race, ethnicity, and class. Before-bodies marked by class and racial/ethnic signs or by indicators of excessive or inappropriate sexuality, as well as by other “aesthetic deformities,” are refashioned in the name of both confdence and beauty. (2009: 168) As with the development of many of these narrative tropes of self-development and personal discovery across television, the sociological issue is that they serve rhetorically to deny the structural conditions of class and race that are habitually written onto bodies. Other key authors have theorized this type of television programing via a Foucauldian framework where bodies are governed by disciplinary techniques as part of a surveillance culture (Ouellette and Hay 2008). In Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault describes how the “spectacle” was a dominant form of control of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where criminal bodies were put on display as a warning for others. Recent decades of reality and lifestyle television operate in a similar fashion – focusing on fat, unhealthy, un-groomed, and decaying bodies – as warnings as to what the undisciplined body might become. These programs (for example, The Biggest Loser, What Not to Wear, Ten Years Younger, You are What You Eat) make the social outcomes of lack of access to capital, a healthy diet, health care services or legitimate taste, into spectacular and highly moralized sites of personal failure. Shame in these programs therefore operates as a powerful ideological form of control that lands on some bodies more than others and in the process helping to secure consent for pulling back social support (Ouellette and Hay 2008). This is important to contemporary class politics because, despite claims that the shift to individualization moves us away from class as a key structuring category (Giddens 1991; Beck 1992), these representations actually mirror the ways in which class formations are now being re-drawn and made spectacular. This is because the focus on the individual is an ideological move that obscures the inequalities in cultural and economic resources that are required to service these self-projects in the frst place (Wood and Skeggs 2008). Beverley Skeggs and I have documented some of the breadth and range of measuring failure in reality television. The use of mirrors, weights, and scales; polling people’s age; scrutinizing people’s taste; and the televised technique of the “judgement shot,” all work to draw the audience into an evaluative framework, generating “tournaments of value” and breathing new life into the legacies of respectability politics (Skeggs and Wood 2012). Sofa Elias and Rosalind Gill (2018) discuss the way in which the latest intensifcation of regimes of self-monitoring and measurement are to be found in the massive rise in the development and use of beauty apps. Apps encourage us to evaluate the minutia of our appearance, which includes fltering and lightening skin, as neoliberal market-pressures dovetail with proto-feminist appeals to get what we want in order to achieve “success.” They argue that beauty apps reinforce a metricized gaze: Their force and signifcance, we contend, go far beyond the (rather typical and familiar) constructions of “beauty” or “female desirability” they encode and promote – the youthfulness, slimness and racialization would ofer few surprises to critical observers. (Elias and Gill 2018: 74) The current algorithmic intervention into the profling of beauty seems only to intensify Eurocentric ideals of middle-class beauty mapped in previous centuries. 24

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Te abject white body as social threat Most of what we have discussed so far has concentrated on how beauty ideals and norms constrain and moderate classed and racialized bodies. Grotesque bodies are marked by their diference to the classical body especially when they seem to transgress established forms of respectability. In the United States, the narrative of “white trash” quite literally relates to waste populations and the term “white” is used here to establish the distance between “whiteness as purity” as in classical regimes. In Nancy Isenberg’s (2017) book White Trash she establishes how the British class system transferred into the colonizing project of America using slaves and indentured servants to appropriate and make good the land and in so doing, left populations behind as waste: Waste men and waste women (especially waste children, the adolescent boys who comprised a majority of indentured servants) were an expendable class of labourers who made colonization possible […] waste people wasted away, fertilizing the soil with their labor while fnding it impossible to harvest any social mobility. (Isenberg 2017: 56–57) Therefore associating taste with “trash” quite literally speaks to these colonial histories. Working-class tastes are often associated with a “white trash” aesthetic that is assembled through a series of “vulgar” choices: choices that lack refnement and are too garish, too loud, too much and therefore deemed “unruly” (Rowe 2011). As we saw earlier in the hair salon, “big hair” and long hair are often associated with a lower-class aesthetic connected to an excessive femininity. In make-over TV shows, bright clothes, large jewelry and excessive make-up is “tamed” – so much that working-class women have even been a device for the televisual “make-under” (Pickering 2014). But what could possibly be so threatening about those choices? Part of the political issue is that these tastes are so visible. Not only do they seemingly display a lack of moral restraint and self-control in public space but they also attempt “fashiness” whereby trinkets of fake-gold and cheap pleather lay bare the class system. It is this over visibility that is most threatening because it punctures the myth of meritocracy and the American Dream. It reminds the middle class of what might happen if they fall and therefore becomes most potent during times of economic downturn: “poor white trash is the ghastly spectre which haunts the white middle class” (Newitz and Wray 1996: 70). In the United Kingdom, a specter of the racially marked white underclass has emerged which is some distance from the normalized construction of whiteness as “neutral” in the manner previously described by Richard Dyer (1997). Rather, here whiteness becomes an ethnic category through which lower-class groups are deemed anachronistic and backward (Lawler 2012). This emerges in the fgure of the “chav”: usually a young white woman, who lives in social housing, is sexually promiscuous having a number of children by diferent fathers, and wears fake designer clothing (often a tracksuit) and jewelry. Imogen Tyler (2008) charts how she became a vilifed fgure of disgust and scorn across popular culture through which anxieties about female sexuality and “racial mixing” were played out in the public imagination. The “chav” has recently borne the brunt of ideologies of shame and blame for a “Broken Britain” in which they cannot contribute to the healthy (read prosperous) future of the nation. Given the powerful emphasis upon preserving these social distinctions, lower-class visibility and styling becomes threatening when it begins to challenge social hierarchies. The “chav’s” appropriation of designer labels, in attempts to claim cultural capital, was so offensive to bourgeois culture, that certain labels were banned in high-end bars and clubs in 25

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order to keep out the “rif-raf.” The high-end designer label Burberry was so symbolically damaged by its appropriation as part of the “chav uniform” that it sought out an expensive rebrand periodically shifting away from its signature tartan styling. Anne Graefer (2014) describes how “orange” celebrities became subject to ridicule for their association with poor white women who could not aford luxury holidays and instead sought-out extensive tanning regimes which were so excessive that they only reinforced their inferior class location. The issue of celebrity is interesting, because if the celebrity produced reveals its relationship to social mobility, then they must walk a line to show that they can “pass” as a middle-class subject in order to avoid retribution. As Tyler and Bennett (2010) argue: The celebrity chav is a fgure who has become rapidly and unexpectedly wealthy or publicly visible – typically through reality television – and is represented as constitutionally unable to manage this change of circumstance with dignity, sang froid or prudence. […] Chav celebrity is constituted by this incompetent or unsuccessful [middle-class] impersonation, and the exposure of this failure is a key source of pleasure in celebrity culture. (2010: 379–381, emphasis in original) Therefore, when classed bodies like these actually do gain access to economic wealth, they are punished for being undeserving of such mobility, because poverty has already been marked as an individualized moral, rather than social, failing. Jefrey A Brown (2005) discusses the case of Anna Nicole Smith a working-class Playboy girl who inherited a 450 million dollar fortune by marrying oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II. He describes how her potential mobility marked her out as a particular threat to the American class system. When she moved away from her playgirl image, gaining weight, the daring visibility of her excessive sexualized body with enlarged breasts made her tabloid fodder and a symbol of national disgrace. But what was most troubling and obscene was the way in which Smith sought out the spotlight and faunted her excess; she was deliberately and very publically transgressing the boundaries of bourgeois normalization. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, the female grotesque can also be a powerful ideological fgure of subversion of gender and beauty norms. According to Brown (2005: 81–82): As a liminal character standing outside the borders of proper cultural behaviour, the female grotesque can examine, criticize, parody and ideally force people to question the supposed naturalness of social expectations, both physical and behavioural. This transgressive potential is simultaneously threatening and provoking and can be interpreted as a symbolic gesture of defance and a refusal to take on board the afect of shame that moral frameworks of respectability insist upon.

Making a spectacle of yourself in the media Across popular culture, there is a struggle at hand between being “made” spectacle and “making a spectacle” of yourself. It is here that I want to turn to some potentially more agentive features of lower-class aesthetics as they are visible across popular culture. Labels such as “white trash” and “chav” can sometimes be used by those subjects themselves in protest to push back against those “respectability politics” that are supposed to shame. Anne Graefer (2014) discusses the ways in which the participants of the reality television program Jersey Shore playfully parade the codes of “abject whiteness” that can be reveled in by viewers 26

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in more carnivalesque ways: “the wrong skin tone can, for instance, be seen as much more subversive and rebellious than the idealized bronzed skin because it does not satisfy white, bourgeois middle-class demands” (Graefer 2014: 119). Extending this further, I have argued that in the British version of Jersey Shore, Geordie Shore we can understand the codes of excess as a more politicized form of hyperbole. In that show, much is made of the extensive work that goes into grooming the excessive aesthetic beauty codes of the white working class: the long mermaid hair extensions, excessive tans, pumped bodies, nail art, facial fllers and so on. This serves to highlight, rather than hide, the amount of self-work that goes into producing the aesthetic. We can see this as a reaction to the neoliberal imperative of self-work that is played out and visualized for the camera of reality television. These actions draw on changes visible on the streets of the industrialized cities of the north of England, whereby hair-curlers, once covered as a sign of lack of access to the hair salon, are now worn proudly by day as signs of the amount of labor one puts into achieving the required look. Media visibility itself constitutes new forms of labor whereby looking into the lens, produces aesthetic and faunted acts of excess. This can be seen as a response to downward social mobility whereby young people face a crisis of possibility where their futures are increasingly uncertain as they struggle to manage their conditions of precariousness (Berlant, 2011). In this context, on Geordie Shore, set in the post-industrial North of England, normative codes of working-class propriety, respectability and shame are reworked in the sight of media visibility as one of the depressingly few routes to some form of ill/legitimate subjectivity. (Wood 2017: 13/14) Now that cameras are everywhere, some of these normative codes of “neutral” beauty must be rethought for the lens. Consider the prevalence of make-up “contouring” which was once solely for the stage or the flm set. This more self-conscious revealing of the artifce of beauty against the “naturalness” of the classic body begins to reframe and perhaps react to the surveillance techniques embedded in the digitization of the media industry and beauty apps. If these are elements of “drag,” through which the parody begins to reveal and contest the limits of the middle-class normative, then perhaps it is through drag that classed beauty can claim some more legitimated media capital and display its unashamed face.

Related topics Democratizing looks Neoliberal beauty

References Adams, Abby. 1989. An Uncommon Scold. New York: Simon and Shuster. Adkins, Lisa. 2001. “Cultural Feminization: ‘Money, Sex and Power’ for Women.” Signs 26(3): 669–695. Banner, Lois. 1983. American Beauty. New York: Knopf. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984 [1979]. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. “What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32: 1–17.

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Helen Wood Brown, Jefrey A. 2005. “Class and Feminine Excess: The Strange Case of Anna Nicole Smith.” Feminist Review 81: 74–94. Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen: Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race. New York: Oxford University Press. Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London: Routledge. Elias, Ana S. and Rosalind Gill. 2018. “Beauty Surveillance: The Digital Self-monitoring Cultures of Neoliberalism.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 21(1): 59–77. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age Cambridge: Polity. Gimlin, Debra. 2002. Body Work: Beauty and Self-image in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Graefer, Anne. 2014. “White Stars and Orange Celebrities: The Afective Production of Whiteness in Humorous Celebrity-gossip Blogs.” Celebrity Studies 5(1–2): 107–122. Hochschild, Arlie. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Isenberg, Nancy. 2017. White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America. London: Atlantic Books. Kang, Miliann. 2003. “The Managed Hand: The Commercialization of Bodies and Emotions in Korean Immigrant–Owned Nail Salons.” Gender & Society 17(6): 820–839. Lawler, Steph. 2012. “‘White like Them’: Whiteness and Anachronistic Space in the Representation of the English Working Class.” Ethnicities 12(4): 409–426. Newitz, Annalee and Matthew Wray. 1996. “‘What Is White Trash’? Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the U.S.” Minnesota Review 47: 57–72. Ong, Aihwa. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ouellette, Laurie and James Hay. 2008. Better Living through Reality Television. Oxford: Blackwell. Pickering, Jo. 2014. “Classy Looks and Classifcatory Gazes: The Fashioning of Class in Reality Television.” Film, Fashion and Consumption 3(3): 195–209. Ranciere, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury. Rowe, Karlyn, K. 2011. Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers Redefning Feminism on Screen. Austin: University of Texas Press. Russo, Mary. 1995. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York: Routledge. Sharma, Ursula and Paula Black. 2001. “Look Good, Feel Better: Beauty Therapy as Emotional Labour.” Sociology 35(4): 913–931. Skeggs, Beverley. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage. Skeggs, Beverley. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge. Skeggs, Beverley and Helen Wood. 2012. Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, Audience and Value. London: Routledge. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Steedman, Carolyn. 2000. “Enforced Narratives: Stories of another Self.” In T. Cosslett, C. Lury and P. Summerfeld (eds.) Feminism and Autobiography: Texts Theories and Methods. London: Routledge, pp. 25–39. Tyler, Imogen. 2008. “‘Chav Mum Chav Scum’: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain. Feminist Media Studies 8(1): 17–34. Tyler, Imogen and Bruce Bennett. 2010. “Celebrity Chav: Fame, Femininity and Social Class.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 13(3): 375–393. Ware, Vron. 1992. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, Brenda. 2009. Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship and Celebrity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wood, Helen. 2017. “The Politics of Hyperbole on Geordie Shore: Class, Gender, Youth and Excess.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(1): 39–55. Wood, Helen and Beverley Skeggs. 2008. “Spectacular Morality: Reality Television, Individualisation and the Re-making of the Working Class.” In D. Hesmondhalgh and J. Toynbee. (eds.) The Media and Social Theory. London: Routledge, pp. 177–193.

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4 TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST APPROACHES TO BEAUTY Oluwakemi M. Balogun and Gracia Dodds

Introduction This chapter examines beauty in the context of transnational feminist approaches. Transnational feminist scholars interrogate beauty in connection to global inequality, international relations, and geopolitics. This perspective pays close attention to the relationship between nationalism and globalization. Nationalism refers to identities, representations, and practices that mark inclusion and divisions within the nation-state. Globalization encompasses the fow of goods, ideas, and people across borders. Beauty is an important vector in linking the daily intimate experiences of people on the ground to larger macro shifts in national cultural politics and the international political economy (Faria 2014; McCracken 2014). Perceptions of beauty are highly contextual and are shaped by and reshape the fow of material capital and variable symbolic discourses. For example, beauty ideals prompted in popular media images may be accepted or contested by individual consumers. Defnitions of beauty change over time and serve multiple purposes including state interests, corporate investment, and political action. A major debate within the feld is the tension between institutional infuences and individual agency that govern engagement in beauty practices. On the one hand, there is an assumption that multinational corporations spurred by a capitalistic logic play an outsized role in beauty culture, such that societal pressures dictate a narrow set of homogenizing beauty standards. These conventions are presumed to be largely determined by the West, due to their hegemonic control of the political economy and cultural trends. This perspective has operated under the assumption that women largely remain passive victims of beauty exploitation within the global industry. In particular, non-white women are consistently portrayed as consuming carefully structured images of beauty that serve as a source of corporate proft gain. From this perspective, globalization remains associated with the domination of Eurocentric beauty ideals with little room for resistance. On the other hand, others emphasize beauty as sites of play, pleasure, and survival, in response to structural forces (Cepeda 2018). This research focuses on the nuances of cultural infuence within national beauty economies, common patterns in the beauty trade, and how bodies serve as manifestations of global cultural capital (Balogun and Hoang 2018). This

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paradigm recognizes the role of beauty in de-centering established nodes of globalization by acknowledging the rising importance of countries outside of the West in shaping beauty ideals. Beauty regimes fuel contingent power relations in the nation-state, shaped by race, gender, and class. This chapter examines specifc examples like beauty pageants, plastic surgery, skin-lightening creams, and media representations to tackle these debates.

Embodied nationalism Embodied nationalism is a concept that shows that gendered bodies are important to maintaining national boundaries through specifc representations and practices. Nationalist discourse can promote certain gendered forms of bodily display and deportment, and stigmatize others, thereby defning insiders and outsiders of a nation. Historian Michael Edward Stanfeld’s scholarship in Colombia (2013) juxtaposes two opposing ways of embodying a nation: feminine beauty and the masculine beast. Feminine beauty has representational power for the nation-state by promoting its positive attributes, while the beast represents the social problems that plague the country including political corruption, violence, and discrimination. Transnational feminist theorists have emphasized how the use of women as symbols of the nation contributes to defning the identity of a nation. Narratives expressing national history and identity often rely on images of particular ways of performing and displaying femininity. These images inevitably include beauty along with other traits deemed feminine. Women’s bodies hold the “burden of the national allegory” (Shohat and Stam 1994: 287). These scholars developed the woman-as-nation thesis, one component of how bodies function as symbols of embodied nationalism, to understand how women and femininity serve as national symbols to shore up the cultural and political boundaries of the nation-state (Yuval-Davis 1997). Examples such as Lady Liberty, Mother Russia, and Mother India serve as national icons that are personifed as women to represent freedom, morality, and strength. These symbols have larger meanings that speak to independence, sacrifce, and nation-building. Nationalism is about establishing belonging through shared common identity and values, but also exclusion, confict, and jingoism, by separating out those considered outsiders. Moreover, beauty serves as a cultural mirror that refects the development and trajectory of a nation. When national elites seek to reposition a nation within global hierarchies, they may use beauty. As representatives of a nation, beautiful women can serve the purpose of “fashioning” the nation and giving it a “makeover” by reworking the national image (Cepeda 2018: 128; Elledge and Faria 2020; Faria 2014). Through tropes of feminine national representation, women’s bodies are used to rectify poor national imagery. By championing physical attractiveness, charm, and desirability, nation-states tap into the possibilities of crafting new national narratives. Nation branding is a form of soft power and image marketing that establishes national scripts and molds international relations (Aronczyk 2013). Nation branding helps to, articulate a more coherent and cohesive national identity, to animate the spirit of its citizens in the service of national priorities, and to maintain loyalty to the territory within its borders … the goal of nation branding is to make the nation matter in a world where borders and boundaries appear increasingly obsolete. (Aronczyk 2013: 3) Successful rebranding eforts help to refurbish a nation’s poor image domestically and on the global stage. 30

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Images of feminine beauty can remake and elevate a nation’s image and strengthen national pride. For example, Maria Elena Cepeda discusses the notion of “global Colombianidad” through beauty (Cepeda 2018). Common assumptions about Colombia portray the country through a stigmatized lens centered on crime, violence, and political corruption. Through a transnational virtual project that analyzes social media memes featuring Colombian beauty queens and pop icons like Shakira, Cepeda argues that these images work to rebrand the nation. Similarly, Oluwakemi M. Balogun (2020) argues that entrepreneurs and politicians within the beauty pageant industry rely on beauty queens to redeem Nigeria’s poor reputation. By promoting the charm, beauty, and hospitality of beauty contestants, stakeholders invest in the possibilities of promoting positive attributes of the country. In the global beauty pageant circuit, beauty contestants are viewed as stand-ins for the nation that represent communal ideals and values. Mainstream beauty pageants meld idealized femininities and aesthetics. Fans and boosters place beauty queens on a pedestal as aspirational role models who embody gender, race, and class norms. Beauty competitions include limited forms of diference, which they present in a non-threatening manner that celebrates neoliberal choice and empowerment (Banet-Weiser 1999; Tice 2012). Beauty contestants aim to enhance and perfect their bodies in ways that translate into cultural citizenship and national worth on a global stage. As Cepeda notes, “a country’s beauty queens ofer a conduit for achieving and expressing worth among the community of nations” (123). In many Latin American and Caribbean countries like Colombia, Venezuela, and territories like Puerto Rico, beauty pageants are viewed as national resources, produced for export, in order to grow the tourism industry and attract global investment. In the case of Puerto Rico, beauty pageants and sporting events are the only arenas in which they are recognized as a nation, since it remains a territory of the United States.

Phenotypes, stereotypes, and competing beauty ideals Beauty ideals rely on racialized tropes within a transnational context. Like the nation, beauty relies on marketing to promote certain services and products. Nations foster their tourism industries, exported goods, and national assets, often times relying on beauty to endorse these enterprises. For individuals, physical attractiveness is a commodity that garners resources, prestige, and mobility. A system of intersecting racial and class inequalities that calculates diferential worth based on phenotypic racial hierarchies (for example, skin color) and cultural capital such as speech, etiquette, and comportment assigns varied values based on dominant assessments (Craig 2002; Hunter 2002, 2011). For example, beauty ideals in Latin America toggle between a recognition of racial mixture (mestizaje) while advocating blanqueamiento (whitening) through the celebration of light skin, blonde hair, and blue or green eye color. Latin American media images also infuence Latinos in the United States who rarely see beauty presented through the bodies of Afro-Latina or Indigenous women. In the United States, popular representations of Latinas typically rely on a specifc look that registers as non-white in the United States yet still privileges Eurocentric standards. Popular culture scholars have dubbed this the “Latina look,” which emphasizes a curvy body, heavy makeup, and tanned skin (Báez 2018; Ovalle 2011). This “Latina look” collapses a large and complex region into narrow beauty constructs like bright lipstick, long hair, and fashy jewelry (Molina-Guzmán & Valdivia 2004). These images, called tropicalism by scholars, often reinforce ideas regarding Latinas’ inherent sensuality, relying on stereotypical homogenous tropes of Latinidad, which eface national and ethnic diferences. 31

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For example, the 2020 Superbowl half-time show performed by pop icons Jennifer Lopez and Shakira received mixed reviews. On the one hand, commentators admired them for their talent and celebrated the representation of Latinas on a popular platform. On the other hand, their show faced backlash for defying American “family values” for baring their scantily clad bodies and performing sexy dance moves that critics viewed as objectifying and inappropriate. Bodies are a prime platform for projecting ideas about possible threats to national unity through discourses about family, civilization, and security. Both performers have also been held up as examples of promoting Eurocentric standards through lighter hair while maintaining crossover appeal through promoting the acceptance of specifc body parts like wider hips and larger buttocks. The term crossover indicates that transnational cultural fows contain competing standards of beauty. The international success of stars like Jennifer Lopez and Shakira arises largely from their conformity to the “Latina look,” but also from the way in which their appearance bridges diferent ways of seeing beauty. Embodied nationalism, as well as debates over beauty ideals, is sustained beyond the borders of a nation through diasporas and immigration. Geographer Caroline Faria (2010) analyzes pageants and the beauty industry as forms of transnational connection to Sudan. In the Miss South Sudan beauty contest held in the United States, participants remain critical of mainstream international and continental beauty competitions like Miss World and Miss Africa for preferring lighter skin contestants. By promoting specifc hairstyles, clothing, and makeup, participants promote a “natural look” that eschews wigs, tight attire, and heavy cosmetics in order to reject foreign culture and embrace “authenticity.” These inclinations also map onto the production of a new South Sudan nation during a moment of intense change and transition post confict. South Sudan is associated with Christianity, Sub Saharan Africa, and darker skin, while North Sudan is oriented toward Muslim Arabs, North Africa, and the Middle East. Through discourses of diference and solidarity projected onto the pageant, understandings of beauty, race, faith, and nation intertwine. Through contestants’ natural hairstyles, traditional outfts, and dark skin tones the Miss South Sudan contest signals pride and solidarity. Contestants navigate gendered nationalist sentiments through expectations that they will pursue professional careers and be good mothers. They receive messages from judges and audience members that encourage them to marry and have children with South Sudanese men, exposing them to pronatalism, a policy that urges people to increase the birthrate for the sake of the national population. Through codes of respectability South Sudanese beauty queens represent communal obligation, political reform, and the collective identity of a newly formed nation. Beauty politics often refect debates about the relative values of tradition and modernity, which in themselves are not pure oppositional categories. For the diasporic audiences that follow the Miss South Sudan pageant, contestants’ hairstyles convey political meaning related to colonialism and national pride. Styles deemed natural are praised, while those that include hair extensions remain hotly contested as an erosion of local values. Meanwhile, the import of hair extensions and other cosmetics from other parts of Africa to South Sudan remain an essential part of reworking a “modern” self-image highly valued by citizens (Faria 2014). These examples illustrate the multiple meanings and complex contradictions attached to beauty.

Colonialism and imperialism Beauty politics come into play in the context of imperialism and nationalist movements. Beauty has been used as a form of civilizational discourse to promote racist ideologies about the superiority of colonizers and the inferiority of the colonized. Black women’s beauty in particular has 32

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been central to constructions of race. For example, during the 1800s Saartjie “Sara” Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from Southern Africa branded the “Hottentot Venus” was exhibited to audiences throughout Europe including in London and Paris. Observers described her body as excessively voluptuous and as an anomaly. Her body was hypersexualized in order to depict Africans as primitive and Europe as advanced. Baartman emerged as a symbol of Black feminine beauty and at times contrasted with the Venus de Medici as an emblem of classical Western aesthetics in European iconography (Hobson 2018; Strings 2019) to substantiate the supposed racial and sexual diference between these groups. Sociologist Zine Magubane (2001) further nuances this analysis of Baartman’s impact by noting that there was no singular representation of her. She emphasizes that in England her reception took on the form of deliberations about the legal justifcations for slavery while in France arguments about the scientifc basis for gender and race dominated. While embedded in specifc contexts, similar dynamics have prevailed in the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries. Western understandings of freedom, equality, and liberation rely on beauty to maintain division between groups (Nguyen 2011). When Laura Bush gave the President’s weekly radio address in November 2001, the frst time by a frst lady, she included messages that justifed the US invasion of Afghanistan due to the repression women suffered under the Taliban regime. Her speech included the following statement, “the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fngernails for wearing nail polish” (Bush 2001), folding beauty into the rhetoric of humanitarianism. In 2003, the non-governmental organization Beauty without Borders partnered with experts to establish a beauty school to foster self-esteem and autonomy in girls and women in Kabul, Afghanistan. These tactics placed alongside educational initiatives were seen as measures to rebuild the nation anew (Nguyen 2011). In the post-Taliban era, the everyday beauty practices of young upwardly mobile women also signal growing national tensions. Cosmetic use and clothing choices often spark public debate that generates moral panics. These beauty practices are either associated with societal progression or cultural erosion. Anthropologist Julie Billaud (2015) complicates these binaries by detailing the complex ways in which the women from Afghanistan she observed navigated between competing discourses of modernity and modesty to manage their reputations and elevate their status in ways that allowed them to fashion their own identities.

Global political economy Beauty refects important shifts in the global political economy and commercial enterprise. At frst glance, the beauty industry may be one of the more prominent displays of global economic power and a major engine of globalization. Experts have traced the expansion of the global circulation of beauty products to the 1880s and estimate that consumers spend over $330 billion (USD) annually on beauty-related products ( Jones 2010). Skin-lightening cosmetics are a multi-billion dollar industry, with most manufacturers based out of the West and marketing their products to women of color (Glenn 2008). The use of skin-lightening creams around the world remains a hotly debated practice, which refects the polarized positions introduced at the beginning of this chapter. Common conceptions of the use of skin-lightening creams assert that these cosmetics are utilized as a means to embody colonial ideals of beauty. Those who fnd themselves in this camp argue that colonialism established whiteness as essential to a beauty ideal that categorically excluded Black women and other women of color, and that as a result of continued Western imperialism, non-Western women use skin-lightening creams in an attempt to adhere to those standards. However, academics have also indicated that the advertising of skin lighteners is much less overt than clearly defning the Western woman as the archetype of beauty. 33

Oluwakemi M. Balogun and Gracia Dodds

Some studies focusing on skin tone suggest that a more nuanced approach to understanding the symbolism of lighter skin is needed. Conventionally light skin is automatically equated with a desire to attain a Western appearance. Through a focus on the beauty ideals that dominate the Vietnamese sex industry, Kimberly Kay Hoang (2014) writes about women altering their bodies to signify global economic changes that can be telling in relation to embodiment, femininity, and agency (2014). Hoang’s research indicates that Vietnamese sex workers look to other countries in East Asia like Korea, Japan, and China for beauty ideals, consuming their popular media in the form of magazines, pop music, and flms. Preferences for lighter skin are not uniform and shift to ft various purposes like client desires. The use of skin lighteners is framed as a way of highlighting Asian modernity and high social status, rather than emulating Western standards. Indeed, most Vietnamese sex workers denigrate Western bodies as too fat, messy, and outdated. Hoang uses the concept of “technologies of embodiment” to describe practices like using skin-lightening creams and plastic surgery, which dramatically shift the looks of female sex workers. The research focuses on how the Vietnamese sex industry caters to diferent groups of men who difer in their racial backgrounds and class status. In one tier of the industry which attracted Western budget travelers, sex workers intentionally darkened their skin through the use of bronzers and tanning to appeal to exoticized expectations of Asian beauty. In the highest niche of the industry, wealthy Asian businessmen often gifted sex workers with additional money to cover cosmetic procedures like nose jobs and eyelid surgery. These clients would visit these bars to socialize with other wealthy men and strike business deals. They would acknowledge the large amounts of money they provided for such surgeries as a way of indicating Vietnam’s changing status in the global economy from a poor country to a rapidly growing one. Representations of women in beauty pageants bring local and regional debates to light regarding ethnicity, class, race, and culture, among other identity categories. Contestants are expected to represent a community as a whole, thereby naturalizing binaries of “good” and “bad” representations of culture, and smoothing over internal and diasporic conficts. Judges select beauty pageant winners because they perceive that they embody a common understanding of a respective country’s gendered understandings of nationalism. However gendered understandings of nationalism may not be fully shared and are the focal point for conficts about national identities. Pageants, for instance, place regional geopolitics into conversation with larger, more global institutions (Cohen, Syoeltje & Wilk 1996). The project of promoting nationalism is closely tied to economic ambitions for contest sponsors and contestants. Pageant winners often rise in social and class status, frequently gaining access to the political elite and international travel (Balogun 2012). Women who win beauty pageants are utilized as ambassadors of an economically mobile lifestyle, indicating in an international context that countries outside of the United States and Europe are economically viable sites of power. One looming controversy remains in understanding beauty pageants as a site of empowerment and nation-building, or as a means of exploitation and manipulation. Debates remain regarding whether most pageant contestants gain or lose by participating in contests. The existence of such debates speaks to the popular belief that beauty is a vehicle for women to gain economic mobility on an international scale. Questions regarding whether ordinary women, communities, or the nation beneft from specifc beauty practices, which are promoted, or eschewed by diferent contests are also important for understanding the relationship of the beauty industry to the global political economy. Common questions that underlie these debates ask who benefts from the sales of beauty-related products, whether consumers can have agency within the beauty industry, 34

Transnational feminist approach to beauty

and whether beauty can serve as a site of empowerment or exploitation. Meeta Rani Jha describes what she understands as “consumer feminism,” which is described as something that “employs feminist themes of empowerment to market products, directing consumerism’s focus on individual consumption as a primary source of identity, afrmation, and social connections” ( Jha 2016: 62). Jha describes the chronic push and pull of institutional forces and individual choice within the global economic market. This shallow understanding of agency pushes us to think critically about why we engage in beauty practices and what that can tell us about our relation to nation and class. There is a wealth of research on representations of beauty as sites of national economic wellbeing (Balogun 2020; Banet-Weiser 1999) but further research is needed to complicate our understanding of transnational beauty norms. These questions aid in understanding the role of consumerism on an international scale, as well as how women’s bodies map onto understandings of a nation’s economic standing.

Related topics Beauty pageants and border crossings Body aesthetics & beauty politics in 21st century Africa: case of the Sudan

References Aronczyk, Melissa. 2013. Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Báez, Jillian. 2018. In Search of Belonging: Latinas, Media, and Citizenship. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Balogun, Oluwakemi. 2012. “Culture and Cosmopolitan: Idealized Femininity and Embodied Nationalism in Nigerian Beauty Pageants.” Gender & Society 26 (3): 357–381. ———. 2020. Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Balogun, Oluwakemi and Kimberley Kay Hoang. 2018. “Political Economy of Embodiment: Capitalizing on Globally Staged Bodies in Nigerian Beauty Pageants and Vietnamese Sex Work.” Sociological Perspectives 61 (6): 953–972. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 1999. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity. London: University of California Press. Billaud, Julie. 2015. “Cosmetics, Fashion and Moral Panics: The Politics and Ethics of Beauty in a Girl’s Dormitory in Kabul.” In H. Ahmed-Ghosh (ed.) Asian Muslim Women: Globalization and Local Realities. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 205–224. Bush, Laura. 2001. “Radio Address by Mrs. Bush,” 17 November 2001. https://georgewbush-whitehouse. archives.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011117.html Cepeda, Maria Elena. 2018. “Putting a ‘Good Face on the Nation’: Beauty, Memes, and the Gendered Rebranding of Global Colombianiad.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 46 (1/2): 121–138. Cohen, Colleen Ballerion, Beverly Stoeltje, and Richard Wilk. 1996. Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power. New York: Routledge. Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race. New York: Oxford University Press. Elledge, Annie M. and Carolina Faria. 2020. “‘I Want To … Let My Country Shine’: Nationalism, Development, and the Geographies of Beauty.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38 (5): 1–20. Faria, Caroline. 2010. “Contesting Miss South Sudan.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 12 (2): 222–243. ———. 2014. “Styling the Nation: Fear and Desire in the South Sudanese Beauty Trade.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (2): 318–330. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2008. “Yearning for Lightness: Transnational Circuits in the Marketing and Consumption of Skin Lighteners.” Gender & Society 22 (3): 281–302.

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Oluwakemi M. Balogun and Gracia Dodds Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2014. “Competing Technologies of Embodiment: Pan-Asian Modernity and Third World Dependency in Vietnam’s Contemporary Sex Industry.” Gender & Society 28 (4): 513–536. Hobson, Janell. 2018. Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge. Hunter, Margaret L. 2002. “‘If You’re Light You’re Alright’: Light Skin Color as Social Capital for Women of Color.” Gender & Society 16 (2): 175–193. ———. 2011. “Buying Racial Capital: Skin Bleaching and Cosmetic Surgery in a Globalized World.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 4 (4): 142–164. Jha, Meeta. 2016. The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism, and the National Body. New York: Routledge. Jones, Geofrey. 2010. Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry. Oxford and New York: Oxford University. Magubane, Zine. 2001. “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus’.” Gender & Society 15 (6): 816–834. McCracken, Angela. 2014. The Beauty Trade: Youth, Gender, and Fashion Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press. Molina-Guzmán, I. and A. N. Valdivia. 2004. “Brain, Brow, and Booty: Latina Iconicity in U.S. Popular Culture.” Communication Review 7 (2): 205–221. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. 2011. “The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36 (2): 359–383. Ovalle, Priscilla Peña. 2011. Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Stam, Robert and Ella Shohat. 1994. “Contested Histories: Eurocentrism, Multiculturalism, and the Media.” In D.T. Goldberg (ed.) Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 296–324. Stanfeld, Michael Edward. 2013. Of Beasts and Beauty: Gender, Race, and Identity in Colombia. Austin: University of Texas Press. Strings, Sabrina. 2019. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. New York: New York University Press. Tice, Karen. 2012. Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageantry, Student Bodies, and College Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage Publications.

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5 PHILOSOPHY AND THE POLITICS OF BEAUTY Monique Roelofs

Beauty is an object of powerful desire and afection, something we are sharply aware of as admirers of singers, dancers, actors, buildings, lakes, sports, movies, and other works of art. It is able to inspire a whole spectrum of emotions that includes exultation and horror alike and shades even into coldness and indiference. For example, in the Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche (2001) takes delight in beauty as a product of a creative, afrmative, and artistic attitude toward life but inveighs against it as a masquerade covering up the terrible and hideous. Much as one loves a given kind of beauty, there is a tendency to be repelled – in a manner refecting the love – when it is deployed in the service of an objectionable project such as injustice or cruelty (although aesthetic practices can reorient and play on these emotional vectors). Embedded in its social, personal, and material settings, beauty carries political contents. Think of the care, freedom, or intentionality embodied in a beautiful gesture (or, for that matter, of its attractive awkwardness or nonchalance). Moreover, beauty awakens a range of political efects. The beautiful pose struck by a performer may project dignity and arouse curiosity, which can confer a vivid aura on a social problem or existential dilemma and cause it to matter to us. Both as a feature of everyday life and as an artistic achievement, beauty enacts a complex politics. This politics is substantially embodied in the experiences beauty makes possible as a concept, quality, and value ( Johnson 1998; Cheng 2000; Roelofs 2014). It also centrally inheres in the cultural categories that help to shape and come by their form in these experiences. A further determinant of beauty’s politics is the manner in which these experiences feed into the web of social and material relationships within which they arise (Adorno 1997; Benjamin 2003; Roelofs 2014). This chapter begins by considering these factors. As we probably sense when in the grip of the quality’s pull, beauty calls on our emotions and perceptions. It invites us to come up with imaginative and narrative framings for what we observe. These solicitations, we shall fnd, endow beauty with transformative powers, which play out at the level of the individual and the collective. Yet besides occasioning changes, beauty produces enduring conditions for the people or societies who engender or confront it. As I will indicate, we organize stable yet mutable normative attachments around beauty, upholding conceptually, corporeally, and materially encoded valuations that tie into systemic forms of social diference. Indeed, the signifcance of the beautiful and its apparent antitheses such as the grotesque and the horrifc must be 37

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regarded as being of a piece with the norms that govern our day-to-day surroundings, structure bodily existence, and regulate our bonds with people, things, and places. Artists Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu, among others, I will show, interlace beauty with values such as the grotesque and the horrifc with which it has often been contrasted. Thereby they disrupt and rethink conceptual binaries that carry expansive gendered, racial, and colonial meanings. We will see how their works invite us to refect on the cultural constellations beauty mediates and to contemplate alternative ones. Drawing on critical scholarship on beauty’s racial and gender politics, I will continue by highlighting beauty’s moral, political, and aesthetic ambivalence and the relational operations attendant on its mobilization of historically entrenched binaries – characteristics it shares with the feld of the aesthetic more broadly, of which it is a part (Roelofs 2014). In ending, I signal implications for a conception of cultural agency by reference to newly emerging technologies as sites of aesthetic address.

Beauty’s callings on afect, perception, narrative, and the imagination We turn to beauty in celebration, commemoration, melancholy, and distress. A tonic, a consolation, and an opening to new possibilities, as many a movie ending will tell us, beauty can bring to awareness the sense of something of intense value that carries on outside of ourselves. Realizing a meaningful connection with a phenomenon that exceeds the subject, the beauty experience may ofer the observer of a beautiful object a moment of joyfulness that is shared with others or allow her to fnd sustenance in confrontation with the absurd – the senselessly evil or hurtful. Beauty can pick up on and underscore an emotional tone, say of respect, regret, liveliness, or elation. It can resonate with feelings of humility, determination, fightiness, hope, rejection, or patience. It can bring us to see the world in a diferent light. Beauty is a quality that we are prima facie inclined to let in, willing to be touched by it, even when we are rushing from chore to chore, in despair, or fatigued. It invites us to fashion an imaginative or narrative framing for the perceived object, as it gets us to dwell on what we see, hear, or otherwise apprehend. Providing materials for the creation of such inventive elaboration to the one who revels or sufers, the beautiful can circumscribe a place for pleasure or loss while also beckoning toward points beyond given plentitudes of meaning or their erosion. The world we hear, see, touch, and move in can take on an altered appearance. Doris Salcedo’s sculpture A for de piel (2011–2012) (Figures 5.1 and 5.2) gives us a hint of the narrative trajectories beauty can instigate. A dark-red sheet made of rose petals threaded together by hand, the work is an homage to the absent, tortured body of a nurse, who was murdered during the decades-long war in Colombia between the US-backed government and the FARC. The work afectively calls forth a history of state-sponsored and transnationally inficted violence. It bears witness to an event, disrupting a failure of mourning on the part of the society and a lack of acknowledgment of loss. Salcedo’s memorial makes the suffering of an individual person present to the viewer in the imagination, while also shrouding this person – holding her in an embrace that protects and honors. The branching ribs in the petals recall the veins visible through human skin. The patterning of the breakable thin leaves evokes the fne-grained textures of a human body. The tapestry’s gentle folds resonate with the subtle blood fows coursing through existence in the fesh. A fragile beauty poignantly underscores the violation that has occurred. Salcedo’s sculpture animates the imaginative, narrative, and afective operations of the beautiful in a political act of commemoration. Beauty’s solicitations have caught philosophers’ notice. Julia Kristeva and Arthur Danto attribute a transformative role to the beautiful in the face of loss. Kristeva (1989: 99–100) 38

Philosophy and the politics of beauty

Figure 5.1

Doris Salcedo, A for de piel, 2011–2012

Rose petals and thread. Approx. 246 7/8 × 433 1/16 in. (627 × 1100 cm). © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Ben Westoby).

Figure 5.2

Doris Salcedo, A for de piel, 2011–2012

Rose petals and thread. Approx. 246 7/8 × 433 1/16 in. (627 × 1100 cm). © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Ingrid Raymond).

describes beauty’s ability to “remake nothingness” and instigate a passage through “nonbeing.” Through this process, beauty transfgures loss “in order to make it live.” She notes that the beautiful can bear witness to a transcendence of “the grief of being apart.” Analogously, Danto (2003: 111) regards beauty as a catalyst: it allows “tears to fow” and enables us to put loss into “a certain philosophical perspective.” He observes that beauty softens “grief into sorrow.” A collective dimension arises: experiences of beauty, for Danto, aford the sad person and her sadness a place in communal bonds. Elucidating this social aspect from a psychoanalytical viewpoint, Kristeva alerts us to beauty’s ability to forge a location within language, representation, and history, or, in other words, a place in which we can situate ourselves vis-à-vis ourselves and other people (42, 184, 204–205). 39

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The intersubjective or public aspect of the beautiful lends itself to mournful and festive occasions alike. Orchestrating processes of the imagination, Kristeva contends, beauty affords a jubilatory amplifcation of possibilities and a surplus of meaning (1989: 100–102). Indeed, beauty’s power to pique our attention and keep us enthralled joins people together in social bonds that can support a whole array of feelings. A conspicuous presence at parties and celebrations, beautiful bodies and things function as what Sara Ahmed (2014: 27) calls “moody signs”: they operate as objects that inspire and prescribe afects, such as optimism, cheer, even happiness. For example, a beautiful garden, public square, city hall, music, parade, and attire encourage our participation in joyful admiration for a distinctive social order. And yet, beauty can at the same time reverberate with diferent facets of our experience, such as a latent anxiety, a steadfast rebelliousness, a skeptical magnanimity, or a tranquil refectiveness. While we exert a measure of control over beauty’s afective productivity, it can also carve an unexpected path through our experience, sidestepping, complicating, or derailing its predicted or normalized efects. Touched by something beautiful that strikes us in the course of our daily lives, we can undergo a shift of emotions: from tedium to excitement, from a carefree sensibility to nostalgia, from a heavy, matter-of-fact attitude to a sense of contentedness. Besides inciting such ephemeral afective swings, beauty fuels extended afective projects. It functions as an object of taste and distaste, of idealization and abjection, of fetishism and surrender, of limit and transgression (Kristeva 1982; Bataille 1986; Plato 1989; Hume 1998; Kant 2011). In these capacities, it draws on involved conceptual framings and constitutes a site of enduring normative attachment. The valuations that beauty holds and represents and the categories that it embodies lock into social dynamics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and coloniality, among other intersecting variables (Irigaray 1985; Du Bois 1986; Wollstonecraft 1992; Armstrong 1996; Cooper 1998; Cheng 2000, 2011, 2019; Craig 2002; Benjamin 2003; Fanon 2008; Davis 2010; Inés de la Cruz 2014; Roelofs 2014; Taylor 2016). An exacting component of cultural pedagogies, beauty carries out persistent social, epistemic, and political roles. We can neither disentangle ourselves from these workings in a single-minded fashion nor set them on a straightforward path toward justice and the truth (Schor 1987; Adorno 1997; Cheng 2000, 2019; Roelofs 2014). Beauty carries shades of meaning that reverberate expansively with the persons we are and imagine or desire to be, or not to be. It is extensively intermeshed with the conceptual frameworks we employ. Its signifcance and its power over us are grounded in the norms governing the actions, practices, artifacts, buildings, institutions, histories, and geographies around which everyday social existence constellates. We carry abiding if evolving attachments to the beautiful and to qualities with which it has historically been contrasted, such as the sublime, the grotesque, the ugly, the horrifc, the disgusting, the formless, the detail, and the comic (Shaftesbury 1964; Schiller 1967; Burke 1990; Wollstonecraft 1992; Hume 1998; Kant 2000, 2011), yet with which it is also often entwined (Schor 1987; Korsmeyer 2006; Roelofs 2014; Ross 2014). Along with these other – partially antithetical, partially converging or fusing aesthetic features and experiences – beauty is encoded in our corporeal being and our relationships to other people and things (Benjamin 2003; Roelofs 2014).

Beauty’s ties to the grotesque and the horrifc: Walker, Mutu, and the disruption of cultural binaries The work of Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu ofers examples of beauty’s interweaving with the grotesque and the horrifc. Walker’s double drawing Daylights (after M.B.) (Figure 5.3), made in 2011, marks the imbrications of modernist aesthetics with primitivist musical idioms 40

Philosophy and the politics of beauty

Figure 5.3

Kara Walker, Daylights (after M.B.), 2011

Graphite and pastel on paper. Left side: 95.75 × 72 inches (243.2 × 182.9 cm). Right side: 91.75 × 72 inches (233 × 182.9 cm). © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers.

and movement vocabularies, while at the same time highlighting the ties of this aesthetics to a history of dismemberment of the Black body. Encoded in a racialized legal system that used to pair up presumed ofenses with body parts, and inscribed in complexly gendered splits among Black people, the terrorization of the Black body appears to be a practice on which white actors can count and from which they can draw a proft while disavowing its presence. The white man in a suit crossing the border between the two panels of the drawing – a business man or perhaps a politician – can confdently turn his back on the violent spectacle among Black characters in the right panel. Here, in the company of a stunned male, a woman who is at once stridently walking and sitting down holds up another woman’s arm as a target for an ax-wielding man, whose arm, in turn, is bound by a rope to an object outside the frame of the drawing. This ensemble carries an energetic thrust in the direction of the performers on the left and casts its shadows on a path treaded by another fgure, who is walking away from the scene, about to leave the frame, a suitcase in hand. At the point of convergence of the stark shadows, the prominent designs decorating the drums, the frenetic twirl delineated by the musicians and dancer, and the forceful forward movement projected by the group on the right, Josephine Baker, carrying a portmanteau adorned with a modernist circle and triangle, epitomizes a genre of artistic and bodily beauty that sets of for new horizons. The female artist, in Walker’s drawing, enters a futurity bound via partially phantasmagoric, partially historical lineages to a past of colonial violence and subjugation. One hand frmly gripping her suitcase, the other touching herself, taking charge of herself, and what is more, almost literally holding her fate in her own hands, Baker ventures to leave her two alter egos behind – the woman who is being mutilated and the exoticized dancer, whose hands remain bound – even if these spectral fgures and the lengthy shadows they cast encroach closely on her, carrying their aesthetic passions and forms well into the present. Beauty, in Daylights, unfolds in close entwinement with the horrifc and grotesque. In a drawing that may be assumed to initiate a dialog with Max Beckmann’s lithograph The Night (1919) and his painting by that title (1918–1919), and that establishes formal and thematic similarities 41

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with other works by the New Objectivity artist (for example, the paneling, an aspect of seriality, the theme of the artist), we see how aesthetic enlightenment and its shadows maintain mutually formative relations with one another. The drawing sets forth questions for the viewer: How and to what extent can beauty shed its bonds with the qualities of the horrifc and the grotesque? What place does the artist or performer give to the complex, aesthetically, morally, and politically fraught historical idioms and modes of address that beauty embodies? Modernity appears to be fundamentally interlaced with an aesthetic that it purports to diferentiate itself from. These vocabularies and forms exercise generative roles within the structures of desire coagulating around the beautiful for Black and white, male and female subjects (along with subjects of other races and genders). Walker signals the intricate trajectories of desire that we enact in the realm of beauty and its apparent antitheses. Kenya-born artist Wangechi Mutu’s series of collages Histology of Diferent Classes of Uterine Tumors (2006) likewise intermingles beauty with the grotesque and the horrifc. Consider Cancer of the Uterus (Figure 5.4). Black glitter, pasted onto a nineteenth-century medical print and fanked by white fur, ominously presses against the contours of the image, suggesting the irrepressible spread of disease. The shiny Black grit and wooly fuf eradicate the distinctions

Figure 5.4 Wangechi Mutu, Histology of the Diferent Classes of Uterine Tumors (detail), 2006 Digital prints and mixed media collage. 23 × 17 inches – Each, Portfolio of 12. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

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between the diferent, fnely parceled-out components of the organs heightened by the anatomical illustration. The stardust and fuzz destroy the individuation of the vessels and receptacles and their distinctive contributions to the body’s healthy functioning. Despite  – and doubtless partially because of – this unstoppable takeover of anatomical physical order, there is beauty. We encounter it in the exquisite consciousness actualized by the eyes, one sad, the other meeting the viewer in a more cool and outspoken manner. We fnd beauty in the ohso-human articulation of the lips, the upper one glossy and glamorous, the lower one subdued. We see it in the defnition of the delicate, to the layperson somewhat enigmatic compositional shapes of the medical diagram that beckon to us with their folds and movements, their bulges and tunnels, their channels and receptors, suggesting a wondrous hairdo or headdress, perhaps even involving the transmission and reception of sound as if through a futuristic speaker and headphone. The person we can imagine to be wearing the stardust/fuzzy mask achieves a powerful visual presence, making a direct connection with the viewer through her candid gaze and her feshy lips with their creases, their striations, their vibrancy. The collage – as well as the series as a whole – turns a Western inventory of diseases into a representational frame harboring materials and forms evocative of both Black African and white femininity. Mutu deploys an epistemic model that posits stark dualities between pathology and health and between whiteness and blackness as a ground for an aesthetics that disrupts these binaries. The work also blurs the boundaries between interiority and appearance, being and masking. The mixed mode of address that combines cartography with portraiture upends the distinction between documentation and fashion, embodiment and artifce, the particular and the typical, the singular and the repeatable. Transgressing these oppositions, the collage reconceptualizes racialized and colonially marked divides between Africa and Europe and the global North and South, which underpin judgments of beauty and its ostensible antitheses of the horrifc and the grotesque.

Twentieth- and twenty-frst-century theories: beauty’s mobilization of aesthetic dualities and its ambivalent racial and gender politics Feminist scholarship of the twentieth and twenty-frst century illuminates the complex, socially embedded ways in which beauty captivates us, exercises its inexorable power in the culture, and realizes its meanings (see, for example, Brand 2000, 2013; Colebrook and Felski 2006; Moreno Figueroa and Rivers-Moore 2013). Three features that mark beauty’s aesthetic operations are particularly signifcant to these procedures. The aesthetic is a feld where a range of infuential, historically engendered cultural dualities establish bridgings and incite reciprocal interconnections (Dewey 1934; Schiller 1967; Fanon 2008; Kelly 2014; Roelofs 2014) – some of which we have already encountered in Walker’s and Mutu’s works. These include the oppositions between reason and emotion or sensory experience, mind and body, public and private, individual and general, detail and whole. Neither a realm of goodness, nor a feld of morally and politically pernicious activities, furthermore, the aesthetic is a fundamentally ambivalent domain that simultaneously houses valuable and problematic meanings. Lastly, the aesthetic is a plane of relationality, that is, a feld in which we persistently engage in the practice of creating relationships among people and among people, things, and places (Roelofs 2014). These three characteristics of the aesthetic can be seen to be especially salient to feminist studies of beauty that refect critically on race in intersection with other categories of diference. Ann duCille examines the commodifcation of racial and ethnic diference in the form of what are presumed to be multicultural varieties of Barbie. Ofering consumers marketable signs of similarity and diference, the dolls invite experiences of looking “like-me” and 43

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“unlike-me” (1996: 15–16, 22, 36–37). Rather than a transformative critical vision of beauty, an alternative to white fgurations, or a positive construction of Black body images, however, duCille describes a capitalist trade in racial and gender signifers and the identifcations and disidentifcations they make possible, an enterprise that maintains white dominance and sells racial sameness glossed as diference. This commerce, in her view, calls for an ongoing critique of the ideologies of race and gender that inform both “the ‘like me’ of Barbie” and the doll’s dismissal as a “threat to womankind.” Noting that “hazard lies less in buying Barbie than in buying into Barbie,” she sounds a caveat lector as well as a caveat emptor: “let the buyer and the reader beware” (58–59). For duCille, we can conclude, the doll represents neither the good lauded by the toy industry nor the bad decried by its detractors. Instead, we encounter here an instance of beauty’s moral, political, and aesthetic ambivalence (Roelofs 2014). Other recent work also speaks to this polyvalent character of the beautiful. Like duCille, Anne Anlin Cheng raises doubts about the possibility of rectifying beauty’s racial and gendered operations by countering problematic devaluations of bodily appearances with positive aesthetic appraisals (Cheng 2000). Reclaimed Black beauty, Cheng notes, preserves a logic of idealization that posits an inverse, while also retaining a contrast with whiteness. Accordingly, it spawns reiterated denigrations within blackness itself, a process she fnds exemplifed by Toni Morrison’s character Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye, whose perceived ugliness allows the beauty of her peers to shine (196, 198, 201). To comprehend the depth of beauty’s productivity in the feld of race and gender, Cheng draws attention to its dynamic of identifcation and disidentifcation. Placing a “confounding confrontation with the ‘self ’” at the center of the beauty experience, she associates beauty with a process of diferentiation between the standard and the exotic, the “cultural ‘norm’” and the “cultural ‘other’” (202–204). Yet the procedures of distancing and approximation that beauty propels can also muddy these distinctions and dislodge racial codes. Indeed, beauty outstrips the political and social values through which we attempt to harness its workings, or as Cheng puts it, to “acculturate” it (210). Here what she considers beauty’s distinctive functioning in the realm of race and gender comes into view: “It is,” she argues, “at the initiatory, mobile, and continually contested site of loss and lack that beauty as value and as perception collides and transforms most powerfully into ideals of gender and race” (210). With respect to the values of morality and politics, we see that beauty for Cheng is an ambivalent state, a condition that cannot stably be assigned to self or other, familiar or strange, good or evil, virtue or vice, justice or injustice. The ambivalence the beauty experience owes to its internal dynamism leaves its mark in a yet further array of aesthetic and political efects, ones that also implicate race and gender in a fundamental manner. In Barbara Johnson’s reading, Toni Morrison’s novels Sula and Beloved reveal a dual fguration of the beautiful. In one sense, beauty implies a distance that can hold of difcult experiences. It allows the spectator to detach from the spectacle of a gruesome or inadvertent death or other kinds of shocking occurrences in a manner that interrupts the connection between event and afect, precludes action, or even elicits pleasure. Interested and disinterested perception approximate each other closely in these cases, which are legion in Sula. Interested in the horrifying situations befalling before their eyes, the characters Sula and Nel watch in disinterested fashion: they make no attempt to intervene and on occasion even experience delight ( Johnson 1998: 84–85). These two apparent antonyms, which have historically held so much importance in conceptualizations of beauty and the aesthetic, become virtually indistinguishable. The straddling of this distinction resonates with the novel’s straddling of another distinction, the contrast between home and the uncanny. Johnson suggests that Sula’s invocation of the home is so compelling to its reader because the novel conceives of it as “always already its own other,” that is, as uprooted and uncanny (75). 44

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Its dimension of detachment notwithstanding and presumably precisely in virtue of that dimension, beauty closely approximates threat and destruction: it is intimately entwined with the very site of pain it paradoxically might be able to put at a remove. Johnson writes, Morrison makes the aesthetic inextricable from trauma, taboo, and violation. It is no accident that the plantation from which the infanticidal slave woman has escaped in Beloved is called “Sweet Home.” Sethe, the former slave, muses again and again about her memory of Sweet Home as aesthetically beautiful, and about that fact as a deep violation. (86) The beauty experience carries and brings to articulation profound racial and gendered forces and injustices in the society that it is Sethe’s and the reader’s lot to contend with. Probing the complexities of these strains, Morrison insists on the morally and politically ambivalent status of the beautiful. Beauty’s ambivalence assumes a dynamic aesthetic form in the two novels, which, as we have seen before, readily absorbs and transfers into apparently antithetical aesthetic experiences. In the critic’s words, “Morrison runs – indeed courts – the risk of transforming horror into pleasure, violence into beauty, mourning into nostalgia” (86). Traversing these uncanny aesthetic reversals, the novels, Johnson points out, embroil the reader in the “uncomfortable ways” in which “the domain of the aesthetic is both profoundly political and impossible to make politically correct” (86). Johnson proposes that Sula takes as its central theme the contrast between a distanced aesthetic contemplation of forms and the realm of “rapport” or connectedness (83–86). She notes that the terms “aesthetic” and “rapport,” labeled “college words” by Nel and hence marked (prior to the ubiquity of online education) as external to the “home” (82), both contain silent letters. In the sonic realm, I would argue, silence, a quality that Freud connects with the production of uncanny efects (Freud 1955: 229, 246–247, 252), bears an afliation to the realm of the secret and intimate that he maintains lends itself to conversion into the uncanny – the unheimlich/unhomely. In a comment on his subsumption of his account of the uncanny under the rubric of aesthetics, Johnson speculates that “it is as though what turns the home unheimlich cannot be fully understood without a passage through the aesthetic” ( Johnson: 85). What kind of passage this precisely entails – besides his essay’s guarded, “half-involuntarily” ushered foray into fction and the arts, away from Freud’s presumed disciplinary home (Freud: 219, 251) – she leaves somewhat obscure. I would like to push this association between the aesthetic and the uncanny further. Morrison’s texts, I suspect, ofer hints of an even tighter interplay between the aesthetic and the uncanny than Johnson intimates. Recall the capability of the aesthetic to bridge oppositions (such as public and private, subject and object, particular and general), and the expediency with which it carries out various kinds of relational labor (Roelofs 2014). These resources and workings hold out a rich repertoire of uncanny strategies. Rather than raising as Johnson claims “the question of aesthetics versus rapport” or inviting us to contemplate how we might realize “rapport rather than aesthetics” (85–86; my emphasis) and thus reinforcing the opposition between these terms, Morrison’s interest/disinterest is in their entanglements. Her texts tread the uncertain, decidedly uncanny territory where beauty dislodges the very distinctions it gives center stage. It enters the scene as a relational operation that efects detachment no less than approximation, and inspires recognition (of home, of identity, of bondedness) as well as estrangement and unsettlement. Thus beauty 45

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uproots the very historical dualities it puts forth and employs. It does this as it shapes (and is itself shaped by) racial and gender positions along with other intersecting registers of social diference. Its relational operations, its handling of dualities, and its embrace of contrastive valuations conspire to carry out beauty’s intricate politics. Social categories and locations and the forms of situatedness and possibility they suggest are in motion. Although he would eschew the lexicon of relationality I fnd so useful, Fred Moten speaks suggestively to the manifold experiential complexities we are encountering: he recognizes a kind of beauty “that’s inseparable from the terrible, that’s too nasty to be sublime, too favorful to be tasteful, too syncopic to be fxed, too red, blur and black for things to persist in residence” (Moten 2017: 224). Indeed, the web of categories of which the beautiful is a part is evolving as artists and everyday actors make beauty do and mean new things.

New technologies as sites of address: beauty politics and cultural agency Contemporary technological conditions invite us to invent new forms of beauty as we address robots and newly designed living materials/organisms and they address us, yielding unprecedented norms, forms, and scenes of address (see Benjamin 2003; Corkery 2020; Roelofs 2020; Sokol 2020). Politically astute aesthetic refection and aesthetically discerning political deliberation will be crucial to the structures and scripts of address that we currently are and later will be bringing into being in this arena. For although technological, legal, medical, and corporate demands and possibilities make their aesthetic roles felt in a plurality of fascinating ways, they do not and should not govern aesthetic reality, which is far too multifaceted to allow for unilateral vectors of control. Of particular relevance in tackling the feld of queries that arises here is the polyvalent, multilayered, self-displacing aesthetic condition I have made beauty out to be in the above discussion.

Figure 5.5

Remedios Varo, Creation of the Birds (Creación de las aves), 1957

Oil on Masonite. 54 × 64 cm. © 2020 Remedios Varo, DeA Picture Library/Art Resource, New York, and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid.

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The unnerving coincidence of critical and oppressive potentialities in the aesthetic points to an intricate characteristic of processes of cultural transformation: wishing to efect positive social changes, human beings work to alter social structures that they at the same time inhabit. In other words, we seek to fashion alternatives within the very cultural setting in which we take part and that shapes us (see, for example, Irigaray 1993; Irvin 2017; Saito 2017). This disquieting situation calls for subtle aesthetic strategies of refraction and working through (Irigaray 1985; Adorno 1997; Roelofs 2014, 2020). A painting by Spanish-Mexican artist Remedios Varo (1908–1963) illuminates the coilings and turnabouts that mark this paradoxical state. In Creation of the Birds (Creación de las aves, 1957) (Figure 5.5), the labor of aesthetic creation involves the artist in procedures in which she distills, refracts, and recomposes materials and forces that she encounters in her surroundings (including her bodily self ), conferring novel forms on these elements and feeding them back into her environment. As theorists and everyday makers, observers, communicators, and sharers of beauty, we assume an at once dislocated and self-dislocating, and a partially self-and-other-made and partially self-and-other-(re)making position analogous to that of Varo’s artist: we inhabit an evolving constellation of aesthetic categories and meanings from which we absorb and to which we return energies in ongoing acts of metamorphosis.

References Adorno, Theodor W. (1997). Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hulot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ahmed, Sara (2014). “Not in the Mood.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory, Politics 82: 13–28. Armstrong, Meg (1996). “‘The Efects of Blackness’: Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54.3: 213–236. Bataille, Georges (1986). Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Benjamin, Walter (2003). “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Third Version. Selected Writings. Vol. 4. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and others. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brand, Peg Zeglin, Ed. (2000). Beauty Matters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2013). Beauty Unlimited. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Burke, Edmund (1990). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful [1757]. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cheng, Anne Anlin (2000). “Wounded Beauty: An Exploratory Essay on Race, Feminism, and the Aesthetic Question.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 19.2: 191–217. ———. (2011). Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2019). Ornamentalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Colebrook, Claire and Rita Felski, Eds. (2006). Feminist Theory 7.2 [A special issue on beauty]. Cooper, Anna Julia (1998). The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper. Ed. Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefeld. Corkery, Michael (2020). “Should Robots Have a Face?” New York Times, February 26. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/business/robots-retail jobs.html?action=click&module= RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article Craig, Maxine Leeds (2002). Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Danto, Arthur C. (2003). The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Peru, IL: Open Court. Davis, Whitney (2010). Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press. Dewey, John (1934). Art as Experience. New York: G.P. Putnam. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1986). “Criteria of Negro Art.” In Writings. Ed. N. Higgins. New York: The Library of America, 993–1002.

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Monique Roelofs duCille, Ann (1996). “Toy Theory, Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Diference.” In Skin Trade. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 8–59. Fanon, Frantz (2008). Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Freud, Sigmund (1955). “The ‘Uncanny’” [1919]. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Hume, David (1998). “Of the Standard of Taste” [1757]. In Selected Essays. Ed. S. Copley and A. Edgar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Inés de la Cruz, Sor Juana (2014). Selected Works. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Norton. Irigaray, Luce (1985). This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ——— (Ed.). (1993). “How Can We Create Our Beauty.” In Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Diference. Trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 107–111. Irvin, Sherri (2017). “Resisting Body Oppression: An Aesthetic Approach.” Feminist Philosophical Quarterly 3.4. Article 3. doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.4.3. Johnson, Barbara (Ed.) (1998). “‘Aesthetic’ and ‘Rapport’ in Toni Morrison’s Sula.” In The Feminist Diference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 74–87. Kant, Immanuel (2000). Critique of the Power of Judgment [1790]. Ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2011). Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime [1764]. Trans. Paul Guyer. In Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings. Ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 9–62. Kelly, Michael (2014). “Preface to the Second Edition.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Second edition. 6 Vols. Ed. Michael Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1: xxi–xxx. Korsmeyer, Carolyn (2006). “Terrible Beauties.” In Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 51–63. Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (1989). Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Moreno Figueroa, Mónica G. and Megan Rivers-Moore, Eds. (2013). Feminist Theory 14.2 [A special issue on beauty in Latin America and the Caribbean]. Moten, Fred (2017). Black and Blur: Consent Not to Be a Single Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2001). The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard Williams. Trans. Josefne Nauckhof and Adrian del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato (1989). Symposium. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruf. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Roelofs, Monique (2014). The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. (2020). Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and the World. New York: Columbia University Press. Ross, Stephen Davis (2014). “Beauty: Overview.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Second edition. 6 Vols. Ed. Michael Kelly. New York: Oxford University Press, 1: 333–340. Saito, Yuriko (2017). Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making. New York: Oxford University Press. Schiller, Friedrich (1967). On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters [1795]. Trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schor, Naomi (1987). Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen. Shaftesbury [Ashley Cooper, Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury] (1964). Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times [1711]. 2 Vols. Ed. John M. Robertson. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Sokol, Joshua (2020). “Meet the Xenobots, Virtual Creatures Brought to Life.” New York Times, April 3. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/science/xenobots-robots-frogs-xenopus.html?action= click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage Taylor, Paul C. (2016). Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Wollstonecraft, Mary (1992). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects [1792]. Revised edition. Ed. Miriam Brody. London: Penguin.

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6 PICKING YOUR BATTLES Beauty, complacency, and the other life of racism Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa

Introduction: beauty studies and its critiques Black anti-racist feminist approaches to beauty emerged to tackle a key debate within feminist theory. The debate can be simplifed around a set of moral imperatives. Either beauty is “bad,” superfuous and must be resisted, or it is “good,” a choice and a path to normality. The debate has tended to adopt one of two main competing feminist analyses: “beauty as a component of a structure of oppression and … beauty as an instrument of female agency” (Craig 2006: 164). Foundational academic work on beauty such as Iris Marion Young’s (1980) and Sandra Lee Bartky’s (1997) discussed “beauty work” as a disciplinary practice supervised by an allencompassing male gaze. Importantly, however, their subject was an unmarked woman, with no racialized identity, no class base, implicitly heterosexual, young and located in industrialized societies. From the 1980s, a body of work critiqued this, demonstrating how “beauty standards maintained racial inequality as well as gender inequality” (Craig 2006: 163). Still unaccounted for, however, were subjective experiences of beauty in relation to women’s desires to feel “normal,” as a source of pleasurable practice, or as sites for identity work. In response, research on issues such as plastic surgery (Davis 1995), body work (Gimlin 2002), and beautifcation processes as a creative/group activity (Cahill 2003) presents a more nuanced account. However, as Craig rightly states, they still neglected the social locations of their subjects, and while acknowledging these were white, middle class, and heterosexual, such work did not address how such locations matter (Craig 2006: 165) and the variety of possibilities, styles and multiplicity within them (Tate 2009). Black anti-racist feminist work discusses precisely how locations matter and how notions of beauty have, in their core, racialized and racist assumptions (Craig 2006; Tate 2009). There has also been a form of Black nationalism emerging mostly from analysis developed in the United States and the United Kingdom, that have set up specifc looks as the only ones valid under the “Black is Beautiful” banner. Black Nationalist beauty standards praise darker skin, natural hair, and African-inspired hair styles and, in contrast, equate other styles and practices, such as hair straightening and skin bleaching as self-hatred (Weekes 1997). Recent perspectives on beauty have decentered white women as a beauty ideal with relevance for all women (Tate 2010). 49

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Starting from a feminist intersectional perspective, I consider the challenge to decenter beauty studies as a way of exploring the complex relationship between internalized oppression and resistance. I open a conversation among Black, Mestizo, and indigenous feminisms in the hope that through the exploration of their specifcities, major commonalities can be drawn.

Resistance and hegemony Recent research in cultural studies, critical race, feminist theory, and related social sciences tends to concentrate in the spaces, discourses, and practices of resistance. While we see a hardening, expansion, and continuation of racist practices and discourses, there has been also a renewed, vigorous focus on fnding instances of resistance, to document, and analyze as exemplary. Such a romance with resistance has lost sight of strong critiques in the 1990s (Abu-Lughod 1990) warning us about what could we lose if we hold ourselves too tight to all that appears to signal imminent social transformation. When research focuses mostly on resistance, there is little patience to explore the experiences of those who do not use everyday practices to rebel. There is even less patience with the experiences of those who actually want, explicitly, to reap the benefts of following the carrot of privilege. We fail then to explore the ways in which certain people appear to be complicit with racism. The carrot of potential privilege lures some to follow certain precepts and uphold a long list of values to achieve a measure of dignity and recognition. Yet they often arrive to a point where even longer lists will be laid out and the parameters shift again. Some will gain something, some advantage, some promotion, some recognition, but the points of reference that measure who is included and who is not, who will thrive and who will die (Hartman 2007) are there, somehow untouched. A critical approach that is able to “not leave anyone behind” has been missing. I want us to notice the complexity of our social experience, both the acts of resistance and of complacency and what kind of notion of human we imply is behind such actions. I want us to notice the struggle, the difculty and what it takes to be on the receiving end of daily racism or sexism, and how there is numbness, but also skill and intentionality. The aim is not just to understand how to continue with acts of defance but also to notice what else happens when people “get on” with life as it is happening to them, negotiating their everyday, working and surviving the system, picking their battles. Is this just a mere reproduction of the system? Stuart Hall (1986) ofered us an invigorated sense of the pertinence of Gramsci’s work for the task of understanding the working of racism. More than 30 years later, I am inspired by the clarity this revisiting ofers me to understand the questions at the heart of the enquiry of this chapter. If, following W.E.B. DuBois, the problem of the twentieth century has been that of the color-line, it seems to me that the twenty-frst century has made clear that the challenge is not anymore the visibility of such color-line, but the complexity and interlocking of oppression lines and the variety of strategies to critically navigate them as efective forms of contestation. Gramsci’s theoretical framework reappears as particularly useful as it allows us to consider racism as a set of relations of force, that is, as a particular terrain of politics and social struggle and development, in interrelation with multiple other terrains. The main elements of this framework, useful for this discussion are, the critical notion that what we are looking for is not…the total incorporation of one set of forces into another. [But following an analysis that unfolds] …relationally, using the idea of “unstable balance”. The critical question is the “relations of forces favorable or unfavorable to this or that tendency.” (Hall 1986: 14) 50

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We can read this in relation to, on the one hand, ways of challenging of racism and, on the other hand, an approach to understanding what happens in the feld of beauty processes and experiences in relation to sexism and racism. William Roseberry (1994) advocates for thinking of hegemony as a process that should be used not to understand consent but to understand struggle; the ways in which the words, images, symbols, forms, organizations, institutions and movements used by subordinate populations to talk about, understand, confront, accommodate themselves to, or resist their domination are shaped by the process of domination itself. What hegemony constructs, then, is not a shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination. (1994: 361) This is particularly useful to develop a nuanced analysis of the lived experience of beauty and the challenges this brings to the unstable balance between racism and sexism. It allows us to give attention to more complex social actors. Can we think of the feld of beauty as both a powerful and fragile order of domination? The analysis of beauty as a hegemonic process allows us to illuminate “the lines of weakness and cleavage, of alliances unformed and class fractions unable to make their particular interests appear to be the interests of a wider collectivity” (Roseberry 1994: 365).

Decentering I will start by taking up Shirley Tate’s challenge that we should “decolonize beauty studies” and decenter white iconicity (2010, 2018, 2009). Tate makes us notice the existence of multiple models of Black beauties, and argues that certain performativities of beauty, such as engaging with cosmetic surgery, express not a desire to pass as white but rather to embody diference. What we found in Tate’s 2010 text is the tension between a very careful argumentation about the racial and political construction of beauty by Black anti-racist feminists, and by Black Nationalists, and how their work, while denouncing racist and racialized beauty standards, has simultaneously allowed for the establishment of the idea that all Black women want to be white “and misrepresents Black women’s beauty practices as signs of psychic damage” (Tate 2010: 196). Tate is suggesting that we press on where recent Black anti-racist feminists’ work has stopped in its analysis of beauty. And this is brave as it means critiquing and extending already quite critical work. For Tate, some approaches of Black anti-racists feminists have contributed to the continuation of the notion that white beauty is iconic (Craig 2002; Hobson 2005) or “the assumption that if Black women internalize this value then whiteness will be the model they aspire to” (Candelario 2007; Collins 2004; Hunter 2005; Wingfeld 2008). Tate has insisted in the need to destabilize the myth of white beauty iconicity – that all Black women want to be white – demonstrating that both race and beauty are performative and that there should be an allowance for a variety and multiplicity of Black beauty models (Banks 2000; Craig 2006; Tate 2007, 2010: 196). Through a series of examples, emphasizing the performativity of beauty, Tate decenters white iconicity. For example, by exploring US rapper, model and actress Lil’ Kim’s cosmetic surgery, Tate aims to recover Kim’s intention not to pass as white but as a diferent kind of Black woman. Kim claims she is enhancing her body and her looks and will not, and cannot, 51

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leave her “race” behind. For Tate, Lil’ Kim is attempting a form of “beauty crossing” and is engaged in a post-Black anti-racist aesthetic where her “attitude on enhancement signifes beauty agency” (Tate 2010: 202). Tate argues then that: The Black anti-racist aesthetics and white beauty iconicity polemic seeks to deny the existence of a variety of looks in the Black Atlantic diaspora….However, not all of our cultural norms of beauty are white. Further, what is seen as white beauty does not just naturally belong to white bodies but to Black bodies as well and whiteness is diferently nuanced across the Black Atlantic diaspora. (Tate 2010: 202)

Decentering beauty in Latin America Tate’s work is a fascinating provocation to develop a diferent dialogue among Black and Mestizo and Indigenous Brown bodies, three parallel experiences of the racialized and gendered construction of femininity but also of racism and sexism. So, with this background, let me now turn to the Latin American context. My empirical research with Mexican Indigenous and Mestiza women suggests that Black women’s experiences, as presented by Tate, do not represent the experiences of all women targeted by racism. Indigenous and Mestiza women do not want to be or pass as white, but in contexts with elaborated traps of inclusion, practices of compliance and internalized oppression emerge. Literature theorizing the role of beauty in gender politics in Latin American and Caribbean contexts is building up a coherent body of work, some of them in dialogue with feminist scholarship. Moving on from analysis of beauty contests throughout the region (Cohen Ballerino et al. 1996; López 2002; Pérez-Rosario 2018; Siu 2005), to more recent studies of transformistas, travestis, and the performativity of femininity (Ochoa 2014; Vartabedian 2016, 2018, 2019), representations of the indigenous body (Canessa 2008; De la Cadena 2000; Moreno 2007; Pequeño 2008; Wade 2013), plastic surgery and national discourses (Edmonds 2010; Edmonds and Sanabria 2014; Gordon 2013) and the relations between physical appearance and sex work (Kempadoo 1999; Pope 2005; Rivers-Moore 2013). There have been a few studies that are more explicitly attuned to the relationship between feminist theory and beauty in their articulation with gender, racism and national identities (Casanova 2004; Moreno Figueroa 2012, 2013; Nichols 2013). A special issue that Megan Rivers-Moore and I edited for Feminist Theory, on “Beauty, Race and Feminist Theory in Latin America and the Caribbean” is a recent contribution to this growing feld (2013)1. The special issue brings together scholarship that links beauty, power relations, and the specifcity of a rich range of national contexts, histories, and politics including Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Mexico, and Venezuela. They approach beauty from an intersectional perspective that takes the empirical and afective complexities of gendered racialization as a point of departure. All of us who wrote for this special issue coincided on the key argument that ideas about beauty, appearance, physical characteristics, and racialized perceptions of skin color and the body inform each other within the specifc historical confguration of mestizaje (racial mixing) in Latin America and the Caribbean. The specifcity of mestizaje as the dominant racial discourse of the region, and its tensions with the growing importance of multiculturalism, has made even more evident the major role it plays in ideas about physical appearance and in the gendered dimensions of social relations.

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Mestizaje is a term heavily invested with racial ideologies and discourses of miscegenation. It describes both the biological and cultural “mixing” of Spanish and Latin American indigenous peoples. In the Mexican context, mestizaje refers to a historical process that has created the subject of Mexican national identity: the Mestizo. Both categories – mestizaje and Mestizo identity – and their multiple meanings, are a direct consequence of the ways in which racial discourses developed in Mexico (for a more detailed discussion, see Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka (2016); Saldívar (2018)). Mestizo is a polyvalent category that relates to diferent points in Mexican and Latin American history and refers simultaneously to a b

c

a person of mixed European and Latin American indigenous descent; a fexible social identity given to the diferent racial mixtures that emerged in the colonial period in Latin America by an array of “combinations” among indigenous peoples, African enslaved people and European settlers; and to the subject of national identity presented as the embodiment of the “promise of improvement through race mixture for individuals and the nation” (Wade 2001: 849).

In Mexico, for example, people are not considered Black or white, but rather they are darker-than or lighter-than others in a given situation. This presents a diferent panorama to what Tate describes. On the one hand, Mestizo subjects exist as a national ideal, and on the other hand, everyday experiences tell Mestizo people that regardless of their racial mixture, they must constantly (re)assess their social location, asking themselves if they are lighter, darker or average, in any particular situation/space/dynamic.

Mestiza and indigenous beauties In interviews I conducted, Mestizo and indigenous women rarely ofered a single straight line of argument regarding beauty. There was always a “but,” which suggested not resistance but sadness or defeat. Consuelo, whose case I have written about before (Moreno Figueroa 2012, 2013), grew up considering the mixture of her inheritance and social environment and wondering, why she has dark skin, why she has certain features. They used to call me “prieta [dark], cabezona [big head], and dientuda [goofy],” and I used to say: “Why do I have such big teeth? Why am I so morena?” (Consuelo, 29, León, México) Not only do we fnd here indications of racialized parameters of beauty, but also of her apparently naïve questions (can anybody really ask “why” our bodies have specifc physical features?); she makes evident how traits can happen to the body. For example, specifc sizes, colors, heights, and features, work sometimes in favor of beauty and against ugliness and sometimes vice versa. Her questions about this happening to, also suggest that such traits could have been manipulated, planned or worked out previously; they could have been negotiated. (Moreno Figueroa 2013: 142)

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Consuelo’s experience goes very much in line with how racial mixing has been seen as a form of improving (or not) the racialized body. Having argued in those other texts that the experience of the racialized body is not settled and is therefore limited and fragile, I want to move on here to explore another angle on the relation between the performance of femininity and the specifcity of contemporary Mexican racial discourses: how mestizaje logics operate in the everyday experience of beauty for Indigenous women. Moreover, I want to continue complicating the gendered and racialized analysis of beauty, alongside an analysis of internalized oppression, to dig into why “people cannot just walk away from racist and gendered constraints” and how is it that people fnd ways of dealing with, being practical about, making an efort and “getting on” with a specifc body, and the constant struggle between defciency and shame. The reasons that one might give for the need to make an efort could be easily dismissed as evidence that one is simply falling prey to a pervasive beauty industry. When this analysis is also located within racial histories, the need for exploring the complexity of beauty and its lure becomes apparent and a re-reading of women’s agency is also enabled. (Moreno Figueroa 2013: 148) I did a series of interviews with professional, self-identifed Indigenous women, living in urban settings in the state of Oaxaca. They all come from humble upbringings, having grown up mostly poor and in small rural villages to then become working or middle class living on the peripheries of bigger cities. They told me about these other ways of perceiving the interrelation of femininity within their communities and the ways this was codifed in both gender and racial terms. They repeatedly described long, black, straight hair as the quintessential feature of a beauty. Stronger, larger bodies were always valued as prettier and healthier. Growing up in their towns and with their communities taught them to appreciate a kind of femininity that did not have either the white or the Mestizo body at its center. This didn’t mean there were not some people around them that valued lighter skin color or that, for most, noticing physical features that signal resemblance to other family members, particularly parents, was a constant issue. So, for them, noticing physical features, repairing in senses of beauty and ugliness, had never been a strange thing, an urban Mestizo or white concern. However, for these women, reaching adolescence coincided with leaving their towns to study and work in bigger urban or semi-urban centers. At 12 or 13 years old, they were confronted both by their own changing bodies and by a variety of other racialized bodies within Mestizo contexts. Pressures around becoming “civilized” started appearing signaling, among many other things, their understanding of long, black straight hair as backwards, and as “indio.” The weight of comparisons and the emphasis on “arreglarse,” making themselves up, fxing themselves (Casanova 2018; Nichols 2014), became more and more present as a strategy both for femininity and ftting in this setting with a diferent racialized order where they were seen as ordinary, ugly, “from the middle down” as one of them said. One of them told me how she was called “Pocahontas” and while she was a princess, it was the indigenousness that marked her in a derogatory way. She used whitening creams and was constantly struggling to get right the distance from the “naco” (Schaf hauser 2003) – the naf ones – those who lack taste, style, the appropriate embodiment –, so that “it wouldn’t show” that she was from the countryside, that she is an indigenous woman. These women’s experience is one of racism and sexism that has generated mistrust, suspicion, and incredulity of white people. One of them told me how really, thinking it through, 54

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“white people scared her.” Another one decided to remain within her peers as a strategy to stop exposing herself to the hurt of racism; she prefers to be around people that look like her, are from pueblos, and that have dark hair and dark skin color. I asked them if they would believe someone telling them they were beautiful. Their frst reaction was laughter followed by profound suspicion. They said it would depend on who said it. They do not quite believe whiter/lighter skinned people, and they are very cautious of being exoticized by potential sexual partners.

Beauty in Mestizo contexts So how can we read, from a Mestizo context, Tate’s invitation to decenter the notion that Black beauty is about wanting to be white and displace it to being diferent kinds of Black beauty? How to go beyond the white and Black paradigm to one where mixture is the norm although it is underlined by whitening processes? Trying to answer these questions I see various emerging challenges. The frst is to be aware of the trap of assuming that all experiences of non-white women are the same as the ones who identify as Black. Here is where I bring the specifcity of mestizaje to this discussion. Tate is arguing for incorporating women’s stylization practices as diferent possibilities or versions of being beautiful and Black. While we need to also explore empirically the stylization practices of mestizo identifed women and others beyond Mexico and Latin America to assess if a similar process of diferentiation is going on, we need to consider what would this mean in a context where mixture is at the core of the racial project. If people are not considered Black or white, but darker-than or lighter-than others in a given context, we are presented with a diferent panorama to what Tate describes, where, on the one hand, the national ideal claims for a preferred mestizo subject and, on the other hand, the everyday experience tells mestizo people that regardless of them being mixed they are constantly (re) assessing if they are the lighter or the darker or an average in the particular situation/space/ dynamic they are in. The second challenge is that within a Mestizo context, people are very aware of the privilege of the “lighter-than” position and will bank on it if they can. They will do this not only because of the situational benefts, but also because the racial project of mestizaje has been extremely successful in securing an understanding of inclusivity (that is, mestizaje as form of national unity), while concealing how that same logic excludes people from privilege. I will illustrate this from an interview. Berenice, a 43 years old, upper-class woman, lives in the city of León, Guanajuato, a famously conservative and Catholic city in the center of the country. Berenice is married to a well-reputed medical doctor, and they have three teenage children. Her family is quite well of. She comes from a long line of women considered as very beautiful. I asked her if she could recall discussions or concerns in her family about the body, skin color, physical features, or appearance more broadly. Straight away, she told me about a conversation between her husband and their 18-year-old daughter, Verónica, who had considered changing from an elite religious high school, to a less prestigious school. Berenice explained: Verónica told my husband: “No Dad, I don’t want to go there because I feel really uncomfortable, the way men stare at me, it’s diferent, like they don’t respect me”…Then Luis, her dad, told her: “You should be thankful, and this is going to happen everywhere because you are blonde with blue eyes (güerita de ojo azul).” And I jumped in (…) it was a way of saying to Luis: “what are you telling her?” 55

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Be thankful for your privilege! Güera (-ita ending for diminutive) is an adjective used to describe somebody who is perceived as having either white or whiter-than another’s skin color, or with light hair. It can be said of the fairest person in a given group. So here, on the one hand, we see a blatant encouragement to endure sexism and heteronormative rules, as well as the circulation of a specifc physical appearance in Berenice’s family, a testimony of the racialization of higher classes in Mexico. On the other hand, her father’s urging her to be thankful for her embodied privilege responds to the racist logic of mestizaje that, as an ideological discourse and as an everyday practical experience favors, congratulates, and rewards the whitest body. The intersectionality of the experience is readily available here; sexism is the trade-of for not experiencing racism. In Mexico and for lighter Mestizo women, such a form of whiteness, representing privilege, is a limited advantage. It is more like a fortunate opportunity than a secured beneft. It is a stroke of good luck, and more likely a consequence of good (parental and ancestral) planning, for which Verónica should be thankful. It is also very gendered – whiteness could represent certain kinds of rewards for men while sexualizing women in disadvantageous ways. Access to such a limited privilege is precarious. It does not work for all, nor is it a permanent guarantee for those who sometimes beneft from it. In this way, the promise of mestizaje and the privilege it bestows are like a carrot at the end of the stick. The promise is so powerful, that most people have learned and are willing to play along, to follow the carrot, to conform with the crumbs of privilege mestizaje ofers, to be complicit. Whiteness is a limited and precarious form of privilege with which people feel compelled to comply. There’s a tendency in the literature to confate white bodies/beauty/iconicity and whiteness (Nayak 2007) and to miss possibilities of exploring how whiteness operates in specifc contexts as a form of privilege, when white bodies are more or less relative, when the embodiment of whiteness shifts or when whitening practices are in operation. Whiteness is the structuring logic through which aspirations are shaped, not for the content itself of iconic white beauty, for having that nose, that skin color, that hair, but for the apparent practical privileges and power it allows. Within a mestizaje logic people are darker or lighter than others in a given context; people might not want to be white, but they might still have whiteness as reference point and structuring logic. If we understand whiteness more like an organizing principle of late modernity that distributes privilege (Nayak 2007), than a matter of fxed notions of skin color, then it is possible to use the case of Mestizo people and mestizaje, to think about how that fuidity gives way to pernicious forms of exclusion that thrive on the knowledge that the privilege achieved here, can be easily taken away there.

Conclusion In Sociology, there is a history of denial of internalised oppression because it means facing spaces of defeat. Having to create an unstable balance between racism and sexism to survive makes the question of beauty something difcult for many brown skinned women. The emotional efects of racism produce forms of shaming that measure people according to their strength to resist. People targeted by racism are not unifed in a single experience of race. They are thus not all equally able to resist. This would then extend to the feld of beauty and would also imagine people resisting the beauty industry and the racist ideologies that support it. When faced with the Mestizo world with its whitening demands, indigenous women, having grown up in safe(r) spaces where they had access to a multiplicity of indigenous beauties, comply to persist. They lament about their bodies being as they are; they cut their hair and 56

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bleach their skin, they endure sexism and whatever it takes to preserve their spot across the carrot of privilege: they comply. That compliance is not their fault, or of their making, it is the force of racism. How can we avoid losing sight that internalized racism is about racism permeating itself? From a context where a distinct racial project is in operation it is possible to refect on how yes, indeed, not all women want to be white, and that we need to pay attention to how is it that this idea that white beauty is iconic has so easily been set at the center of debates on racialized beauty. However, if we take seriously the distinction between white beauty, white bodies, white iconicity, and whiteness as a structuring logic and form of privilege, we can still accommodate the cases where aspiring to be “whiter than” is still in operation, such as in the Mexican case. It’s important to acknowledge though, that there seem to be various instances where a multiplicity of beauties can emerge, that is, where other parameters of beauty beyond white beauty appear as part of the possibilities for many women – and these are in need of empirical research. However, looking for these alternative/multiple models and experiences of Black or brown beauties runs the risk of reifying essentializing racialized models of beauty, such as those proposed by Black nationalism. This essentialization can erase, or make us lose sight, of the processes by which beauty is embedded with racism and social exclusion or the ways in which the workings of racism are operationalized through beauty practices. Thus, it can make it difcult to get out of the moralizing conundrums and banalization that surround beauty. It can make it difcult to deal with beauty as also an inescapable tendency, an inclination, a lure that gives solace and pleasure.

Related topics The racial politics of plastic surgery

Note 1 There is a spring 2017 special issue dedicated to beauty in ReVista Harvard Review of Latin America with an academic op eds here: https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/fles/revista/fles/135653_ web-complete.pdf.

References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women.” American Ethnologist 17(1): 41–55. Banks, Ingrid. 2000. Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness. New York: New York University Press. Bartky, Sandra L. 1997. “Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In: Conboy, K., Medina, N. and Stanbury S. (eds.) Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 129–154. Cahill, Ann J. 2003. “Feminist Pleasure and Feminine Beautifcation.” Hypatia 18(4): 42–64. Candelario, Ginetta. 2007. Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Canessa, Andrew. 2008. “Sex and the Citizen: Barbies and Beauty Queens in the Age of Evo Morales.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 17(1): 41–64. Casanova Erynn Masi de. 2004. “No Ugly Woman: Concepts of Race and Beauty among Adolescent Women in Ecuador.” Gender & Society 18(3): 287–308. ———. 2018. “Beauty Ideology in Latin America.” dObra [s]: revista da Associação Brasileira de Estudos de Pesquisas em Moda 11(23): 10–21.

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Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa Cohen Ballerino, C., R.R. Wilk, and B. Stoeltje. 1996. Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests and Power. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge. Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. “Race, Beauty, and the Tangled Knot of a Guilty Pleasure.” Feminist Theory 7(2): 159–177. Davis, Kathy. 1995. Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery. New York: Routledge. De la Cadena, Marisol. 2000. Indigenous Mestizos. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Edmonds, Alexander. 2010. Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press. Edmonds, Alexander and Emilia Sanabria. 2014. “Medical Borderlands: Engineering the Body with Plastic Surgery and Hormonal Therapies in Brazil.” Anthropology & Medicine 21(2): 202–216. Gimlin, Debra. 2002. Body Work: Beauty and Self Image in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gordon, Doreen. 2013. “A Beleza Abre Portas: Beauty and the Racialised Body among Black Middle-class Women in Salvador, Brazil.” Feminist Theory 14(2): 203–218. Hall, Stuart. 1986. “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10(2): 5–27. Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hobson, Janell. 2005. Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge. Hunter, Margaret. 2005. Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone. New York: Routledge. Kempadoo, Kamala. 1999. Sun, Sex and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean. Oxford: Rowan and Littlefeld. López, Rick A. 2002. “The India Bonita Contest of 1921 and the Ethnicization of Mexican National Culture.” Hispanic American Historical Review 82(2): 291–328. Moreno Figueroa, Mónica G. 2012 “‘Linda morenita’: Skin Colour, Beauty and the Politics of Mestizaje in Mexico.” In: Horrocks, C. (ed) Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 167–180. ———. 2013. “Displaced Looks: The Lived Experience of Beauty and Racism.” Feminist Theory 14(2): 137–151. Moreno Figueroa, Mónica G. and Megan Rivers-Moore. 2013. “Beauty, Race and Feminist Theory in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Feminist Theory 14(2): 131–136. Moreno Figueroa, Mónica G. and Emiko Saldívar Tanaka. 2016. “‘We Are Not Racists, We Are Mexicans’: Privilege, Nationalism and Post-Race Ideology in Mexico.” Critical Sociology 42(4–5): 515–533. Moreno, Maria. 2007. “Misses y concursos de belleza indígena en la construcción de la nación ecuatoriana.” Iconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales 28: 81–91. Nayak, Anoop. 2007. “Critical Whiteness Studies.” Sociology Compass 1(2): 737–755. Nichols, Elizabeth. G. 2013. “‘Decent Girls with Good Hair’: Beauty, Morality and Race in Venezuela.” Feminist Theory 14(2): 171–185. ———. 2014. “Virgin Venuses: Beauty and Purity for ‘Public’ Women in Venezuela.” In: Raicheva-Stover, M. and Ibroscheva, E. (eds) Women in Politics and Media: Perspectives from Nations in Transition. London: Bloomsbury, 233–248. Ochoa, Marcia. 2014. Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pequeño, Andrea. 2008. Imágenes en disputa. Representaciones de mujeres indígenas ecuatorianas FlacsoEcuador, Abya Yala, UNFPA, Quito, 2007, 130 págs. ÍCONOS 31: 161–168. Pérez-Rosario, Vanessa. 2018. “On Beauty and Protest.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 46(1): 279–285. Pope, Cynthia. 2005. “The Political Economy of Desire: Geographies of Female Sex Work in Havana, Cuba.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 6(2): 99–118. Rivers-Moore, Megan. 2013. “Afective Sex: Beauty, Race and Nation in the Sex Industry.” Feminist Theory 14(2): 153–169.

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Picking your battles Roseberry, William. 1994. “Hegemony and the Language of Contention.” In: Joseph, G. M. and Nugent, D. (eds) Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 355–366. Saldívar, Emiko. 2018. “Uses and Abuses of Culture: Mestizaje in the Era of Multiculturalism.” Cultural Studies 32(3): 438–459. Schaf hauser, Philippe. 2003. La Naquez: Estudio de una Categoría Cultural Mexicana. Perpignan: Centre de Recherches Ibériques et Latino Américaines, Université de Perpignan. Siu, Lok. 2005. “Queen of the Chinese Colony: Gender, Nation, and Belonging in Diaspora.” Anthropological Quarterly 78(3): 511–542. Tate, Shirley A. 2007. “Black Beauty: Shade, Hair and Anti-racist Aesthetics.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(2): 300–319. ———. 2009. Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2010. “Not All the Women Want to be White: Decolonizing Beauty Studies.” In: Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E., Boatca, M. and Costa, S. (eds) Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 195–212. ———. 2018. “Too Dark Skinned to Win Strictly: Alexandra Burke, Race Hate and Why Love Still Matters.” Beauty Demands Blogpost. http://beautydemands.blogspot.com/2018/11/too-darkskinned-to-win-strictly.html Vartabedian, Julieta. 2016. “Beauty That Matters: Brazilian ‘Travesti’ Sex Workers Feeling Beautiful.” Sociologus 66(1): 73–96. ———. 2018. Brazilian ‘Travesti’ Migrations: Gender, Sexualities and Embodiment Experiences. Cham: Springer. ———. 2019. “Bodies and Desires on the Internet: An Approach to Trans Women Sex Workers’ Websites.” Sexualities 22(1–2): 224–243. Wade, Peter. 2001. “Racial Identity and Nationalism: A Theoretical View from Latin America.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 24(5): 845–865. ———. 2013. “Articulations of Eroticism and Race: Domestic Service in Latin America.” Feminist Theory 14(2): 187–202. Weekes, Debra. 1997. “Shades of Blackness: Young Black Female Constructions of Beauty.” In: Mirza, H.S. (ed) Black British Feminism: A Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 113–126. Wingfeld, Adia Harvey. 2008. Doing Business with Beauty: Black Women, Hair Salons, and the Racial Enclave Economy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld. Young, Iris Marion. 1980. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality.” Human Studies 3: 137–156.

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PART TWO

Competing defnitions of beauty

7 DEMOCRATIZING LOOKS Te politics of gender, class, and beauty in early twentieth-century United States Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the growing dissemination of visual images through lavish department stores’ displays, periodicals, and advertising created a more visually oriented society than in earlier decades (Finnegan 1999; Schweitzer 2009). As a result, a new image of feminine beauty, indeed a “New Woman,” appeared on the American cultural scene. Popular culture, and especially the print media, was instrumental in promoting the New Woman and her image, which symbolized women’s new presence in the public sphere (Banta 1987; Patterson 2008). No longer heralding the docile, domestic, motherly, and fragile-looking femininity of the Victorian “True Woman” (Welter 1966), popular mainstream magazines such as Harper’s Monthly, Life, and Ladies’ Home Journal celebrated in their pages a distinctly modern beauty ideal that corresponded with women’s new reality of work and education, and demanded a much more fexible lifestyle and freedom of movement. This image of the New Woman emphasized youth, athleticism, and mobility, and was highly intertwined with consumerism (Kitch 2001; Patterson 2008). “You see,” argued a fctional New Woman against her Victorian counterpart, I can do everything my brothers do; and do it rather better, I fancy. I am an athlete and a college graduate, with a wide, universal outlook. My point of view is free from narrow infuences, and quite outside of the home boundaries. (Ticknor 1901: 106) The New Woman presented a sharp contrast to the “Steel-Engraving Lady” who epitomized Victorian beauty as it was depicted in magazine illustrations that used this printing technique. Unlike these steel-engraving lithographs, which gave the impression of a frail, sickly looking appearance, the New Woman sported a tan and a healthy look, accompanied by a “short skirt” that displayed “six inches of [her] stockings,” and mannish collar, cravat, and vest (Ticknor 1901: 106). Yet, while the image of the New Woman represented a modern conceptual and a visual understanding of femininity, it was not a unifed or fxed image. In fact, the New Woman’s appearance varied signifcantly from the 1890s to the 1920s as fashion and hair styles changed, and as women gained more visibility in the public sphere. While in the 1890s and 1900s it was the image of the athletic Gibson Girl that epitomized female beauty, by the 1920s, the sexually brazen fapper became an icon of modern womanhood (Figure 7.1). Thus, 63

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Figure 7.1

“Thirty Years of ‘Progress!’,” Life, October 1926. Image published with permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission

rather than marking a specifc look, the New Woman in all her variations represented a shift in beauty ideals and gendered notions of femininity (Banner 1983; Banta 1987). If the New Woman portrayed a bolder appearance than the True Woman, class and racial politics were also part of these gendered constructions of female beauty and they played an important role in shaping these images. Although magazine readership expanded in the late nineteenth century to include broader and more diverse audiences, in general, visual images that circulated in popular culture presented beauty standards that often refected white, native-born, middle-class notions of femininity (Garvey 1996). Yet, the constant search for new markets and consumers also opened up spaces to challenge these notions and to create alternatives to them. Indeed, although advertisements and illustrations in the mainstream media almost always depicted a narrow ideal of white middle-class beauty, they also promoted a democratic message that suggested that all women could attain this ideal, regardless of their ethnic background or socioeconomic class (Peiss 1998). While this democratic message never quite extended to include Black women, the Black press served as a realm where African Americans could engage with these images on their own terms and construct alternative versions of female beauty (Rabinovitch-Fox 2019). Furthermore, the rise of the ready-made fashion industry that ofered similar styles in various price grades created a common look that crossed regional, racial, and class boundaries. 64

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Consumer culture thus both shaped defnitions of beauty and provided the means to challenge these same defnitions. However, it was never a free realm, and a woman’s class and race often determined the extent to which she could participate in consumerism and control her image. Yet, as more and more women engaged with the mass consumer market, taking advantage of the possibilities that the fashion and the beauty industries ofered them, they also actively participated in the redefnition of feminine beauty in this period. Moreover, ideals of white middle-class beauty also changed during the frst decades of the twentieth century. Young middle-class women began to incorporate elements of working-class culture into their lifestyles and appearance such as dancing and cosmetics, redefning ideals of beauty and femininity. Understanding the role these women played in shifting notions of feminine beauty illuminates the multiple and complex ways in which women’s appearance became intertwined with questions of power, independence, and freedom in this time of unsettling social change. Rather than serving as a frivolous pastime activity, beauty became a contested arena where ideas of gender, class, and race were constantly delineated and redefned.

Te Gibson Girl and the changing beauty ideal In the pages of the popular press, the New Woman at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century typifed white, middle-class women’s growing opportunities for work, education, and engagement with consumer culture. Illustrators such as Charles Dana Gibson, Harrison Fisher, and Howard Chandler Christy depicted the ideal “American Girl” as a white, young, tall, active woman, often in outdoor settings and in leisure scenes that alluded to her middle-class position. They never portrayed her as a “factory girl” or as performing work for wages (Kitch 2001; Patterson 2005). Moreover, although she was not always explicitly described as a college student, the “American Girl’s” association with athleticism and sports solidifed the connection between middle-class collegiate culture and this new beauty ideal. By the 1890s, physical exercise became an inherent part of the curriculum in women’s colleges, turning it not only into a socially accepted activity for women, but also to a central component of this understanding of beauty that espoused a more athletic look (Lowe 2003). Out of all the “American Girls” that circulated in the press, it was Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations of the “Gibson Girl” that reached prominence as the epitome of the New Woman and the modern beauty ideal. By the mid-1890s, the Gibson Girl became one of the most marketed images of the time, appearing not only as a stand-alone illustration, but also in advertising and on myriad of consumer products, including fashion, wallpaper, silverware, and furniture. Magazines and pattern companies advertised “Gibson skirts” and “Gibson Waists,” as well as fashion accessories such as hats, ties, and collars that were inspired by the Gibson Girl (Kitch 2001; Patterson 2005). Gibson’s success in turning the Gibson Girl into a popular icon laid in his ability to use her image to refect white middle-class values of respectability and femininity, while at the same time to capture the changes in gender norms and appearance. The Gibson Girl was defnitely modern, presenting a more robust and athletic fgure, but she was not a radical (Kitch 2001). Her looks adhered to the gendered conventions of the period: she always appeared corseted, wearing skirts and dresses. Furthermore, the Gibson Girl was a “charmer.” Unlike images of radical feminists and women’s reformers from this period – who were often depicted as masculine brutes wearing bloomers – the Gibson Girl was an appealing and firtatious young woman who enjoyed, and even invited, the courtship of men (Banta 1987; Rabinovitch-Fox 2017). Although Gibson himself created his Girl as the embodiment of a white, middle-class beauty ideal, as her popularity grew, contemporaries began to associate her image with a 65

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more generic image of modern femininity that managed to cross ethnic, class, and racial lines (Rabinovitch-Fox 2017). This popularity might have been connected to the fact that unlike Howard Chandler Christy’s “Christy Girl,” who was a blonde with blue eyes, Gibson’s black-and-white illustrations appealed to broader and more diverse audiences. While the use of the black and white contrast served to emphasize the whiteness of her complexion, debates over the identity of the model who inspired Gibson attested to the ambiguity of the image. Some surmised the model was Irene Langhorne, a Virginia socialite who became Gibson’s wife. However, since they had only met in 1893 she could not have served as his original model. Other rumors, based on Gibson’s tendency to use prostitutes and actresses as models for his illustrations, identifed either Minnie Clark, a professional model of Irish decent and working-class background, or the personal maid of the dancer Loie Fuller, who was a daughter of a French father and a Cuban mother, as possible models (Banner 1983). These somewhat mysterious class and ethnic origins of the model, as well as Gibson’s reluctance to provide clear answers to her identity, opened a space for women who did not necessarily adhere to the image’s race and class signifers to reclaim it. However, more than the racial and class ambiguities of the image, it was the commercialized nature of the Gibson Girl’s appearance that ofered non-white and working-class women a route to deploy the image and utilize it. The rise of mass culture, and especially the ready-made garment industry in the early twentieth century, provided afordable solutions to imitate the image. The shirtwaist in particular – a mass-produced clothing article modeled after the masculine dress shirt – which was one of Gibson Girl’s hallmarks, ofered a convenient route to adopt the look. The shirtwaist became a national fashion and an essential item in women’s wardrobes. Its commercial popularity contributed to the democratization of styles, causing the trade journal The Cutter-Up to declare in 1899 that “[d]ay by day the waist entrenches itself more deeply in the esteem of women … It is worn by rich and poor alike, is ornate or simple, and lends itself to fashionable use, no matter what the occasion” (Kidwell and Christman 1974). The shirtwaist’s ability to blur class diferences in terms of styles, in turn, contributed to the democratization of the Gibson Girl’s imagery and beauty ideal that allowed for diferent interpretations and appropriations. White working-class women, many of them immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe could relate more easily to the Gibson Girl’s features and beauty, and they tapped into the romanticism and middle-class respectability that the image represented. By adopting the shirtwaist, and the overall appearance of the Gibson Girl, these working-class women could shape their own version of the New Woman and her meanings. These women capitalized on the availability and popularity of the shirtwaist style to make claims for respect, rights, and inclusion in American society, arguing for their entitlement to enjoy the pleasures of fashion (Enstad 1999). As they presented themselves as stylish “American Girls,” Jewish immigrants like Carla Lemlich also reshaped what this “American Girl” looked like, adding to it a working-class component that further democratized the beauty ideal of the New Woman while also inserting more militant elements into the image (Figure 7.2). Lemlich, who led the 1909 garment strike in New York City that turned the female labor force into an infuential power, ofered a more “determined” version of the Gibson Girl, conveying her demands to be taken seriously not only as a woman, but also as a worker, and as an American. African American women, while facing more difculties to embrace the Gibson Girl due to her whiteness, nevertheless managed to harness the image to promote claims for equality and inclusion. The association of the Gibson Girl with a refned, middle-class femininity, as well as her connections to collegiate culture, enabled African American women to lay claims to middle-class respectability and the associated privileges of white “ladyhood.” Like white 66

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Figure 7.2 Carla Lemlich. ca. 1910, Kheel Center, Cornell University

working-class immigrants, middle-class Black women also used the accessibility of styles and consumer culture to fashion themselves according to the latest trends. As they appropriated the image, Black civil rights activists such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell created their version of the New Woman that served as a model for Black middle-class respectable womanhood (Lindsey 2017). Moreover, by portraying themselves as respectable Gibson Girls, Black women could challenge derogatory white stereotypes that perceived African Americans as uncivilized and ugly, using the image to present themselves as modern women of leisure and thus to claim middle-class status. In the process, Black women, like working-class immigrants, not only recreated the Gibson Girl as a more inclusive image, but also expanded her meanings, constructing respectability and beauty as a political practice.

Te fapper and the commercialization of beauty While the Gibson Girl maintained her popularity in the 1890s and 1900s, by the 1920s a new image of beauty rose on the cultural scene. Changes to social, political, and cultural norms that had been occurring since the early 1910s, together with women’s war experience and the 67

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struggle for sufrage, gave rise to the beauty ideal of the “fapper” or the “modern girl” in the postwar period (Kitch 2001). Like the Gibson Girl, the fapper emphasized youth, movement, and freedom, symbolizing the new political and social status women were beginning to enjoy in the 1920s. And like the Gibson Girl, the fapper’s beauty was intertwined with a gendered middle-class understanding of modernity defned by mass consumer culture, popular magazines, and the ready-made industry, which encouraged both the consumption of new products and new patterns of consumption (Tinkler and Warsh 2008). Yet, with her short skirt, bobbed hair, and visible makeup, the fapper espoused a more urbanized, sophisticated, and sexual ideal that came to represent female beauty in the 1920s (Zietz 2006; Kitch 2001). Identifed as a young girl in her teens or 20s, the fapper’s youth created a much more slender, “boyish” and even androgynous look that contrasted with the Gibson Girl’s hourglass silhouette. Some critics understood this look as a threat to the gendered social order, arguing it was the result of women’s masculinization. Yet, while the fapper ideal contained some “masculine” traits such as short hair and fat rectangular silhouette, to most contemporaries she did not symbolize the rejection of femininity, as much as a newly mobilized female sexuality (Roberts 1994; Kitch 2001; Zietz 2006). The focus on the legs that the short skirt created, together with the fat rectangular silhouette that blurred women’s curves, constructed a conceptual shift from equating women’s sexuality with maternity (as bosoms were associated with breastfeeding), to a new feminine ideal in which sexuality was based on pleasure and was severed from motherhood. Moreover, the fact that many observers called the look “boyish” rather than “masculine” indicates that they responded more to the look’s youthful connotations than to its possible challenges to male authority. Indeed, what concerned contemporaries the most was the fapper’s overt sexuality and her shameless celebration of it, not the threat of gender transgression (Rabinovitch-Fox 2017). However, the “boyish” look of the fapper, despite its name, did not suggest an option for gender crossover. On the contrary, rather than pointing to sexual diversity, or openness regarding homosexual expressions, the 1920s were a period when heterosexuality, and particularly female heterosexuality, became a much more rigid standard (Simmons 2009). Although no doubt, many queer women adopted the fapper look, which enabled them to experiment with female homosexuality without drawing public attention, the image itself did not carry subversive connotations. As Laura Doan demonstrates, wearing an extreme short bob, masculine hats, neckties, or monocles did not necessarily signal a lesbian identity, but rather adherence to the period’s trends of blurring gender roles and the assertion of female sexual desires (Doan 1998). In fact, in popular imagination, the image of “the lesbian” was usually of a trouser-wearing woman, quite diferent from the short-skirted fapper. Trousers for women as public street attire were still considered a taboo in the 1920s, yet contemporaries did not interpret the adoption of other masculine attributes such as short hair, smoking, barrettes, and monocles as an attempt to “pass” as a man or to appear as a lesbian. Always more a commercial image than a lived experience, the fapper’s commercialization, like the Gibson Girl, not only defned her beauty, but also determined her non-radical character. Her image was a celebration of freedom and youth; however, this freedom was not framed in political terms but as a consumer choice (Cott 1987). Indeed, depictions of the fapper in the media concentrated on her sexuality and quest for fun, not on her new status as a voting citizen after the ratifcation of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Yet if the fapper represented a commercialized ideal of freedom, it was not limited to the American-born white middle class. The rise of the ready-made fashion industry and the availability of relatively cheap, durable, and fashionable apparel ofered women, even those who did not belong to the middle class, an accessible route to adopt the fapper look and to shape its meaning. 68

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Images of fappers that circulated in popular culture varied in terms of class and race association. Some depictions, such as those in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories or John Held Jr.’s illustrations, portrayed the fapper as a young society woman or as a college student, who did not need to work for a living but spent her time in leisure activities. Others depicted her as an independent secretary or salesgirl, or as a young aspirant with rural origins who came to the big city to fnd success in theater or the movies (Pumphrey 1987; Zietz 2006). African American magazines such as Half-Century and Women’s Voice emphasized the fapper’s middle-class and respectable origins, portraying her as a modern epitome of femininity that conveyed both sophistication and propriety (Rooks 2004). Yet, the Black press also celebrated more overt and commercialized manifestations of the fapper, and in the process legitimized the image for Black girls (Rabinovitch-Fox 2019). Despite these diferences, both visually and sartorially these fappers looked very similar, contributing to the dissemination of the fapper beauty ideal nationally and even globally (Weinbaum et al. 2008). Indeed, the mass consumer market, in bringing “within the reach of moderate and modest incomes wearing apparel which previously only the wealthy could aford to buy,” enabled women from diferent socioeconomic classes to actively engage in the creation of national, and even international, fashion trends (Devon 1929). The prevalence of readymade fashions and beauty products, moreover, contributed to a change in hierarchies of taste and in the infuence of traditional cultural trendsetters. “It doesn’t matter what queens or beauties do,” observed the Literary Digest. “The young woman of to-day insists on dressing to suit her own life as well as she can with the available materials” (“Fashion’s Efect on Business” 1928). The popularity of new forms of leisure and entertainment such as flms and dancing created new role-models that did not necessarily adhere to middle-class standards of beauty, yet became fashionable trendsetters embraced by the mainstream culture. Clara Bow, Hollywood’s most famous “It Girl” became the epitome of the fapper image, playing a poor shop girl in the movie that brought her fame. In addition, middle-class women began incorporating beauty styles and practices that were more prevalent among non-white and working-class communities, further blurring the class association of the image (D’Emilio and Freedman 2012). The use of makeup for example, which by the 1920s became acceptable practice among middle-class women, exemplifed the ways the mass consumer market used democratic messages to further commercialize the fapper’s beauty ideal while at the same time to blur its class associations. No longer a marker for women’s questionable morals, makeup in the 1920s was marketed as a means through which every woman could enhance her beauty and sexual appeal, and become modern. Cosmetics companies sold beauty as a “democratic” ideal, arguing that it was not only a birthright belonging to the rich, but a right to which every woman was entitled (Peiss 1998). However, while consumer culture ofered an inclusive message in terms of class, racial boundaries were more carefully drawn. Eastern European, Italian, and even Latina women could participate in the beauty culture that the market offered them, mostly by accepting the “exotic” look designation, but African Americans were excluded from the mainstream market (Peiss 1998). Black women of course adopted the fapper image as well as makeup during the 1920s as marker of their modernity, yet they operated in a segregated market that was often ignored by white society (Baldwin 2007; Haidarali 2018). Ultimately, despite the existence of alternative versions of beauty, the mainstream media promoted a unifed, conformist, and limited ideal. As an advertisement for Armand Beauty Products demonstrated, despite encouraging the reader to “fnd yourself ” amid eight diferent “types” of beauty, the variations between the looks were miniscule (Figure 7.3). All “types” represented white, young women who difer only in hair color and style (Peiss 1998). 69

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Figure 7.3

“Find Yourself,” N W Ayer Advertising Agency Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Moreover, while the availability of cosmetics and ready-made fashions enabled workingclass women to participate in the construction of the fapper ideal, maintaining the “fapper look” often required much time and efort, as well as fnancial resources that circumscribed their ability to do so. The fan magazine Motion Pictures Classic estimated that the cost to look like a “well-dressed fapper” was about $346.50, the equivalent of “equip[ping] completely a reasonably well-furnished three-room fat” (Peirce 1927). Whereas cheaper versions of fapper fashions were attainable through mail-order catalogs and home-sewing, and the stability in styles enabled many women to remain fashionable without investing large sums of money every year, not everyone had the means to keep up with the life of leisure that “fapperism” promoted. Working-class women who could not aford a life of leisure on their salaries often had to resort to participating in some form of “treating,” whereby men paid for women’s leisure in return for some forms of sexual afection (Peiss 1986). Non-white women also had to adjust their appearance as they tried to adhere to the fapper’s beauty ideal and its sexual undertones. Although middle-class Black women began to wear light makeup and jewelry, when it came to clothing, they presented a more conservative taste. “Conservative styles are best unless you are strikingly pretty – and comparatively few of us are,” argued a writer in a 1922 article in the Black-owned magazine Half-Century and suggested that readers would adhere to more conservative cuts and silhouettes that eschewed deep cleavages and very short skirts (“Judging by Your Clothes” 1922). While both white and non-white fappers needed to negotiate the tension between their desire to display a freer expression of 70

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their sexuality and the need to maintain respectability, it was far greater challenge for African American women, due to the deeply embedded racist stereotypes that cast Black women as sexually deviant. If middle-class status enabled the growing strata of young Black women to participate in the new youth culture through consumption, racial boundaries still hindered them from gaining full access to the beauty ideal the fapper represented. Thus, although the commercialization of the fapper image opened up spaces for nonwhite and working-class women to shape and challenge white middle-class notions of beauty, it also set the boundaries to such challenges. Moreover, class and race were not the only barriers. Whereas the loose fapper dresses provided more comfort to the limbs than previous decades, the rectangular silhouette that favored a slim fgure required the molding and controlling of the body through fattening undergarments and diet to achieve that look (Fields 2007). For those who did not ft the fapper ideal, particularly non-white, older, and more stout women, adopting the image was not always a statement of personal liberation. Women had to navigate between the promises that consumer culture ofered them to achieve beauty and the various impediments that prevented them from fully take control over their images. Yet, recognizing the complexities of these negotiations allows better understanding of the ways in which consumer culture operated in the construction of new ideals of feminine beauty in the early twentieth century, enabling their dissemination across racial and class lines.

Conclusion Changing notions of beauty that gave rise to the images of the Gibson Girl and the fapper corresponded with shifts in women’s status and roles in the early twentieth century. As more women entered higher education, professional and reform work, as well as factory and domestic labor, they fashioned their appearance to ft their lifestyles of work and leisure. Consumer culture and the popular press ofered these women images and products through which they could engage with and shape understandings of femininity and beauty, promoting a youthful, athletic, and commercialized ideal that remained relevant through much of the twentieth century. While this beauty ideal was modeled according to white, middle-class standards, the growing accessibility of consumer culture expanded the meanings of femininity to include more diverse manifestations in terms of class and race. Indeed, the standardization of ready-made clothing, the availability of cosmetics, and the growing dissemination of print culture enabled women from diverse class and racial backgrounds to play an active role in constructing and challenging ideas of gender and beauty. Whereas economic and racial barriers often hindered the level of infuence women had in shaping the Gibson Girl or the fapper images, the consumer market provided an accessible means to join this conversation. Beauty thus became a realm through which contemporaries could not only express but also redefne their ideas of gender, class, race, Americanness, and democracy, turning it into an important subject of public debate.

Related topics Beauty and class Some’s thin, some’s voluptuous but they all fne: feminine beauty in black publications 1827–1909 “There is Something Chic About Women Wearing Men’s Clothes”: lesbian activists as fashionable women in the fght for the rights of sexual minorities in the United States, 1955–1972 71

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References Baldwin, Davarian L. 2007. Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Banner, Lois. 1983. American Beauty. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Banta, Martha. 1987. Imaging American Women. New York: Columbia University Press. Cott, Nancy F. 1987. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press. D’Emilio, John and Estelle Freedman. 2012. Intimate Matters, 3rd ed. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Devon, Ann. 1929. “Will Women Wear Them?” Outlook (November 6): 372. Doan, Laura. 1998. “Passing Fashions: Reading Female Masculinities in the 1920s.” Feminist Studies 24(3): 663–700. Enstad, Nan. 1999. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press. “Fashion’s Efect on Business.” 1928. Literary Digest (25 February): 18. Fields Jill. 2007. An Intimate Afair: Women, Lingerie, Sexuality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Finnegan, Margaret. 1999. Selling Sufrage. New York: Columbia University Press. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. 1996. The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture 1880–1910. New York: Oxford University Press. Haidarali, Laila. 2018. Brown Beauty: Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II. New York: New York University Press. “Judging by Your Clothes.” 1922. Half-Century (September–October): 19. Kidwell, Claudia Brush, and Margaret C. S Christman. 1974. Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kitch, Carolyn. 2001. The Girl on the Magazine Cover. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Lindsey, Treva. 2017. Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Lowe, Margret A. 2003. Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875–1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Patterson, Martha H. 2005. Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman 1895–1915. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2008. The American New Woman Revisited. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Peirce, Scott. 1927. “What It Costs to Be a Well-Dressed Flapper.” Motion Picture Classic (March 1927): 44. Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ———. 1998. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Henry Holt. Pumphrey, Martin. 1987. “The Flapper, the Housewife, and the Making of Modernity.” Cultural Studies 1(2): 179–194. Rabinovitch-Fox, Einav. 2017. “New Women in Early 20th-Century America.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Eds. Jon Butler et al. New York: Oxford University Press. http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acr efore-9780199329175-e-427 ———. 2019. “Fabricating Black Modernity: Fashion and African American Womanhood During the First Great Migration.” International Journal of Fashion Studies 6(2): 239–260. Roberts, Mary Louise. 1994. Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France 1917–1927. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rooks, Noliwe M. 2004. Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture that Made Them. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Schweitzer, Marlis. 2009. When Broadway Was the Runway. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Simmons, Christina. 2009. Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II. New York: Oxford University Press. Ticknor, Caroline. 1901. “The Steel-Engraving Lady and the Gibson Girl.” Atlantic Monthly Magazine ( July): 105–108.

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Democratizing looks Tinkler, Penny and Cheryl Krasnik Warsh. 2008. “Feminine Modernity in Interwar Britain and North America.” Journal of Women’s History 20(3): 113–143. Weinbaum, Alice et al., Eds. 2008. The Modern Girl around the World. Durham: Duke University Press. Welter, Barbara. 1966. “The Cult of True Womanhood 1820–1860.” American Quarterly 18(2): 151–174. Zietz, Joshua. 2006. Flapper: A Mad Cap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity and the Women Who Made America Modern. New York: Crown Publishers.

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8 SOME’S THIN, SOME’S VOLUPTUOUS BUT THEY ALL FINE Feminine beauty in Black publications 1827–1909 Sabrina Strings Until recently, I cried every time I watched The Color Purple. You know the scene where Shug hears the church choir up the road, and her expression grows wistful? Moved, she begins softly singing the hymnal from a distance. Cut to her marching purposefully in the direction of the church, belting out notes with such raw emotion that her diaphragm collapses. She crouches down low and growls, “Oh Speak LAAWWWDDDDD!” Then she bursts through the church doors, jumping with the power of the Holy Ghost as she attempts to reconnect with her family. When I tell you how that scene used to lay me out. But there were other parts of the flm that lingered for diferent reasons. The most recent time I’ve seen it, I was struck by the conversation between Celie and Mister where he’s trying to remind her of her place in the order of things. He tells her, “What you got? You’re ugly. You’re Skinny. You’re shaped funny … All you ft to do is be Shug’s maid.” Mister’s rebuke of Celie’s appearance spoke to me directly. Back in 1993, I’d heard my great aunt say something very close to this to my grandmother. It was my frst time meeting this great aunt. She was my grandmother’s older sister although they didn’t look even remotely related. My grandmother had always been relatively slight, with warm brown skin and short, fne hair. Her sister was robust in physique. She had that striking blue-black skin and thick, long hair. This sister lay dying in her hospital bed. She just kept laughing while saying to my grandmother, “Look at yo’ little, nappy-headed self! Skinny legs and short, nappy hair.” Whether she sufered from dementia or had been psychically transported back to time where people could say the things she was saying in public, I couldn’t tell. Being just 13 years old, I tried to rush to my grandmother’s defense. But, she restrained me. “It’s alright.” She said. “This is nothing I haven’t heard before.” In reality, it wasn’t news to me either. I had known that these kinds of things had been said about my grandmother when she was growing up. She told me that people called her peg leg, pencil leg, chicken leg. Why Georgians under Jim Crow were so fond of leg slurs I wasn’t sure. So when I saw The Color Purple again in 2018, it got me to wondering about what had been the aesthetic landscape in the Black community under Jim Crow, or even slavery. Was there a general trend of disdain for thin women? Also, how might they have felt about women at the other end of the size spectrum, the fat women who, as I have explored elsewhere 74

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(Strings 2019c), white Americans so scorned? Indeed, in another iconic Black cultural text, Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), one of the Black male characters describes fat women with more than a little derision. But, are The Color Purple and Mules and Men indicative of broader cultural trends in the rejection of bodies deemed “too thin” or “too fat,” evidently in favor of fgures deemed appropriately sized? There is prodigious documentation suggesting that during the tail-end of Jim Crow and its aftermath (1960–1990), Black folks commonly expressed a preference for women on the spectrum between what we might today deem “slim thicc” and “thicc” (Rosen et al. 1993; Craig 2002; Bailey 2008; Overstreet, Quinn, and Agocha 2010). And yet, precisely when, how, or even if thinness and fatness came to occupy lower rungs on some aesthetic hierarchy than “thiccness” has, to my knowledge, never been thoroughly investigated. This chapter examines Black representations of female bodily beauty under slavery and early Jim Crow. I have chosen the time period 1827–1909 because it encompasses some of the earliest and most iconic Black publications in the United States. Moreover, to the extent that my previous work establishes the nineteenth century as a key period during which American beauty ideals were being framed and consolidated (Strings 2019b, c), it is reasonable to begin an exploration of Black beauty ideals during this era. Below, I examine the following: what, if any, was the stated Black physical ideal between 1827 and 1909? How did men and women feel about thin Black women? How did folks regard fat Black women? Was thiccness then, as it appears to be now, atop the aesthetic hierarchy?

Tall, Svelte (white?) lovelies: a prelude A great deal of literature has explored contemporary Black aesthetics (Hobson 2003; Lowe 2005; Hesse-Biber et al. 2010; Overstreet, Quinn, and Agocha 2010). Yet, I know of no literature examining how Black people in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries viewed the relationship between body size and beauty. Since a formal literature review on the topic is not possible, given the dearth of research heretofore, I am ofering a prelude to my more systematic study of Black aesthetics. I performed a preliminary search of publications specifcally tailored to Black women of the early twentieth century and came across the work of esteemed writer Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Hopkins was the founder of The Colored American Magazine (CAM), a magazine for Black women that launched in 1900. She was born into a free Black family in Portland, Maine in 1859. In addition to serving as the magazine’s editor from 1900 to 1904 – when rumor has it she was pushed out by Frederick Douglass – Hopkins had established herself as an author. She published several novels and serialized short stories, many of the latter appearing in CAM. Her most famous work, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, was set to parchment in 1899. I turned to this text frst, searching for the word, “beauty.” This was the excerpt that I retrieved: Grace Montfort was a dream of beauty even among beautiful women. Tall and slender; her form was willowy, although perfectly molded. Her complexion was creamy in its whiteness; her hair, a rich golden brown, fell in rippling masses far below the waist line. (Hopkins 1988a: 40) Not exactly what I was expecting in a story about post-bellum racial violence. There was even an epigraph for the chapter, which extols a “fair young girl with light and delicate 75

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limbs” (Hopkins 1988: 32). This prompted multiple questions. First, why would Hopkins romanticize white looks? Why wax poetic about the “creaminess” of the protagonist’s white skin and her long, wavy, golden brown hair in a story wherein the title promises to illustrate romance in “Negro life”? But also, how can it be that a Black woman writing at the dawn of the twentieth century had intimate knowledge of, and a willingness to reproduce, the latest white aesthetic standards: being tall and thin? In interviews about the transition to the thin ideal, and even in my book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, I suggested that in my earlier research, I found little evidence that Black people were concerned about the thin ideal prior to the middle of the twentieth century. Was Hopkins an exception to these general fndings? I dug deeper into her bibliography. In her serialized story originally published in CAM, Hagar’s Daughter, Hopkins describes, “Jewel Bowen’s beauty” as being “of the Saxon type, dazzling fair, with creamy roseate skin. Her hair was fair, with streaks of copper in it; her eyes, gray with thick short lashes, at times iridescent. Her nose superbly Grecian” (Hopkins 1988b: 82). There is a Black female character in this work, Aurelia, described as a “Negress.” Aurelia, too, is described as beautiful, but unlike Jewel Bowen, Aurelia, “is false to the core” and “a dangerous woman” (Hopkins 1988b: 194). Hazel Carby has given us an efective deconstruction of representations of beauty in Hopkins’ work. Per Carby, “the idealization of black beauty” in Hopkins’ writing “is contradictory and retains classically European pretensions” (Carby 1988: xlvi). This was not to say that Hopkins did not challenge many of the anti-Black tropes that typically appeared in romance novels – because she did as Carby also acknowledges. Aurelia, for example, is one of “three black female characters who exist within the context of a white community and are believed to be white; for each, blackness is a secret and a means of their victimization” (Carby 1988: xxxvii). Aurelia Madison is, moreover, thoughtful, and generally betrays traits that would have been considered “masculine” at the time, and yet, she is an anti-heroine, rather than a villain. Many of Hopkins’ complex characters, Carby informs us, are “disguised as white” (Carby 1988: xxxvii). That is, they often use their light skin as a mechanism of subterfuge, deploying it to shuttle between white and Black spaces, efectively “passing” in each. And herein lies the complexity: while Grace Montfort, the protagonist of Hopkins’ Contending Forces fulflls the stereotype of “tragic mulatta” (McWilliams 2010), Aurelia, the light-skinned vamp in Hagar’s Daughter is cunning, but not vilifed as a jezebel. Nevertheless, the presentation of beauty in CAM more or less mirrored notions of white beauty at the time. Light-skinned and lithe women were regaled, their (sometimes tragic) stories deemed worthy of narrative exploration. As it turns out, Hopkins believed it was Africans, and not Europeans, who were the originators of this ideal. In an article entitled “Venus and the Apollo [were] Modelled from Ethiopians” (Carby 1988: xlvi) Hopkins wrote, “the most famous examples of classic beauty in sculpture … were chiselled from Ethiopian slave models” (Carby 1988: xlvi). Hopkins was, in her own estimation, (re)claiming for African descendants a certain primacy over artistic and philosophical matters. The tactic would be later employed by race scholars to reclaim the origin of civilization as African (Snowden 1970; Jackson 1985). To fnd evidence, from one of the earliest magazines for Black women, that middle-class and free Black women of the early twentieth century were aware of the slender ideal, traffcked in it, re-packaged it to make it fundamentally “Black” was staggering. It ran counter to what I’d always thought I’d known about Black women’s engagement with the thin ideal,

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not to mention the copious body of literature which suggested it was alternately unknown or rejected in Black spaces during the twentieth century (Lowe 2005; Hesse-Biber et al. 2010; Overstreet, Quinn, and Agocha 2010). Still, perhaps CAM was unrepresentative. It was, arguably, responding to or representing the concerns of an incredibly small subset of African Americans during the early twentieth century: the middle-class. I decided to conduct a more thorough search – widened the universe to include a suite of early African American newspapers. I wondered, were more Black Americans than previously believed conversant with the slender aesthetic that rose to prominence in white America between the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries? What was their view of slim, voluptuous, and fat women? Also, do we have evidence that class status played a role in these conceptions?

Method I conducted a search of all the archived and digitized African American periodicals available via Accessible Archives. There were 10 sources accessible, spanning the years between 1827 and 1909. The sources were: The Christian Recorder (1861–1902); The Colored American (1837–1841); Frederick Douglass’ Paper (1851–1855, 1859–1863); Freedom’s Journal (1827–1829); The National Era (1847–1860); The North Star (1847–1851); Provincial Freeman (1854–1857); Weekly Advocate (1837–1837); The Freedmen’s Record (1865–1874); The Negro Business League Herald (1909). I searched for terms relating to attractiveness and weight, including, “skinny,” “plump,” “slender OR slim AND fgure,” “Fat AND woman,” and “Venus.” The search for “skinny” yielded 0 relevant hits, indicating that I wasn’t going to locate any references to a Color Purple-esque relationship between skinniness and ugliness in these data. The remaining searches yielded between 500 and 2,300 hits. Results being sorted by relevance, I reviewed the frst 100 of all the remaining search terms. Using a grounded theory approach (Charmaz 2006), I read through each of the retrieved articles, looking for any reference to a relationship between weight and desirability. After generating a list of relevant results, I re-read the applicable articles to inductively identify major themes in the relationship between body size and attractiveness in Black periodicals. This resulted in 71 available articles, 62 of which were included in the present analysis. There were three major themes. The frst was expected: “Curvy Love.” The second and third “Slim Dolls,” and “Fat Aversion” were not.

Curvy love The most common fnding was praise for Curvaceous women1. Twenty-six of the 62 articles in the analysis rhapsodized about the beauty voluptuous women. Of these, seven made no mention of the race of the bearer. Illustrative is an 1848 piece from The North Star. The unknown author states, “The custom of lacing presupposes an increase of beauty, premised upon the idea that the most slender are the most handsome. This is an eggregious (sic) error of modern origin” (Anon 1848b). For this author’s taste, the reverse was true: an aesthetic that evinced a joy in life was preferred over one that supposedly bespoke self-denial, “the error must cease … What is man without enjoyment? Wealth and treasures may surround us in rich

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profusion, subject to our control, but where there is no enjoyment, there cannot be true happiness” (Anon 1848b). This piece was somewhat critical of the (new) thin ideal, as it alludes to a hierarchy that placed feshiness at the top. In this respect, we can see how other middle-class Black folk, especially in the North, were well acquainted with the mainstream and often-white notion of beauty, even if not everyone wholly embraced the ideal. Still the author wanted to make it clear that women who were not voluptuous were nevertheless still capable of being considered beauties. They write, “[n]either does the size of the person, increase or detract from beauty. Whether tall or short, corpulent or delicate, large or small persons, may or not, possess all the graces and beauty of symmetry and form.” Other works made no bones about asserting the primacy of curvaceousness. In these, race was often underscored. Eight of the pieces falling under this theme described plump and pretty white girls. In two of them, older women were singled out as being beautiful because of their mature fgures. In one, none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe intones, “So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls! Why doesn’t somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?” The author proceeds by highlighting the charms of two older white women, including one named Ruth who the author describes as “a little short, round-pincushiony woman stood … with a cherry blooming face, like a ripe apple” (Stowe 1851). It may appear surprising to fnd Harriet Beecher Stowe as a contributing author in a Negro periodical, particularly given the controversy surrounding her representation of Black people in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Martin 2008). But it is worth noting that it was a routine practice for publications at the time to invite famous authors to submit pieces, or reprint works published elsewhere. As it turns out, several of the pieces included in this analysis were written by white men and women. Some of them were famous, like Nathaniel Hawthorne. Others, like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thomas Carlyle, the latter known for both his anti-Black and anti-Irish screeds, were infamous (Strings 2019c). Stowe, in her piece, was apparently speaking to a growing phenomenon of praising mature women. There was even a saying among white America at the time, “fat fair, and forty.” This phrase appeared twice in these data. Exemplary is a piece by a woman named Martha Russell from 1849 in which Mrs. Judge Lawson is depicted as “self-satisfed, somewhat aristocratic, but really kind-hearted, ‘fat, fair, and forty’” friend of the author (Russell 1849). Still, the number one fnding by far were depictions of well-built Black women. In an 1853 piece in the Frederick Douglass Paper, the unnamed author describes the scene at a slave auction: The slave market is a large court surrounded with rude cells, which I found crowded with negro girls … I noticed one of them young, handsome, and fne featured, but with wooly, greasy, matted hair. She was jet black from Nubia, and all but quite naked. – Her features were regular, and might have been considered beautiful, notwithstanding her negro complexion and her woolly black hair, woven in grease into tiny bristling plaits. Her form was plump and graceful. And she had an expression of thoughtful melancholy in her face. (Anon 1853) The author is apparently a white man, who admires the “plump” fgures of this presumably “jet black” Nubian woman. The statement spoke to the colorist predilections and the derision of kinky hair that was common among race scientists and many lay white persons at 78

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the time. And yet, save her dark skin and braided hair, he fnds this thicc maiden well worth writing home about. Of course, not all of the pieces on aesthetics were written by white people. In one that appears to have been written by a Black man, he states that Egyptian women’s forms, “resembled the fgures of beautiful women of the present day, round and voluptuous; a small nose, the eyes long, half-shut, and turned up at the outer angle…” (Anon 1861). What may be concerning to the modern reader, however, is that the authoritative source on women’s aesthetics cited by this author is Johann Blumenbach. Blumenbach is recognized as the creator of the term “Caucasian,” and known by contemporary race scholars as a fetishist of whiteness (Painter 2010). Under this theme, Black, white, and so-named “mulatta” women were praised for their curves. While the preference for thicc physiques that is manifest in these newspapers may not be surprising, that this preference was articulated by white persons is unexpected. In periodicals targeting white Americans in the nineteenth century, the lion’s share of representations centered white women (Strings 2019b). And, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the women selected for praise were increasingly svelte (Strings 2019c). It is an eye-opening fnding, then, that the authors invited to write for (or who were reprinted in) African American periodicals, whether Black or white, were those who largely articulated a relationship between voluptuousness and desirability.

Slim dolls This is not to suggest that slim women were without acclaim. Especially due to the preponderance of white authors in these data, there were fully 18 articles describing slim beauties. Of these, 14 specifcally identifed white women as svelte dolls. In a piece appearing in The National Era from 1848, the author, Emma D.E. Southworth, can scarcely contain her adulation for the tiny sprite she describes, despite the fact that the woman in question is bedridden: She was thin, even to emaciation, yet very beautiful as she slept. Her long black eyelashes rested upon a cheek white as marble, transparent as pearl; her long black hair, escaped from her cap, foated over the pillow. Her slender white arm was thrown above her head, across the black tresses. (Southworth 1848) That the author salivates over this “emaciated” beauty, who’s apparently lying in a hospital bed, recalls Adele Clarke’s analysis of white women “wasting in style” during the period (Clarke 1990). It also underscores the fact that the preference for thinness often ran counter to concerns for health (Strings 2019c). Indeed, the skimpy fgures over which Southworth – and other white women – often swooned were the very same that, to borrow from Jasbir Puar, may have them in “death’s position” (Puar 2017). Only two of the articles under this theme mentioned Black women specifcally. One is a poem written to interrogate white men about their real reasons for leaving Europe and heading to the colonies. The piece, titled simply “Jealousy” reads, Why hast thou left thy native home? Was it for love, was it for gold? Or was it for a maiden fair, With pearly teeth and crimped hair? For one, whose fgure tall and slim,

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Sabrina Strings With grace, full form, and dimpled chin? One on whom kind fortune smiled, And made her an heirless child; For one, when beauty passed her by, Left a mark for the lover’s eye? What other charms have made you go And leave your land of birth? If not for love, if not for gold, It was in search of feeting mirth. (Manley 1862)

The “maiden fair” is likely a light-skinned Black woman or “mulatta.” Such women were commonly described as “fair” in these data, evocative of Hopkins’ novels (Hopkins 1988b). We can further glean as much from depictions of her hair as “crimped” as opposed to “woolly,” and intonations that the woman imagined was an “heirless” child – suggesting that her father was white. While it is unclear if the author of these verses, Mary Manley, is white or Black, the title seems to suggest it was penned by a white woman. She appears to ask white male colonizers if the feeting nature of their enjoyments justifed them leaving European women behind. It speaks to the anxiety white women sometimes expressed about interracial relationships during the period. Many feared the possibility of “good stock” white men choosing nonwhite women over them (Strings 2019a). To round out this category, an 1853 essay in The National Era speaks to the relationship between weight, class, beauty, and (ill)health. In it, one character praises another for her weight-loss: You are not so very plain – not ugly, you know. Indeed, now I think this illness has improved you. You have lost that – well, that fullness of the chest and shoulders – that country look, as I call it. With a little attention to dress, you will have quite a slender fgure. (emphasis mine; Russell 1853) The race of the characters is unspecifed. However, elucidated for the reader is the relationship between urbanity, beauty, and a certain peaked-look. Per Russell, the wan look is elevated – it shows a woman who has cast of her “country” (implying lowly) roots. She is ready to step into the refnement beftting society’s upper crust. In this respect, claims of one being “country” are also classist.

Fat aversion Perhaps the most surprising fnding in these data was that of fat aversion. Articles betraying a form of fatphobia tied in number (18) with those showing a praise for slim fgures. But signifcantly, the fat stigma herein was not for the most part, projected onto the Black female body; Black women were specifcally mentioned in only two of the articles. In an 1859 article, E. Foxton, who appears to be a white male, dispatches his regular character, Herman, to describe Black women working a cotton-feld as follows: They were clad in a uniform of gowns which seemed once to have been brown, but which were now grim with flth. These were restrained about their monstrous Afrite fgures by two bands one passing round the middle of their thick waists, and another 80

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just above the hips. Between these two bands, their skirts were pulled up, so as to make a circular pouch about their bodies, and to exhibit to the best advantage below their stumpy, elephantine legs, swathed in bocking or bagging, tied on with string wound carelessly round and round in spiral lines. (Foxton 1859) Here, Foxton displaces the horror of the plantation onto the bodies of enslaved Black women. Likening the Black women on the plantation to animals by describing their legs as “elephantine,” the terror evoked is not that of their being condemned to live as slaves. Rather, Foxton frets over the ways in which visiting a plantation makes visible the “monstrous” nature of the “Afrite” (a homonym to “a fright”) fgures. E. Foxton was a regular contributor to The National Era. Yet, his own background is not immediately evident. It is an open question what would have made him so attractive a contributor to this periodical. But again, a very small number of the articles in the section mentioned Black women at all. The most intriguing fnding was the relationship between fatness and white masculinity. Indeed, the most common form of fat stigma in these data were visited upon rich white men – reviled for growing large on the abundance generated from slave labor, while slaves themselves languished in poverty. Seven articles in these data revealed a derision for “fat cats,” all of whom were white men. In a selection from The North Star in 1848, the author (seemingly a Black man) is disgusted by the poor treatment of Black women in America. He writes, Is it worse to abuse a few white women in Russia, than a nation of black women in America? Is that worse for a European than this for the democratic republicans of America? The truth must be spoken, the voice of the bondman’s blood cries out to God against us; His justice shall make reply. How can America ask mercy, who has never shown it there? (Anon 1848a) The author concludes his indictment by mocking a slaveholder, pretending to write as this man: “I am fed with his toil; fat, voluptuous on his sweat, and tears, and blood” (Anon 1848a). Similarly, a post in The National Era writing as if from the position of an Indigenous person extols, facetiously, the small blessings white men bestowed upon the Native peoples: We are glad our Father came up here with a little corn and a little beef, and, it may be, a few slices of pork, for us to eat. We were very hungry, and we are yet. The red man is always hungry. The white young men are fat. They look very sleek and greasy. (Anon 1851) The piece was clearly intended to chaf. This is evident as we learn that the supposed generosity of the colonizer translates to their giving Native people “little” to eat and leaving them “yet hungry.” Meanwhile, the white men themselves are well fed to the point of appearing to have excess nutriment seeping from their pores, rendering them as slick as their unctuous settler-colonial policies. The modern reader may still view this as a form of fat stigma. It is, however, worth mentioning that the view of fatness in African American periodicals was not routinely misogynistic or anti-Black; indeed, being voluptuous, plump, or full fgured, especially for women, was the most common assignation of beauty in these data. 81

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Rather, the distaste for fatness, when deployed, was a way of signifying the diferential access to food that beset the poor, especially the poor Black and Indigenous populations, vis-á-vis the fat white enslaver. In this way, the derision of rich white men as “fat,” might have been supplanted with a depiction of them as loosely cannibalistic. That is, they were not revolting because of their size alone. Their revulsion was spawned by the knowledge that they were feeding of the blood, sweat, and tears of people of color.

Conclusion I was originally disappointed that I could not fnd a greater description of “skinny” or, even slim Black women. I had inherited familial knowledge on the topic and amassed pop cultural references on top of those. Even in my own experience as a Black woman – who has experienced slenderness as an advantage in largely white spaces, but a defcit in largely Black spaces – I thought I knew what I’d fnd in the African American periodicals. I realized in writing this article that I had, in my thinking about the issue of “Black” aesthetics, inadvertently fattened the experiences of Black people in America under slavery and Jim Crow. I had been raised hearing about – and witnessing – the preferences of lowincome Black people, and especially those from the South. These tales had been told to me by family and friends born in former slave states and in rural areas. People without resources, and with little education. People like The Color Purple’s Celie. They apparently did not refect the knowledge or afect of Black people in the North, or those with a modicum of means. Middle-class and northern African Americans, at least as depicted in the available, digitized newspaper and magazine sources, appeared to print works praising feshiness, for sure. But they also praised slimness. If many of the writers of the latter pieces were white, we can nevertheless be assured that the audiences for the works were largely Black and middle-class. This indicates that middle-class Black people, especially those in the American North, were at least familiar with the slender aesthetic – potentially long before poor Blacks and those from the South. Future research is needed to tease out the specifc contours of southern, rural, and poor Black aesthetics. This will likely require a methodology that relies on found artifacts as opposed to sustained archives (Samford 1996). Those individuals with access to the means of publication may have had, it seems, diferent dispositions than poorer folks who did not. The relative few privileged African Americans appear to have been knowledgeable of – and may even have been afected by – the thin ideal already in the nineteenth century. Yet, it is important to mention that unlike what I have chronicled regarding white periodicals (Strings 2019a), Black newspapers and magazines did not resort to a routine degradation of Black women’s appearance, whether fat or slim. In this way, they rejected the tradition of making Black women the foil for white beauty standards. Rare instances of attempts to cut Black women down appear to have been penned by white authors. Rather, the approach of the Black periodicals seems to be one of relative size inclusivity, cut with a fatphobia that targeted white men as a form of anti-colonial politics. As far as descriptions of the female body in these periodicals, white and Black, voluptuous and thin women were all fne.

Related topics Bumpah politics: the thick Black female body in US and Caribbean academic discourses Democratizing looks: the politics of gender, class, and beauty in early twentieth century United States

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Note 1 The word “thick” or “thicc” was not used. Like many racial, gendered, and aesthetic terms commonly in use today, relevant to my modern analysis of historical trends. (Similarly, I am using the term “African American” although that is a late twentieth-century invention.) Future research is needed to determine the etymology of the term “thick.”

References Anon. 1848a. “Selections. From Parker’s Letter on Slavery.” The North Star, May 5, 1848. ———. 1848b. “A Word to Mothers.” The North Star, August 25, 1848. ———. 1851. “Indian Customs.” The National Era, October 23, 1851. ———. 1853. “The Slave Market of Cairo.” Frederick Douglass Paper, January 7, 1853. ———. 1861. “Chapters on Ethnology.” The Christian Recorder, March 23, 1861. Bailey, Eric J. 2008. Black America, Body Beautiful: How the African American Image Is Changing Fashion, Fitness, and Other Industries. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Carby, Hazel. 1988. Introduction.” In The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, ed. Pauline Hopkins. New York: Oxford University Press, xxix–l. Charmaz, Kathy. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Clarke, Adele. 1990. “Women’s Health: Life-Cycle Issues.” In Women, Health and Medicine in America: A Historical Handbook, ed. Rima D. Apple. New York: Garland, 3–40. Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race. New York: Oxford University Press. Foxton, E. 1859. “Washington, D.C.” The National Era, February 10, 1859. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene, Stacey Livingstone, Daniela Ramirez, Emily Brooke Barko, and Alicia Lorene Johnson. 2010. “Racial Identity and Body Image among Black Female College Students Attending Predominately White Colleges.” Sex Roles 63 (9): 697–711. Hobson, Janell. 2003. “The ‘Batty’ Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body.” Hypatia 18 (4): 87–105. Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth. 1988a. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1988b. The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins. New York: Oxford University Press. Jackson, John G. 1985. Ethiopia and the Origin of Civilization. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press. Lowe, Margaret A. 2005. Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875–1930. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Manley, Mary. 1862. “Jealousy.” The Christian Recorder, July 3, 1862. Martin, Michael. 2008. “Why African-Americans Loathe ‘Uncle Tom.’” Tell Me More. NPR. https:// www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93059468. McWilliams, Dean. 2010. Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Overstreet, Nicole M., Diane M. Quinn, and V. Bede Agocha. 2010. “Beyond Thinness: The Infuence of a Curvaceous Body Ideal on Body Dissatisfaction in Black and White Women.” Sex Roles 63 (1–2): 91–103. Painter, Nell Irvin. 2010. The History of White People. 1st Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rosen, Ellen F., Adolph Brown, Jennifer Braden, Herman W. Dorsett, Dawna N. Franklin, Ronald A. Garlington, Valerie E. Kent, Tonya T. Lewis, and Linda C. Petty. 1993. “African-American Males Prefer a Larger Female Body Silhouette Than Do Whites.” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 31 (6): 599–601. Russell, Martha. 1849. “Mary Grayson.” The National Era, April 19, 1849. ———. 1853. “Diary.” The National Era, October 20, 1853. Samford, Patricia. 1996. “The Archaeology of African-American Slavery and Material Culture.” The William and Mary Quarterly 53 (1): 87–114.

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Sabrina Strings Snowden, Frank M. 1970. Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Southworth, Emma D.E. 1848. “Neighbor’s Prescriptions. Inscribed to the Medical Faculty.” The National Era, March 2, 1848. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 1851. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or Life among the Lowly.” The National Era, September 4, 1851. Strings, Sabrina. 2019a. “Women (Re) Making Whiteness: The Sexual Exclusion of the Fat ‘Black’ Irish.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 43 (4): 672–689. ———. 2019b. “Fat as a Floating Signifer.” The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment, January. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190842475.013.9. ———. 2019c. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. New York: New York University Press.

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9 COLORISM AND THE RACIAL POLITICS OF BEAUTY Margaret Hunter

What was once a topic relegated to the backpages of Ebony or Jet magazine every few years has become a popular and frequent discussion across all media outlets. With growing public frustration about limited representations of beauty for women of color, suddenly, everyone is discussing the topic of colorism. With attention grabbing headlines like, “Shades of Prejudice,” “50 Shades of Black: Young Hollywood has a Colorism Problem,” and “In the Trump Era, a Lighter Shade of Latino Can Make Life Easier,” major media outlets from MTV to the New York Times are analyzing the phenomenon of colorism. Social media platforms have not missed the opportunity to showcase the best and worst of the colorism debates including Twitter’s infamous competition between #teamlightskin and #teamdarkskin, an ongoing series of back and forth tweets highlighting the perceptions of the best and worst things about being each shade. The ubiquitous use of Instagram, Snapchat, and other photo flters has highlighted the often unquestioned cultural ideal of light or white skin. The dozens of apps that users engage to smooth over blemishes or slim down the face can also be used to lighten skin. So what’s the problem? Almost all of the so-called “beauty flters” change people’s faces in the same direction: to look more like white people. From narrowing the nose to lightening skin, flters are no longer just adding rainbow tongues and puppy ears. The design of the flters belies their creators’ Eurocentric defnition of beauty: lighter is better. Those with more money can skip the flter altogether and change the real thing. Cosmetic surgeries designed to alter racial features are on the rise, and this is especially true among people of color. From nose jobs to eyelid surgeries, increasing numbers of people of color undergo elective cosmetic surgery every year to alter racialized aspects of their bodies. Nearly 2 million Latinx, 1.5 million African American, and 1.1 million Asian American patients underwent elective cosmetic surgery in 2017 alone (ASPS 2017). Cosmetic procedures are no longer reserved for white movie stars, but are now common practice among upper middle class professionals of all races looking for an edge in the job market or marriage market. How should we understand the racial identity of a body with altered racial features? Is racial identity as malleable as our eyelids? Do the people of color who pay for these procedures want to be white? Research on the use of skin bleaching creams and cosmetic surgery reveals a complicated picture of changing bodies and the shifting meaning of race. For example,

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the American Society of Plastic Surgeons recently published a briefng paper titled “Plastic Surgery for Ethnic Patients,” where they suggest, The majority of patients want to maintain their ethnic identity. They do not want to lose important facial features that exhibit racial character. For instance, the typical Asian patient who has eyelid surgery desires a wider, fuller eye that is natural looking to the Asian face and maintains an almond shape. An African American patient interested in nose reshaping may want to reduce the size of their nose to achieve a harmonious balance with other facial features, but is not seeking a nose that is more European. (2013) The cosmetic surgery industry carefully curates its message to welcome people of color and to assure them that despite getting wider eyes and narrower noses, they are not “trying to be white.” It is true that people of color are making their features more white or European and that they do not necessarily want to change their racial identity – they just want the extra status that come with white bodies. It is also true that people increasingly view their bodies as possessing capital that can increase their access to jobs, spouses, and generalized social status. Racial identity aside, there are real economic benefts for light skin and white features. I use the term, “racial capital” to capture the economic and transferable status of whiteness that even people of color can access by physically whitening their appearance. Snapchat flters, skin bleaching creams, and cosmetic surgeries are all tools used to build racial capital and enhance access to white privilege. The cultural anxieties that have been stirred up in recent media scandals reveal ongoing discomfort and ambivalence about the role that skin bleaching and cosmetic surgery should play in our society. Julie Chen of The Talk recently disclosed an eyelid surgery done decades ago (Chen 2016). She opted for the surgery in order to boost her career, after being told that her eye shape made her look “disinterested.” She was overwhelmed with both criticism and praise from people inside and outside of the Asian American community. Other celebrities such as baseball superstar Sammy Sosa and rap music artist Lil’ Kim have been “outed” in the media for bleaching their skin with stark before and after pictures. Public shaming via social media ensued and the colorism spectacle repeated itself. This chapter provides an alternative analysis to the pop culture wars around colorism. This chapter is focused on understanding the history of colorism and how it operates as a system of discrimination. The racialization of beauty and the concept of racial capital are crucial to this endeavor. Finally, I investigate how contemporary practices of skin bleaching and cosmetic surgery can be understood in their sociological contexts as rational acts in a discriminatory system.

Te historical foundations of colorism Colorism is a structural and cultural system of discrimination that uses the status of skin tone to diferentiate and value racialized bodies. Light-skinned people of color experience privilege in this system and dark-skinned people experience discrimination. The forms and intensity of that discrimination are afected by other aspects of their identity such as gender identity and presentation, sexuality, language use, economic class status, education level, and more. Colorism is not a stand-alone system. It is built on the foundation of structural racism and it will not go away as long as structural racism is present. Colorism is a manifestation 86

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of racism. Colorism has masqueraded as an “in-group” problem for many years, but in fact, people of all races practice colorism, including at the level of unconscious bias. While most people of color can easily identify interactions with family members who evaluated their skin color with praise or criticism, fewer people of color can point to overt interactions with whites where colorism was named. Although whites may be less aware of their color-based bias, there is signifcant evidence that it exists (Dhillon-Jamerson 2018). Evidence that African Americans and Latinxs experience discrimination in employment and education based on color will be discussed in the following section and ofered as additional evidence that color-based discrimination extends far beyond communities of color. Colorism is a much larger system that permeates not just the United States, but global media culture. Because colorism is a subsystem of structural racism, it operates in many institutions and does not require the actual presence of racist individuals. Moreover, people of color and whites, alike, internalize skin tone hierarchies, so even in communities that are extremely racially segregated, there will be hierarchies that beneft the lighter-skinned members and disadvantage the darker-skinned members. In this way, people of color feel the efects of white racism in their communities even when no white people are present. Colorism is not just about beauty standards, per se, but more generally about social status and esteem. Historical legacies of racism and colonialism lay the framework for racialized status and defnitions of beauty (Craig 2002). The historical foundations of colorism are directly related to European colonization and slavery in the Americas. Countries such as India, the Philippines, Mexico, and Nigeria all have strong color hierarchies with deep historical roots and long lasting legacies. In addition, countries like Japan, which were never true “colonies” of Europe, developed their own histories of colorism linked to class status and the privileges of staying inside versus the burden of working outdoors in the sun. The US form of colorism for African Americans has its foundation in the system of slavery. The following section provides an outline of how some of these systems worked and the value systems they built that are reinforced in today’s global media culture. European colonialism in the Americas had, at its foundation, an ideology of European superiority that included intellectual contributions, language, religion, culture, and even bodily aesthetics ( Jordan 1968/2012). Consequently, European body types, pale skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, were often elevated in status by the Europeans and eventually revered by both the colonizers and the colonized. The brutality of European colonialism around the globe facilitated an internalization of some European norms, even while colonized people fought to maintain some of their cultural values (Darity, Dietrich, & Hamilton 2005; Hall 2011; Hunter 2005). Although many colonized groups resisted aspects of European superiority, European cultural norms became ubiquitous across many societies, and were often viewed as high status and desirable (Fanon 1952/2008). For African Americans, colorism has its roots in the US slavery system, where lighterskinned Blacks were often given more privileges and more desirable jobs on the plantation than their darker-skinned counterparts ( Jordan 1968/2012). Slave-owners and other white Southerners worked hard to build divisions among enslaved Africans to help minimize their power, including the manumission of some mixed-race ofspring of slave-owners (Russell-Cole, Wilson, & Hall 2013). After slavery, African American color hierarchies were reinforced by whites and other African Americans who looked more favorably on the growing light-skinned middle class than the darker-skinned working class (Frazier 1957). For Latinxs, colorism was frmly established in the colonial practices of the Spanish in Mexico, which included the denigration of the culture, language, political system, religion, 87

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and aesthetics of the Indigenous people and Africans in the region (Telles 2014). Dark-skinned people were relegated to low-status roles in social and economic realms. The color-caste system, established by the Spanish colonizers, was also adopted by white Americans in the colonization of the now Southwestern United States (Acuña 2014). Colorism elevates and values white aesthetics so that positive traits are associated with whiteness and negative traits are associated with Blackness or Indigeneity. The historical legacy of colorism works in tandem with contemporary forms of white racism that valorize whiteness around the globe (Hunter 2011).

Skin tone stratifcation and the halo efect Colorism has a long and varied history, and its legacy is reinforced today across many dimensions of social life, including employment opportunities, educational experiences, housing, criminal justice sentencing, and mental health outcomes. For example, lighterskinned African Americans and Latinxs earn higher incomes than their darker-skinned counterparts, even when darker-skinned people are similar to them in other ways (ChavezDueñas, Adames, & Organista 2014; Espino & Franz 2002; Gomez 2000; Hersch 2006). Lighter-skinned people of color have higher educational attainment (Bodenhorn & Ruebeck 2007; Fergus 2009; Keith & Herring 1991; Murguia & Telles 1996), live in less racially segregated neighborhoods (Alba, Logan, & Stults 2000), marry higher status spouses, experience less depression and more self-efcacy (Thompson & Keith 2001), experience less harsh discipline in schools (Hannon, DeFina, & Bruch 2013), and have lighter prison sentences when convicted of the same crimes as darker-skinned people (Pizzi, Blair, & Judd 2005; Viglione, Hannon, & DeFina 2011). The broad range of efects of colorism suggests that color-based discrimination is widely practiced by people of color and whites alike. In order for large-scale patterns of income inequality, educational inequality, and criminal justice sentencing to be visible along skin tone lines, colorism must be deeply embedded in US cultural practices. While racial gaps also exist in terms of wealth, educational attainment, and housing, gaps by color are layered on top of that complicating the way that racial and color-based discrimination work to create stratifcation. How can we make sense of the broad unearned advantages that light skin garners? Researchers have shown that the “halo efect” phenomenon in psychology is central to understanding how people evaluate one another. The halo efect is a propensity to allow positive evaluations about one trait in a person (often physical attractiveness) to infuence the appraisal of other aspects of that person’s characteristics, such as intelligence, kindness, and likeability (Nisbett & Wilson 1977). People routinely attribute other positive traits (like competence or integrity) to people they perceive as physically attractive (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster 1972). A color-based halo efect operates in the same way, but is infuenced by the skin tone of the person being evaluated. Lighter-skinned people of color, who are often viewed as more physically attractive because of racialized beauty standards, are more likely to be judged as intelligent and kind (Rondilla & Spickard 2007; Wade 2008). In this way, the halo of physical attractiveness (or light skin) afects one’s judgment about the other traits of the person one is evaluating (Hersch 2011). The educational classroom is an interesting case study in how the halo efect might be working to contribute to color-based discrimination. Lighter-skinned students of color may seem more attractive to teachers because of racialized beauty standards; they may also seem more white. Teachers may unconsciously favor Latinx and African American students with 88

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light hair, light eyes, or other European features (Ryabov 2013). The halo efect can then extend from notions of physical attractiveness to perceptions of intelligence, competence, and integrity. In fact, Chin, Wade, and French (2006) found this to be true in a study of parental assessments of baby’s faces of diferent races. If the lighter-skinned students of color are more likely to be seen as the good kids in the class, then they are more likely to perform at higher levels because of strong teacher expectations. Those students may also be perceived to have fewer behavioral problems as the positive evaluation of their appearance bleeds over to the positive assessment of other characteristics (Rong 1996). If lighter-skinned children of color are more likely to experience the halo efect with their teachers because of their color, then they are also more likely to have positive relationships with those teachers, leading to more positive schooling experiences overall. The politics of beauty are also shaped by the racialized halo efect. Because race is a central criterion for defning beauty in a racist society, the benefts of the halo efect are disproportionately applied to white women or light-skinned women of color. It isn’t just good looking people who get the benefts of the halo efect, but the benefciaries are also disproportionately white or light-skinned.

Racial capital and beauty politics Facial features, skin tones and body types associated with whites confer status on people of color in an individualistic way. Many scholars have used the concept of capital to better understand how people use status within a capitalist system. Light skin tone can be transformed into social capital (social networks), symbolic capital (esteem or status), or even economic capital (a high-paying job or promotion) (Bourdieu 1984; Hunter 2005). Blay (2009) found that women in Ghana who used bleaching products were trying to attain beauty vis-à-vis light skin. She argues that light skin and beauty were the vehicles through which women attempted to gain social capital (Blay 2009). Similar fndings are reported in Jamaica (Charles 2011) and other nations around the globe. Social capital – the value of the social networks in which a person is embedded – is a central concept in studies of colorism. Because of the history of class distinction in the United States, social networks that involve wealthy or powerful people can be very valuable. White or light skin is a form of “racial capital” gaining its status from existing racial hierarchies. Racial capital is a resource drawn from the body that can be related to skin tone, facial features, body shape and other racialized physical characteristics. I use the term “racial capital” to describe the role that white bodies play in the status hierarchy. For racial capital to provide status, others’ perceptions of one’s appearance matter more than one’s own. When people perceive someone as lighter-skinned or with European facial features, they assign more social status to that person. Consequently, skin-lightening products, cosmetic surgeries, and digital tools that alter social media images of the body are particularly sought after in this moment. Consumers seek to gain racial capital virtually, through digital flters that lighten their appearance in online images, as well as in real life through alterations of their actual skin tone and bodies through skin bleaching and cosmetic surgery. Does racial identity also shift when the racialized body, or a digital representation of it, is altered? Not necessarily. An analysis of media coverage of ethnic cosmetic surgery reveals a clear pattern of discourse that reinforces racial identity while rationalizing the racial alteration of the body toward a white aesthetic (Dolnick 2011; O’Connor 2014). The concept of “racial capital” is distinct from racial identity. Racial capital is closely related to phenotype and how others perceive someone, rather than how that individual 89

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defnes him or herself. This is an important distinction. Racial capital is a concept that allows us to understand discrimination, inequality, and the diferential status accorded to racialized bodies. Racial identity, on the other hand, is driven by the individual in relation to their social context. A light-skinned biracial Asian and white person may identify as Korean, for example, and they may also have signifcant “racial capital” if their phenotype, or physical appearance, is signifcantly European. That means that while they may identify as a person of color, their access to racial capital mediates their experience of racism and colorism in the world. Their identity is still Korean, but they experience racial discrimination quite diferently from a Korean person with less racial capital. The increase in skin-bleaching around the globe is a result of the merger between old ideologies of colonialism and race, and new technologies of the body (Hunter 2005). The racist ideologies of race and color were an integral part of the European colonial experience (Charles 2003). However, new transnational neocolonial ideologies continue and elaborate these old belief systems (Leonardo 2002). Images from the United States and Europe lead the way in valorizing white/light beauty around the world. Japan’s infuence is particularly strong throughout Asia and is evidenced in their best-selling beauty products marketed as, “specially designed for Asian skin” (Ashikari 2005). Although skin lightening is a centuries-old practice, the cosmetic surgery industry is a relatively new invention. Globally, cosmetic surgery is on the rise and is most practiced in nations such as Japan, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, and the United States (ISAPS 2018). White women comprise the vast majority of all clients in the US cosmetic surgery industry, but rates among people of color have continued to rise over the past two decades. In fact, from 2016 to 2017 alone, the number of cosmetic surgeries done on Latinx patients increased 16% and the number for African Americans increased 17%, compared to only 8% for whites and fat levels for Asian Americans (ASPS 2017). These data reveal startlingly high increases in people of color’s enthusiasm for cosmetic surgical procedures in the United States. The types of procedures people of color elect to have also reveal aspirations to gain racial capital. For example, the most common procedures for Latinx and African American patients are nose-reshaping, breast augmentation, and liposuction. Most common among Asian Americans are nose-reshaping, eyelid surgery, and breast augmentation (ASPS 2013). Nose-reshaping and eyelid surgeries are common surgeries that change facial features in the direction of a more white/European look. However, even liposuction can be interpreted as a way that some African American women may be pursuing a slender body associated with whiteness that afords more racial capital in the beauty queue (Hunter 2005).

Conclusion People often refer to locations where people are assessing bodies as they look for sexual/ romantic partners (like bars and gyms) as “meat markets.” The term “meat market” has a negative connotation and implies an inappropriate focus on the evaluation of people’s bodies. However, I contend that marriage and dating markets have a strong focus on the body, especially for women, and that bodies are rank-ordered in diferent patriarchal contexts according to broadly accepted and racialized beauty standards (Hill 2002). “Meat markets” like the hot new club or newest gym in town are just refections of much larger and more insidious forms of an evaluation of and focus on the body. From skin color to facial features, body type to hair type, the racialized body is a key aspect in assessing status when looking for a partner. Defnitions of beauty, central to understanding the beauty queue, have remained relatively unchanged in the United States over the past several decades. Despite public acclamation 90

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that multiculturalism is highly valued, white skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, and a slim body type have remained constant as highly desirable physical characteristics, especially among whites. While some communities of color may embrace standards of beauty that are slightly diferent, most people of color in the United States have also embraced the white defnition of beauty that has permeated all cultural media outlets. Beauty is not “in the eye of the beholder” as is often quoted, but instead is largely in the hands of elites and the dominant social group to defne. It is for this reason that we experience the hegemony of racist white beauty standards. Nonetheless, people of all genders also resist the white beauty regime and build movements that celebrate other styles and aesthetics (Craig 2006). Although they may be localized or temporary, their presence is a reminder that beauty is a social construction. Through the globalization of media outlets, the multimedia messages of white beauty and sophistication are more than evident (Perry 2006). From the multibillion dollar skin bleaching industry to the expanding cosmetic surgery industry, methods to lighten the skin and Anglicize the face and body are more common and accessible to the public than ever before (Charles 2003; Glenn 2008; Hunter 2011; Mire 2001). In our media-saturated environment where people see thousands of messages each day reinforcing the desirability of whiteness, our own relationship to our bodies has changed. We imagine increased malleability and plasticity, as well as the option to acquire racial capital that we do not have. Rather than interpreting people’s choices to undergo cosmetic surgery or skin bleaching as acts of self-hate or internalized racism, we can instead view them as rational acts in a discriminatory system where light skin and white bodies are rewarded with real material gains. As communities continue to organize against racism in all of its forms, we will also continue to see organizing against colorism, and hopefully, ultimately, the decline of both systems.

Related topics Beauty, colorism, and anti-colorism in transnational India Picking your battles: beauty, complacency and the other life of racism Body aesthetics & beauty politics in 21st century Africa: case of the Sudan

References Acuña, Rudolfo. 2014. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. New York: Pearson. Alba, Richard D., John Logan, & Brian Stults. 2000. “The Changing Neighborhood Contexts of the Immigrant Metropolis.” Social Forces 79: 587–621. American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). 2013. “Briefng Paper: Plastic Surgery for Ethnic Patients.” https://www.plasticsurgery.org/news/briefng-papers/briefng-paper-plastic-surgery-forethnic-patients ———. 2017. “2017 Cosmetic Demographics.” https://www.plasticsurgery.org/documents/News/ Statistics/2017/cosmetic-procedures-ethnicity-2017.pdf Ashikari, Mikiko. 2005. “Cultivating Japanese Whiteness: The ‘Whitening’ Cosmetics Boom and the Japanese Identity.” Journal of Material Culture 10: 73–91. Blay, Yaba A. 2009. “Ahoofe Kasa! Skin Bleaching and the Function of Beauty among Ghanaian Women.” JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies 14: 51–85. Bodenhorn, Howard, & Christopher S. Ruebeck. 2007. “Colourism and African-American Wealth: Evidence from the Nineteenth-Century South.” Journal of Popular Economics 20: 599–620. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Charles, Christopher A. D. 2003. “Skin Bleaching, Self-Hate, and Black Identity in Jamaica.” Journal of Black Studies 33: 711–718. ———. 2011. “Skin Bleaching and the Prestige Complexion of Sexual Attraction.” Sexuality & Culture 15(4): 375–390.

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Margaret Hunter Chavez-Duenas, Nayeli, Hector Adames, & Kurt Organista. 2014. “Skin Color Prejudice and Within-Group Racial Discrimination: Historical and Current Impact on Latina/o Populations.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 36: 3–26. Chen, Julie. 2016. “Exclusive: Why the Talk’s Julie Chen Has No Regrets about Her Cosmetic Surgery.” Glamour.com (September 20). Chin, Stephanie S., T. Joel Wade, & Kassandra French. 2006. “Race and Facial Attractiveness: Individual Diferences in Perceived Adoptability of Children.” Journal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology 4: 215–229. Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Culture, Social Movements, and the Politics of Race. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. “Race, Beauty, and the Tangled Knot of a Guilty Pleasure.” Feminist Theory 7(2): 159–177. Darity, William A., John Dietrich, & Darrick Hamilton. 2005. “Bleach in the Rainbow: Latin Ethnicity and Preference for Whiteness.” Transforming Anthropology 13(2): 103–109. Dhillon-Jamerson, Komal. 2018. “Euro-Americans Favoring People of Color: Covert Racism and Economies of White Colorism.” The American Behavioral Scientist 62(14): 2087–2100. Dion, Karen, Ellen Berscheid, & Elaine Walster. 1972. “What Is Beautiful Is Good.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24: 285–290. Dolnick, Sam. 2011. “Ethnic Diferences Emerge in Plastic Surgery.” New York Times (February 18). Espino, Rodolfo, & Michael M. Franz. 2002. “Latino Phenotypic Discrimination Revisited: The Impact of Skin Color on Occupational Status.” Social Science Quarterly 83: 612–623. Fanon, Frantz. 2008/1952. Black Skin, White Masks (R. Philcox, trans.). New York: Grove Press. Fergus, Edward. 2009. “Understanding Latino Students’ Schooling Experiences: The Relevance of Skin Color among Mexican and Puerto Rican High School Students.” Teachers College Record 111: 339–375. Frazier, E. Franklin. 1957. Black Bourgeoisie. Chicago: Free Press. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2008. “Yearning for Lightness: Transnational Circuits in the Marketing and Consumption of Skin Lighteners.” Gender & Society 22: 281–302. Global Newswire. 2018. “Latest International Study Shows Global Rise in Cosmetic Surgery.” International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (ISAPS) (November 1). Gomez, Christina. 2000. “The Continual Signifcance of Skin Color: An Exploratory Study of Latinos in the Northeast.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 22: 94–103. Hall, Ronald. 2011. “Eurocentrism and the Postcolonial Implications of Skin Color among Latinos.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 33: 105–117. Hannon, Lance, Robert DeFina, & Sarah Bruch. 2013. “The Relationship between Skin Tone and School Suspension for African Americans.” Race and Social Problems 5: 281–295. Hersch, Joni. 2006. “Skin-Tone Efects among African Americans: Perceptions and Reality.” American Economic Review 96: 251–255. ———. 2011. “Skin Color, Physical Appearance, and Perceived Discriminatory Treatment.” Journal of Socio-Economics 40: 671–678. Hill, Mark E. 2002. “Skin Color and the Perception of Attractiveness among African Americans: Does Gender Make a Diference?” Social Psychology Quarterly 65: 77–91. Hunter, Margaret. 2005. Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone. New York: Routledge. ———. 2011. “Buying Racial Capital: Skin Bleaching and Cosmetic Surgery in a Globalized World.” Journal of Pan African Studies 4: 142–164. Jordan, Winthrop. 1968/2012. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Keith, Verna, & Cedric Herring. 1991. “Skin Tone and Stratifcation in the Black Community.” American Journal of Sociology 97: 760–778. Leonardo, Zeus. 2002. “The Souls of White Folk: Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, and Globalization Discourse.” Race Ethnicity & Education 5(1): 29–150. Mire, Amina. 2001. “Skin-Bleaching: Poison, Beauty, Power, and the Politics of the Colour Line.” Resources for Feminist Research 28: 13–38. Murguia, Edward, & Edward Telles. 1996. “Phenotype and Schooling among Mexican Americans.” Sociology of Education 69: 276–289. Nisbett, Richard E., & Timothy D. Wilson. 1977. “The Halo Efect: Evidence for Unconscious Alteration of Judgments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35: 250.

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10 BEAUTY, COLORISM, AND ANTI-COLORISM IN TRANSNATIONAL INDIA Vanita Reddy

In 2013, the Indian flm actress Nandita Das became the face of a national anti-colorism media campaign called “Dark Is Beautiful” (DISB; launched in 2009). Since then, DISB has sought to address the deleterious efects of colorism in India on women and girls – and, increasingly, men. The so-called “dusky” Das was chosen as ambassador for the DISB campaign because of her own experience with colorism in the Indian flm industry. DISB emerged in response to decades-long Indian skin-lightening advertisements that have perpetuated light skin preference on the subcontinent. These include Pond’s White Beauty Detox line of products, L’Oréal’s White Perfect, and the most popular and best-selling skin-lightening cream in South Asia, Unilever’s Fair and Lovely. (Ironically, Unilever is the parent company of Dove, a beauty company that launched its US “Real Beauty” campaign in 2006 as a response to widespread criticism of the beauty industry’s celebration of a narrow feminine beauty ideal rooted in whiteness, thinness, and youth.) In addition to publicly advocating against colorism, DISB ofers workshops and peer support groups. The skin-lightening industry will be worth an estimated $31.2 billion by 2024 and makes up more than 50% of the entire skin care market in India, where it is also one of the fastest growing segments of the global beauty industry (Shrof et al. 2018). The harms of colorism in India are still largely understood as tied to cultural attitudes toward dark skin. More recently, though, studies on usage of skin-lightening products in India have framed skin lightening as a public health issue, focusing on the adverse health efects of many of these products’ unregulated ingredients – hydroquinone, mercury, and bleaching agents – on skin and even vital organs (Shrof et al. 2018). This chapter provides an overview of the Dark Is Beautiful campaign as emblematic of feminist campaigns to combat colorism in South Asia through a humanitarian discourse of democratization-through-beauty. “Dark is Beautiful” rifs of of the global 1960s and 1970s slogan “Black is Beautiful,” an expression of Afro-centric political pride. Yet I argue that DISB cannot approximate the oppositional politics of “Black is Beautiful” because of its rootedness in a liberal humanitarian discourse of women’s empowerment, rather than in a radically transformative vision of anti-nationalist and anti-racist solidarity. Humanitarian campaigns like DISB fail sufciently to address the connections between colorism and raceand caste-based hierarchies in its pronouncements of “dark is beautiful.” 94

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Cruel optimism DISB frames colorism – the valorization of light skin and the demonization of dark skin within the same racial or ethnic group – as a matter that afects the social, economic, and psychological welfare of the majority of Indian women and girls. It seeks to [challenge] the belief that the value and beauty of an Indian woman is determined by the fairness of her skin. This belief – shaped by societal attitudes and reinforced by media messages – is corroding the self-worth of countless girls and women (DISB). Poor self-esteem, poorer job and marital prospects, familial ostracism, and even perceptions about immoral behavior are the cultural and economic costs that dark-skinned women and girls report facing in their communities and families. The campaign has had some real material efects. In 2013, DISB launched a change. org petition to ban ads for Fair and Handsome, a skin-lightening product for men that was endorsed by and regularly features the Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. Despite the petition garnering 30,000 signatures, the Emami Skin Care Company, which owns Fair and Handsome, refused to discontinue the ads. As a result, in 2014, the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) issued a new set of guidelines that banned skin-lightening ads depicting those with darker skin as being “inferior.” A typical ad tells the story of a dark-skinned person who is jobless or under-employed, unmarriageable, subject to family mistreatment, and more or less generally dissatisfed with her life chances prior to using the product, and who is then magically absolved of these woes and achieves her dreams of a better job, husband, and family life after using the product. The new ASCI regulations, which have yet to take efect, prohibit the equation of darker or lighter skin color with any particular socioeconomic strata, caste, community, religion, profession, or ethnicity; they also prohibit gender-based discrimination based on skin color. In keeping with a culturally dominant focus on the psychological harms of colorism, much of the language in the new advertising standards pertains to the management of afect in the representation of dark-skinned subjects. According to the ASCI, dark-skinned people in skin-lightening ads should not be portrayed as “unattractive, unhappy, depressed or concerned,” nor as “at a disadvantage of any kind, or inferior, or unsuccessful in any aspect of life particularly in relation to being attractive to the opposite sex, matrimony, job placement, promotions or other prospects” (ASCI). And models, whether “real or graphical” in the pre-usage depictions of the product, such as those regularly appearing in print ads, should not be portrayed as “unattractive, unhappy, depressed, or concerned” (ASCI). The new ASCI regulations constitute a signifcant area of media reform, since most ads almost universally rely upon a “before and after” verbal and visual narrative of dark-to-light skin. The new regulations’ focus on the dark-skinned subjects’ emotions clearly target and seek to mitigate the psychological harms of colorism (unhappiness, depression, concern). This focus leaves its physical harms (skin and organ damage) unaddressed, while paying scanter attention to social and economic harms ( job discrimination and marriageability). Moreover, even while dark skin cannot be demonized and light skin cannot be linked with better life chances under the new ASCI regulations, there is hardly a limit to the number of ways that fair skin can – and undoubtedly will – still be promoted as a beauty ideal in Indian advertising. Even as it has been instrumental in efecting change in media representation, as a political campaign DISB seeks to go beyond the ASCI’s approach of avoiding negative representations of 95

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dark skin (as in the new ad guidelines). It aims further to reclaim darkness as beautiful through a discourse of feminist empowerment. Touting the slogan, “Celebrating 1.2 billion shades of beautiful,” Dark Is Beautiful is part of the Indian feminist NGO Women of Worth (WOW), which was established in 2008 with the goal of “empower[ing] women across cultures and ethnicities to stand up for justice, equality, and change in all facets of life and society in both local and global contexts” (WOW). In addition to launching DISB, WOW’s programing includes Girl Rise, a campaign that works to ensure women and girls’ public and domestic safety, and the Fearless Project, which seeks to combat childhood sexual abuse. Across these various advocacy platforms, WOW deploys the language of feminist education and empowerment, such as educating girls and women about poor self-esteem and cultivating physical strength, emotional intelligence, and independence from the strictures of gender norms. It is worth noting that India’s oldest and best-selling fairness cream, Fair and Lovely, deploys a similar discourse of female empowerment through education and employment. In 2006, the company established the Fair and Lovely Career Foundation, which claims to “empower 5 million women across Asia and Africa through knowledge, skills and career guidance” by ofering scholarships for higher education, career seminars, and career guidance, and to be the “world’s frst mobile university for women” (Fair and Lovely Career Foundation 2003). Situating DISB within this constellation of feminine and feminist empowerment projects – including that of one of its greatest adversaries – allows us to see how DISB explicitly frames beauty as a matter of distributive rights and social good, not just individual vanity. DISB mobilizes beauty as a form of humanitarian care that confers a measure of dignity and personhood upon those who have been denied their basic humanity within a colorist national culture. DISB’s promotion of the “right to beauty” has become part of global humanitarian projects that frame “women’s rights as human rights” (Grewal 2005: 122). Writing about humanitarian NGOs, feminist scholar Mimi Nguyen (2011) describes how feminist humanitarian projects frame beauty as a universal social good that can help to empower women who are the most vulnerable victims of state and imperial violence. Nguyen examines the US-based feminist NGO Beauty Without Borders, which was created in 2005 to help women in post9/11 war-ravaged, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan set up beauty schools in which they could learn about “modern” techniques for applying makeup and cutting and styling hair. Nguyen argues that, in the face of gendered violence where violence is constituted by “the apparent suppression of the body’s movement and the soul’s fulfllment” (368) under authoritarian rule, the work of Beauty Without Borders becomes “emblematic of the instrumentalization of beauty as indexing the welfare of populations” (368). Beauty Without Borders ofers to redress the Afghan woman’s bodily suppression under Taliban rule by advocating beauty as a human right. It ofers, in other words, the false promise of liberation from social injustice by fostering care of self and others through beauty. Though it does not purport to redress state forms of violence, DISB does seek to redress other forms of “slow violence” (Nixon 2013)– low self-esteem, diminished value on the marriage and job markets, permanent skin damage, and even suicide. In its humanitarian narrative of rescuing dark-skinned women to the dignity of beauty, DISB’s central message of “stay unfair, stay beautiful” and its programing to improve the self-esteem and self-worth of women, girls, and men through a celebration of dark skin together operate as what queer literary critic Lauren Berlant has called cruel optimism: [O]ptimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a 96

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people risks striving; and doubly, it is cruel in that the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining . . .. (2011: 2) At its most basic, cruel optimism functions as an attachment to a compromised condition of possibility; here, that comprised condition – that intractable attachment – is Indian beauty itself. The cruel optimism of DISB has to do with the desire to admit dark skin into Indian beauty’s regimes of value, and even allowing darkness to be a signifer of that value. According to spokesperson Das: “Prejudice or conditioning is not a habit; it’s much deeper than that. But we have to be hopeful and optimistic and believe that this can change within a generation” (qtd. in Reynolds 2014). Das is optimistic that once darkness is revalued as beautiful, skin color discrimination will end. This form of optimism is cruel because it still holds out Indian beauty as an aspirational and attainable democratic ideal—it operates, as Berlant would have it, from “within a relation” to beauty—despite the way that normative beauty by its very logic operates through distributive scarcity.

Indian whiteness The cruel optimism of DISB surfaces at the level of the “dark beauty” that its spokeswoman Das comes to signify. In her ethnography of skin-lightening practices among working- and middle-class women in South India, feminist media scholar Radhika Parameswaran observes that one of her informants described Das’ skin as desirably “light brown” (2015: 75), not dark. Celebrating dark skin as beautiful is thus contingent upon a sliding scale of darkness that does little to challenge the logic of fairness as a beauty ideal. Parameswaran contends that the labels “dusky” or “wheatish brown” rarely equate to “very dark skin” (75). DISB does feature “very dark skinned” women and men as bloggers and includes some dark-skinned hands on its “About” tab. But it otherwise lacks any substantive representation of dark brown or black skin, and certainly does not take a dark-centric approach to “dark is beautiful.” Claiming nominally dark-skinned women as beautiful recruits more women into beauty’s aspirational logic and the caste, race, and colonial hierarchies that structure that logic. Reclaiming darkness as beautiful may, in other words, do little to disrupt the way that “beauty bears the weight of what Minoo Moallem calls ‘civilizational thinking’” (Nguyen 2011: 366), despite its claims to dismantle the colonial equivalences of light skin with civility, modernity, and moral progress. A feminist blogger for Dalit and Adivasi (indigenous) women, Anjali Ragoria, expressed anger toward Dark Is Beautiful in this way: [T]he Dark is Beautiful campaign in India is emerging from highly successful upper caste women who are protesting the loss of few more lucrative mainstream opportunities due to their relatively darker skin tones. These successful actresses, models, and activists hardly pose any serious challenge to the Brahmanical aesthetics but are in fact enhancers of the caste hindu [sic] aesthetics and power structures. (2013) DISB might put pressure on the global hegemony of light skin as a beauty ideal; it may even hurt the pocketbook of a multi-billion-dollar industry that promotes this form of bodily capital. But embedded within Ragoria’s comment is the way that the campaign does not address ongoing investments in Indian female beauty as part of the nation’s investments in liberal 97

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modernities. After all, along with its capacities for nuclear bomb testing and the promotion of a global IT workforce, India’s visibility as a globally modern nation had to do with the arrival of the Indian beauty queen onto the international pageant scene (Oza 2006). The lightskinned, light-eyed Aishwarya Rai and Sushmita Sen, who won the titles of Miss World and Miss Universe in 1994, respectively, contributed to what Rupal Oza calls “the making of neoliberal India” at the end of the twentieth century. Sen and Rai helped to promote Indian whiteness as a form of bodily capital that promises transnational mobility/modernity. I use the term “Indian whiteness” to draw attention to the way that Indian standards of whiteness are not equivalent to Western standards of whiteness. Indian whiteness is premised upon a version of global modernity in which the Indian woman is still desirably “ethnic” by Western standards, rather than remaining ethnically unmarked (as in the case of Western whiteness: think of Das’ desirable brownness). “Indian whiteness” captures how the fairness ideal in Asian contexts cannot be explained solely by colonial projects and modern conceptions of race and racial diference. A recent and emerging body of feminist scholarship on Asian whiteness has productively complicated colonial and even neocolonial epistemologies of fairness in Asia (Saraswati 2013; Lee 2019; and Tu 2019). For example, L. Ayu Saraswati has shown that a preference for light skin in transnational Indonesia is tied to “afective vocabularies” (2013: 14) of beauty in pre-colonial religious texts, such as the Indian Ramayana, in which lightness or brightness – rather than whiteness, per se – was correlated with love and desire; and that whiteness itself is heterogeneous, such that in the Indonesian context, there are distinctions between Caucasian, Japanese, and Indonesian whiteness. These genealogies of whiteness sometimes do and sometimes do not overlap with colonial and postcolonial racial categories. Indian whiteness has its origins in the pre-colonial Indian beauty myth. According to this myth, the Aryan invasion of North India in 1200 B.C. drove the original Indian race, the Dravidians, further south, and allowed a lighter skinned race of Indians to emerge in the north. Skin-lightening ads rely, however implicitly, upon the explanatory power of this myth since almost all of them—regardless of the diferent class, religious, regional, and age groups that they target—construct dark skin as a result of environmental toxins and impurities. Such constructions completely elide biological and genetic factors that contribute to skin pigmentation. By contending that the fairness of Indian skin simply lies in wait of revelation with some help from science, skin-lightening products often promise to “restore” dark skin to its “authentic” (read pre-colonial Aryan) whiteness. (The myth of Indian skin as “originally” light is, of course, also self-contradictory, since it relies upon the southern displacement of “originally” dark-skinned Dravidian Indians). Despite reclaiming dark skin as beautiful, DISB does not sufciently challenge beauty’s regimes of value. For one, it does not explicitly address Indian investments in whiteness vis-à-vis the Aryan beauty myth. The celebration of dark skin as evidence of the democratization of beauty may do little to destabilize how the concept of “Indian beauty” might inherently rely upon, to rif on sociologist George Lipsitz’s (1998) evocative phrasing, a “possessive investment in lightness.” Second, DISB has remained largely uncritical of the links between colorism, racism, and casteism. Without a fuller account of South Asian colorism’s links to casteism, histories of colonization, and anti-Blackness, anti-colorism campaigns will continue to promote a vision of “dark is beautiful” in which celebrations of Indian beauty cannot help but (re)invest in the racist and casteist ideals of the modern nation-state. The global movement for Black Lives has marked a substantive, if somewhat contradictory, shift in the national conversation around colorism. The police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the United States in April 2020 precipitated an unprecedented 98

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popular backlash against skin-lightening products on the subcontinent. Shaadi.com, India’s best-known marital match-making website, removed its skin tone flter following the US protests. In June 2020, L’Oréal and Unilever, two of the largest skin-whitening brands in India, stopped selling certain whitening products, revamped the names of some skinlightening products, and removed the words “white,” “fairness,” and “light” from some of its products. In perhaps the most visible shift in product nomenclature in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, the best-selling Fair and Lovely skin-lightening cream was renamed “Glow and Lovely” in July 2020 (Ramirez 2020).

Anti-colorism and anti-blackness Despite drawing its rhetorical force from the popularized Black Civil Rights slogan “Black is Beautiful,” DISB fails sufciently to engage with the oppositional political force of anti-Blackness in its reclaiming of darkness as beautiful. Cultural historian Tanisha Ford describes “Black is Beautiful” as part of a larger “revolutionary politics of style” (2015: 1) that foregrounded how everyday practices of fashion and beauty – such as in Black women’s choices to don the Afro, cornrows, denim overalls, and dashikis – should be understood as a vital part of the global struggle for Black liberation. In her examination of “Black is Beautiful,” sociologist Maxine Leeds Craig (2002) examines how the movement politicized African American working-class and Black African aesthetics. Both young and old Black activists rebelled against the middle-class aesthetics of Black respectability that had become a marker of racial pride across class lines, and engaged in the racial project of re-aestheticizing the working-class Black body. The anti-colorism slogan “Dark is Beautiful” rhetorically performs the re-aestheticization of dark Indian skin. But, in addition to featuring bodies that are rarely darker than “light brown,” DISB’s messaging also deploys a middle-class aesthetic of dark skin that is rooted in a politics of respectability, rather than in a revolutionary politics of style. Many of DISB’s campaign initiatives focus on how to improve access to marriage, professional careers, and upward mobility for dark-skinned Indians. Take, for example, a DISB blog post by Vaidehi Sriram, in which she advises parents, adults, and teachers to combat colorism by avoiding commenting on the bride’s skin color at weddings: “[C]omment on how well-mannered or well-educated … the bride is, not on the colour [sic] of her skin” (2020, my emphasis). She continues to admonish those who think that “dark” is the “colour [sic] of construction workers” and that only “fair” is “high-class.” Sriram’s solution to colorism depends upon imagining a nation in which dark-skinned Indian women can and should aspire to feminine decorum, white- (versus blue-) collar labor, and inclusion within elite social circles. Sriram’s recoding of dark skin as indicative of middle- and upper-class (rather than working-class) femininities is also an example of the larger way in which DISB capitulates to a politics of inclusion. Its multicultural ethos mitigates against accusations of what DISB identifes as dark-centrism. Anticipating accusations that the NGO promotes a beauty ideal in which only “dark is lovely,” DISB is quick to engage in performative gestures of a celebratory multiculturalism that positions dark-skinned beauty as just as beautiful as fair skin. Such gestures include slogans such as “celebrating 1.2 billion shades of beautiful” (a reference to India’s population); graphics that feature light, medium, and dark skin tones; founder Kavita Emmanuel’s admission that she embraces “the celebration of all skin tones;” and blog posts that assert that “Dark or white. You are beautiful.” Relatedly, in its aestheticizing of dark skin, DISB fails to consider the way that South Indians, in particular, are routinely racialized as Black in India’s colorism hierarchy, and are 99

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disproportionately afected by colorism’s economic, social, and cultural harms (Parameswaran 2011). An emerging body of work in feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies has begun to examine how regions such as South India often stand as spaces of national neglect and political and economic divestment, such that they can be understood as sub-national, or below the threshold of dominant defnitions of national citizenship (Hettne et al. 1999; Halberstam 2005; Gray 2009; Herring 2010; Johnson 2013; Joshi and Desai 2013; Gopinath 2019). This regional neglect and provincialization of the South appear in anti-colorism advocacy as well. Even while the racialization of (South) Indian Blackness is distinct from that of African Blackness, the racial category “Black” positions South Indians as further away from the Aryan beauty myth and, thus, further away from aspirational whiteness. Explanations that “blame” colorism on colonial whiteness, then, do not fully consider how colonial racial hierarchies historically reinforced pre-existing caste, color, and regional hierarchies on the subcontinent. What remains further obscured within the under-examination of racial hierarchies in anti-colorism campaigns such as Dark Is Beautiful is a diasporic racial order that has historically positioned Indians, socially and economically, above Black Africans (Reddy 2015). This racial hierarchy took on particular salience in the colonial Indian diasporas of the Global South. DISB’s slogan, “be the change you want to see” is a quote from Indian anticolonial leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose anti-colonial politics were shaped by his time in apartheid South Africa while training there to be a lawyer. Gandhi’s championing of anti-colonial ideals in the early decades of the twentieth century, though, has recently come under attack in Ghana, where student-led protests alleging Gandhi’s anti-Black racism led to the removal of a Gandhi statue from the University of Ghana in 2019. The protests stem, in part, from a book penned by two Indian South African historians, Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: The Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (2015). In it, Desai and Vahed detail some of the limitations of Gandhi’s idealization as a global icon of racial justice. They show how in his early writings in South Africa, Gandhi promoted the political independence of Indian Africans as a separate struggle from that of Coloreds and Black South Africans, and that Gandhi regularly used the racial slur “kafr” in reference to Black Africans. The words “coolie” and “kafr” were present long before Indian indenture to East Africa and the Caribbean. These terms had roots in the Indian Ocean slave trade beginning in the 1600s, prior to Gandhi’s mobilization of them as part of his participation in the Indian nationalist movement. Meanwhile, in the Global North, colorism and unmarked casteism operate as techniques of power that allow diasporic South Asians to claim a greater proximity to whiteness, as many scholars in the growing feld of Afro-Asian Studies have observed (Prashad 2002; Reddy 2016; Reddy 2017; Dutt-Ballerstadt 2020). Vijay Prashad, in his seminal book, The Karma of Brown Folk (2000), excoriates a largely professional-managerial class of South Asians in the United States who arrived after the passage of the Hart-Cellars immigration act in 1965, for leaving their anti-colonial politics “behind” in India and contributing to anti-Black racism within their newly formed diasporic communities. Such forms of anti-Black South Asian racism, Prashad argues, allow South Asians to gain approval in the eyes of white Americans. He therefore urges South Asian Americans to commit “model minority suicide” as a way to dismantle narratives that South Asians are inherently pliant and successful, a form of internalized (benevolent) racism that reinforces and justifes the racial subordination of Black Americans. Given the ways that diasporas shape homeland politics (Gopinath 2005; Grewal 2005), the racialized tensions and afnities between Black African and South Asian diasporic 100

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populations must be understood as inextricably intertwined with anti-Black racism on the subcontinent. This transnational approach to anti-Black sentiment could help to explain, for example, contemporary anti-Black violence against new African migrants, such as the beatings and murders of three Black Africans from Sudan, Tanzania, Nigeria, and the Congo in 2016, in various parts of India. (African students in India have since formed the Association of African Students in India [AASI] as a way to organize against anti-Black violence targeting African students.) Rather than apprehending these acts of violence as resulting from an anti-Black racism precipitated by a new form of colorism on the subcontinent, colorism might be understood as emerging out of these prior diasporic histories of anti-Black racism. DISB thus falls short of addressing anti-Black racism within its political reclaiming of dark skin as beautiful. Though it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss them in detail, other grass-roots diasporic anti-colorism advocacy projects, such as “Dark, Lovely, and South Asian” and “Unfair and Lovely,” have begun to address the intersections of colorism in Black and Brown communities in ways that foreground an oppositional consciousness around anti-Black racism. Because of intersecting histories of Asian indentureship and African enslavement in the global South (Caribbean, Africa), and those of immigration, African American racialization, and Black migration in the global North (United Kingdom, United States, and Canada), diasporic anti-colorism campaigns are especially well-poised to more fully engage (anti-) Blackness as central to colorism’s punitive and injurious power.

Related topics Colorism and the racial politics of beauty Picking your battles: beauty, complacency and the other life of racism Beauty standards in Sudan

References The Advertising Standards Council of India. 2014. https://www.ascionline.org/index.php Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dark is Beautiful. 2009. http://www.darkisbeautiful.in/ Desai, Ashwin, and Goolam Vahed. 2015. The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Dutt-Ballerstadt, Reshmi. 2020. “Colonized Loyalty: Asian American Anti-Blackness and Complicity.” Faculty Publications, published version, submission 78, n. pag. Fair and Lovely Career Foundation. 2003. https://www.fairandlovelyfoundation.in/en/ Ford, Tanisha. 2015. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gopinath, Gayatri. 2005. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. Gopinath, Gayatri. 2019. Unruly Visions: Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press. Gray, Mary. 2009. Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York: New York University Press. Grewal, Inderpal. 2005. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Herring, Scott. 2010. Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. New York: New York University Press.

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Vanita Reddy Hettne, Bjorn et al. 1999. Globalism and the New Regionalism: The Second Great Transformation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Colin. 2013. Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Joshi, Khyati Y., and Jigna Desai, eds. 2013. Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfeld: University of Illinois Press. Lipsitz, George. 1998. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. 2011. “The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36(2): 359–383. Nixon, Rob. 2013. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Oza, Rupal. 2006. The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization. New York: Routledge. Parameswaran, Radhika. 2011. “E-Racing Color: Gender and Transnational Visual Economies of Beauty in India.” Pp. 68–86 in Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures, edited by Radha Hegde. New York: New York University. Parameswaran, Radhika. 2015. “Radhika Parameswaran on ‘Colorism’ in India.” Asia Experts Forum: A Journal by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College. http://asiaexpertsforum.org/radhika-parameswaran-colorism-india/. Prashad, Vijay. 2000. The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Prashad, Vijay. 2002. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Boston: Beacon Press. Ragoria, Anjali. 2013. “Why I Don’t Support the ‘Dark Is Beautiful’ Campaign.” Savari. http://www. dalitweb.org/?p=2039 Ramirez, Rachel. 2020. “Beauty Companies are Changing Skin-whitening Projects. But the Damage of Colorism Runs Deeper.” Vox. https://www.vox.com/frst-person/2020/6/30/21308257/ skin-lightening-colorism-whitening-bleaching Reddy, Vanita. 2015. “Afro-Asian Intimacies and the Politics and Aesthetics of Cross-Racial Struggle in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala.” Journal of Asian American Studies 18(3): 233–263. Reddy, Vanita. 2016. Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Reddy, Vanita. 2017. “Afect, Aesthetics, and Afro-Asian Studies.” Journal of Asian American Studies 20(2): 289–294. Reynolds, Louisa. 2014. “Dark Is Beautiful: Nandita Das Speaks Out Against Racism in the Media.” International Women’s Media Foundation. https://www.iwmf.org/stories-from-the-feld/dark-isbeautiful-nandita-das-speaks-out-against/ Saraswati, L. Ayu. 2013. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Shaadi. 1996. https://www.shaadi.com/ Shrof, Hemal, Phillippa C. Diedrichs, and Nadia Craddock. 2018. “Skin Color, Cultural Capital, and Beauty Products: An Investigation on the Use of Skin Fairness Products in Mumbai, India.” Public Health 5(365): 1–9. Sriram, Vaidehi. “Deep Rooted Colourism: Vaidehi’s Story.” Dark Is Beautiful. https://www.darkisbeautiful.in/colourism-stories/deep-rooted-colorism-vaidehis-story/ Women of Worth. 2008. https://womenofworth.in/

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11 CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON BODY SIZE Viren Swami

Introduction In April 2015, the ftness and sports nutrition store began a “beach body ready” advertising campaign in the United Kingdom, which featured a bikini-clad model next to the question: “Are you beach body ready?” Despite sparking a huge backlash – including an online petition that attracted more than 70,000 signatures – centered around the fact that the advertisement objectifed women, was socially irresponsible, and implied that other body shapes were inferior, the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the campaign was “unlikely to cause serious or widespread ofence” (Sweeney 2015). Protein World maintained a combative stance throughout, with its chief executive likening protestors to “terrorists” and defending the advertisements as “aspirational” (Gander 2015). Implicit in these counter-arguments was the claim that a thin beauty ideal is rooted in human biology and, therefore, “natural.” By implication, running an advertising campaign that centered on a “natural” beauty ideal merely refected human psychological imperatives. This perspective is most often supported by evolutionary psychological claims that human attractiveness preferences are stable across time and cultures. Such stability, it is argued, mean that beauty ideals and attractiveness preferences are part of human biological, rather than cultural, heritage (Buss 1999). More precisely, beauty ideals are argued to be related to reproductive ftness-enhancing benefts, which may be direct (those that increase an individual’s reproductive success by benefting the individual and any ofspring) or indirect (those that increase the individual’s inclusive ftness) that evolved in human ancestral populations. To the extent that all living humans are the products of ancestral pairings and, therefore, share the same genetic endowment, “mental modules,” perceptual mechanisms, or some variation of this, universality in beauty ideals across time and cultures is to be expected. Proof of cross-cultural similarity in beauty ideals is, ipso facto, proof of that ancestral endowment and evidence of the “naturalness” of beauty ideals (Singh 1993).

Do cross-cultural diferences exist? Setting aside shoddy evolutionary psychological theorizing (see Swami & Salem 2011), what is the evidence that beauty ideals are stable and, therefore, natural outcomes of human 103

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biology? A review of temporal changes in beauty ideals within cultures is beyond the purview of this chapter, but sufces to say that there is little evidence of stability over time. Consider the example of the thin ideal that featured in the Protein World advertisements: such a body would have been very unlikely to have been idealized by human ancestral populations (Wood 2006), it was certainly not idealized during the European Enlightenment when Rubens was painting voluptuous muses (Swami, Gray, & Furnham 2007), and nor did it become the standard ideal before the proliferation of mass media in the 1920s helped to ensure a homogenized view of women’s beauty (Banner 2006; Calogero, Boroughs, & Thompson 2007). Nor are such temporal changes limited to women’s beauty ideals: studies suggest that cultural norms of the ideal male body have become more muscular over time (Leit, Pope, & Gray 2001). Anyone who has a passing interest in the James Bond flms can attest to the increasing pronouncement of muscularity in Daniel Craig’s portrayal of bond compared to, say, Sean Connery’s more mediocre physique. Beyond temporal changes, what is the evidence of stability of beauty ideals across cultures? Evidence of variation is not difcult to fnd, even once we move beyond culture-specifc beauty practices, such as the neck-rings worn by Kayan women in Myanmar (Khoo Thwe 2006). Consider again the example of women’s thinness: it has long been known that there are cross-cultural diferences in attitudes toward body fat, obesity, and thinness (Brown & Konner 1987; Sobal & Stunkard 1989). Traditionally, a distinction was drawn in the twentieth century between the preference for relatively thin fgures in Westernized settings and the preference for relatively plump in non-Westernized, “traditional” settings (Swami 2015). For example, in many non-Western cultures, plumpness was linked with heightened perceptions of self-worth, sexuality, femininity, and fertility (Ghannam 1997; Treloar et al. 1999). In some societies, where women attained status through motherhood, greater body fat was also perceived as a symbol of maternity and nurturance (Powdermaker 1960). Some of the best evidence of cross-cultural diferences in body size ideals comes from anthropological research in the South Pacifc. Traditionally, fatness among South Pacifc Islanders was associated with high status, authority, wealth, and – among women specifcally – sexuality and femininity (Pollock 1995). Indeed, various scholars have described rituals in Pacifc societies where women and men, typically from high-ranking families, take part in deliberate fattening prior to marriage (Pollock 1995). Furthermore, empirical work has documented signifcant diferences in ideal body size between South Pacifc Islanders and comparable groups in New Zealand or Australia (Becker 1995; Brewis & McGarvey 2000). The former was also less likely to regard themselves as overweight or obese, even when very large (Brewis, McGarvey, Jones, & Swinburn 1998). Of course, South Pacifc Islanders were not unique in their idealization of a larger body size. Similar fndings have also been reported among many diferent cultural groups from across the world (for a review, see Swami 2015). Cross-cultural diferences in beauty ideals clearly exist – or, at the very least, have existed in recent history. But do they still exist today? Studies conducted in the past decade have suggested that diferences across cultures may be narrowing. For example, studies now consistently report no signifcant diferences in ideal body size between Western and nonWestern participants in urban settings (for example, Swami & Tovée 2005), including in the South Pacifc (Swami et al. 2007). Data from the International Body Project, one of the largest cross-cultural surveys of body size ideals with data from nearly 7,500 participants in 26 countries (Swami et al. 2010), provides further evidence for the homogenization of a thin ideal globally. The results of the study showed that, while there were signifcant diferences in ideal women’s body size across world regions, the efect sizes were very small and participants from all urban sites rated a relatively slim female fgure as the ideal. 104

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However, this is not to say that the idealization of thinness is now a universal phenomenon. Data from the International Body Project also showed that there were large diferences in ideal body size within countries, with participants from sites of relatively low socioeconomic status idealizing heavier body sizes than participants from sites of relatively high socioeconomic status (Swami et al. 2010). This is also corroborated by other studies that have included participants from the same country but from sites difering in socioeconomic status (for example, urban versus rural sites). These studies consistently report that there is an inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and ideal body size, with data coming from Asia (for example, Swami & Tovée 2005), Europe (Swami & Tovée 2007), the South Pacifc (Swami et al. 2007), and Africa (Tovée et al. 2006). In fact, moving from a site of low socioeconomic status to one of high socioeconomic status appears to shift body size ideals from relatively heavy to relatively thin (Nicolaou et al. 2008; Tovée et al. 2006).

Explaining cross-cultural diferences and/or similarities In contrast to evolutionary psychological explanations of beauty ideals, which emphasize the “naturalness” of those ideals based on presumed cross-cultural similarity, sociocultural theory seeks to understand the ways in which cultural milieus and structures propagate and shape beauty ideals, as well as the way in which those ideals are transmitted to individuals via various agents (Levine & Smolak 2010; Thompson et al.1999). From this perspective, beauty ideals can be viewed as cultural symbols that are constantly constructed, reconstructed, and negotiated within particular cultural or subcultural contexts (Anderson-Fye & Brewis 2017; Backett-Milburn & McKie 2001). Far from being immutable, beauty ideals are shaped and reshaped by a range of actors within particularly contexts and, to the extent that those ideals prescribe unachievable ideals for most individuals, it will result in body- and self-disparagement, as individuals struggle to reconcile their actual selves with culturally prescribed ideals of appearance (Becker 2004; Ramati-Ziber, Shnabel, & Glick 2020).

Westernization Although a number of diferent agents transmit information about, and pressure to conform to, beauty ideals, much of the available research has focused on the role played by the mass media (Thompson et al. 1999). In Western Europe and North America, for example, a shift toward homogenized beauty ideals is often said to have begun in the early part of the twentieth century, which coincides with the proliferation of mass media that informed consumers about what was beautiful (Brumberg 1998; Calogero et al. 2007). Drawing on this perspective, scholars have also implicated the reach of Western media in homogenizing beauty ideals across the world. In the 1980s, for example, Nasser (1986: 625) noted diferences in rates of disordered eating between Arab women in the United Kingdom and Egypt, and attributed the diference to levels of Westernization. More specifcally, she identifed Western media as an important source of infuence for beauty ideals and wrote that, “new concepts of beauty and femininity … transmitted through television programs” helped to explain the rising prevalence of disordered eating in non-Western sites like Egypt. Other scholars have followed this lead in highlighting the role of Western media in shaping beauty ideals in non-Western settings. For example, Becker’s (2004) seminal work in Fiji examined how the introduction of Western television programs reshaped relationships with the self, such that individuals increasingly engaged in a “process of competitively positioning 105

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oneself through the savvy manipulation of cultural symbols,” such as through the consumption of material goods, adorning the body to demonstrate cultural capital, or attempts to reconfgure the body. As one example, she described how Fijian women who bought into “Western styles of appearance and the ethos of work on the body” increasingly viewed thinness as a means of obtaining the consumerist lifestyle they newly desired. In her view, the illusion that the self could be “reshaped and remade” invariably led to negative body image and disordered eating, as individuals struggled to achieve prescriptive beauty ideals (Becker 2004). Of course, Western media do not merely propagate beauty ideals, which are internalized by individuals in non-Western regions of the world. Rather, Western media also present a concoction of values that go beyond beauty ideals alone. For example, such media typically also idealize youthfulness, promote a notion that the body is inherently malleable, emphasize that body-work is both normal and required, and pathologize a reluctance to work on one’s appearance (Becker 2004; Levine & Smolak 2006, 2010). In sites that have seen an infux of Westernized media, the adoption of these hitherto alien values made it more likely that new beauty ideals – and indeed the veneration of beauty in and of itself – would fnd new audiences (Anderson-Fye & Becke 2004). Beyond ethnographic work, cross-sectional evidence also supports a link between exposure to Western media and beauty ideals: in the International Body Project, for example, greater exposure to Western media was signifcantly associated with a preference for thin female fgures (Swami et al. 2010). Despite this evidence, there are limits to the Westernization argument. For one thing, more recent research is increasingly problematizing the view that there is a strong relationship between media consumption and adherence to beauty ideals (Ferguson 2013). Instead, it may be that the deleterious efects of media exposure are strongest for individuals who have pre-existing body image issues or personality profles (for example, higher Neuroticism) that place them at risk for internalizing beauty messages. More generally, the traditional narrative in which Western media are treated as a homogenous, monolithic, and all-powerful force – what is sometimes referred to as the hypodermic efects model (Gill 2012) – unfairly treats consumers as isolated and passive. In fact, consumers are often active, engaged, and critical media users who frequently critique and deconstruct beauty ideals that are propagated in mass media. Indeed, the proliferation of Western media also opened up new spaces to critique and challenge beauty ideals and practices in a manner that was far more complex than the traditional narrative suggested. Indeed, this was the conclusion of Anderson-Fye’s (2004) longitudinal ethnographic work in Belize, a nation where the impact of Westernization has been marked. Rather than fnding evidence for a thin ideal in this context, Anderson-Fye reported that having a “Coca-Cola” body shape was more important than attaining thinness, and that this was coupled with a rejection of Western body ideals. Anderson-Fye (2004, 2011) proposed that this was an example of how values particular to a culture or context can resist Westernized images of beauty. In a similar vein, it is possible that some values native to non-Western cultures engender a thin ideal, irrespective of Western infuence. For example, it has been suggested that the Confucian belief that “real” women attend to, and work on, the body and self-restrict food intake may engender a thin ideal in some East Asian nations ( Jackson, Keel,  & Lee 2006). Similarly, religious fasting may place a similar pressure toward a thin ideal among some Muslim populations (Edman & Yates 2004). In short, although many theorists have relied on Westernization as an explanation for diferences in body size, it may not be sufcient to fully account for cross-cultural diferences in beauty ideals. 106

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Socioeconomic development One of the difculties with the Westernization argument is that it is often difcult to disentangle the specifc efects of Westernized media from those of socioeconomic development and urbanization (Anderson-Fye & Brewis 2017). That is, given that the infux of Western media typically occurs during periods of rapid socioeconomic development, it is quite possible that there are co-occurring factors that shape the propagation of new beauty ideals. For example, Gordon (2001) pointed to the example of rapid socioeconomic development in Japan in the second half of the twentieth century, which (in tandem with Western infuences) led to a myriad of cultural changes, including greater individualism, consumerism, and changing roles for women. These changes, Gordon (2001) argued, played a role in reshaping existing beauty ideals and shaping new ideals in Japan, particularly among high-income women in urban areas. A similar process was observed in Malaysia, where the introduction of Western media occurred alongside rapid socioeconomic development, industrialization, and urbanization, which damaged a sense of national identity and allowed easier assimilation of new beauty ideals (Swami 2015). One way in which socioeconomic development may impact beauty ideals is by altering the symbolic value of the body. Much of this literature has focused on body size ideals, where it argued that the symbolic and cultural value of body fat changes as a society develops (Brown & Konner 1987; Sobal & Stunkard 1989). More specifcally, in contexts of low socioeconomic status, where the availability of resources may be uncertain or insecure, individuals are thought to idealize heavier individuals, as fatness would be associated with access to resources (Fox, Feng, & Asal 2019). In these contexts of low socioeconomic status, it is also possible that thinness is associated with perceptions of ill-health (Tovée et al. 2006) and poorer parenting capabilities (Powdermaker 1960). In contexts of high socioeconomic status, by contrast, thinness attains cultural and material value as a symbol of wealth and higher status, whereas being fat comes to be associated with relatively low social and economic status. The suggested role for resource security is supported by the studies – reviewed above  – indicating large diference in body size ideals between within-country sites difering in socioeconomic status, rather than across countries. In addition, experimental studies have shown that proprioceptive hunger impacts on men’s body size (Nelson & Morrison 2005) and breast size ideals (Swami & Tovée 2013) in the directions predicted by the resource security hypothesis. That is, within high socioeconomic sites, hungrier men show a preference for heavier body sizes and larger breasts than do more satiated men. Other studies, drawing on the Environmental Security Hypothesis (Pettijohn & Tesser 1999, 2003), have similarly shown that, under uncertain or threatening socioeconomic conditions, individuals will idealize more mature physical characteristics, including heavier body sizes, because mature physical characteristics are thought to signal greater ability to handle threatening conditions (Nelson, Pettijohn, & Galak 2007). Supporting evidence for this perspective comes from archival data showing a greater idealization of mature physical characteristics during periods of socioeconomic hardship in the United States (for example, Pettijohn & Jungeberg 2004; Pettijohn & Tesser 1999) and from experimental work showing that men experiencing psychological stress show a preference for a heavier female body size than control participants (Swami & Tovée 2012). Beyond resource security, socioeconomic development also brings important changes in gender roles. Thus, among urban women in the developing world, economic prosperity brings competing demands in terms of pressure for career accomplishment and work on the body (Ramati-Ziber et al. 2020). In particular, in urban areas, the attainment of prescriptive 107

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beauty ideals may come to symbolize modernity, personal development, and upward social mobility (Anderson-Fye 2011; Anderson-Fye & Becker 2004). For men, too, changing gender roles may bring greater pressure to reassert masculinity through increased muscularity (Swami & Voracek 2013). By contrast, the relative absence of gender role confict in rural areas may help explain the relative lack of pressure to attain beauty ideals in those contexts (Swami 2015). Because of these multiple efects and pathways, however, untangling the specifc efects of modernization may be difcult; or, to put it diferently, modernization alone may not be sufcient to fully account for cross-cultural diferences or similarities in beauty ideals (Anderson-Fye & Brewis 2017).

Conclusion: the politics of beauty ideals across cultures Although explanations based on sociocultural theory have been useful in helping scholars better understand beauty ideals across cultures, a limitation of the theory is that it does not seek to explain the function of those beauty ideals (Smolak & Murnen 2007). In contrast, feminist scholars have emphasized the ways in which bodily experiences are shaped by patriarchal structures, particularly (though not limited to) in societies experiencing changes in gender role orientation and where women strive for greater equality (Bordo 1993; Wolf 1990). From this perspective, beauty ideals can be described as originating from oppressive beliefs and attitudes directed at women in male-dominated societies. For example, Dworkin (1974) highlighted the ways in which “masculine aesthetics” shift awareness away from women’s real competencies to superfcial aspects associated with beauty and appearance. Beauty ideals, in this view, reduce women to the status of sex objects, causing them to feel that their bodies are inadequate and forcing them to engage in practices that leave them feeling inauthentic if they do not live up to the idealized image of femininity. Beauty ideals, then, serve a very precise function: they act as a form of oppression against women, allowing patriarchal societies to denigrate and impede women’s liberation and gender equality (Bordo 1993; Wolf 1990) – a service that was performed in the Western world in the early part of the twentieth century and that is now being repeated across the developing world. Some feminist scholars have extended this feminist critique to include beauty ideals aimed at men. Bartky (1990), for example, has argued that what she calls the “fashion-beauty complex” is responsible for the normative discontent experienced by women and increasingly men in relation to their bodies. The fashion-beauty complex, she argues, represents the corporate interests involved in the fashion and beauty industries, who propagate and maintain unrealistic beauty ideals in order to engender proft-deriving insecurity among populations the world over. By continually depreciating women’s and men’s bodies by displaying images of supposed ideals, the fashion-beauty complex ensures that women and men feel their bodies to be defcient, requiring “heroic measures” to rectify that defciencies. Of course, the best way to rectify those “defciencies” is to seek refuge in the products ofered by the fashion-beauty complex, so ensuring large fortunes for transnational corporations and industries. While it may be difcult to envision a future in which the importance of beauty ideals is minimized, even eliminated altogether, we should not forget the ways in which beauty ideals and practices were challenged by thousands of women and men in the 1970s, who strived for women’s liberation. Likewise, in an increasingly globalized world, opportunities for connecting body-positive movements and challenging prescriptive beauty ideals become that much easier. When Protein World’s “beach body ready” reached New York in the summer of 2015, many women there took inspiration from what they had seen happening in the United Kingdom to deface or subvert the adverts (Sweeney 2015). This is just one small 108

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example, but it does point to greater awareness of the detrimental efects of beauty ideals and points to a future in which we are no longer judged solely on our appearance, but on our real competencies.

Related topics Beauty standards and body-image issues in the West and Japan Body aesthetics & beauty politics in twentieth century Africa: case of the Sudan

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12 BEAUTY STANDARDS AND BODY-IMAGE ISSUES IN THE WEST AND JAPAN FROM A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE Yuko Yamamiya and Tomohiro Suzuki

Aesthetic ideals of the human body have been quite diferent across cultures, but rapid globalization and Western dominance of the cosmetic and fashion industries have fostered the global dissemination of Western beauty ideals (Yamamiya 2020). In many contemporary societies, a thin body is highly valued for women. However, what constitutes an ideal “thin body” is diferent across cultures. In addition, a highly muscular body is idealized among men in Western cultures but not necessarily in Japan. Such diferences may be partially related to the distribution of body types among populations but may be more related to local and traditional values that are blended with new values imported from the West. This chapter aims to summarize the meaning and function of beauty standards in Western (mostly US) and Eastern (mostly Japanese) cultures by comparing the body ideals of women and men in the countries.

Body weight and beauty in Japan and the West Thinness has been viewed as a determinant of female beauty in various Western(ized) cultures (Voracek & Fisher 2002). In the United States, thin women are characterized as “good,” happy, socially desirable, and successful in the media (Heinberg 1996; Tiggemann 2002). Hence, Western women widely idealize a thin body. In Japan, thinness also represents femininity (Inokuchi et al. 2014). Japanese culture is known as “kawaii (cuteness)” culture, and “kawaii” is actually a present-day representation of traditional femininity that emphasizes passivity, purity, and submissiveness (Pike & Borovoy 2004). In Japan, a young girl with wide-eyed innocence and an extremely thin and petite physique is frequently depicted as “kawaii ideal” (Ginsberg 2000). Moreover, a few female fashion models in Japan have a BMI of 14.5. Researchers have attributed various psychological problems such as eating disorders to the glorifcation of an unrealistically thin ideal, which is assumed to have originated in Western cultures (Smith & Joiner 2008) and spread (Yamamiya 2020). When a thin-beautiful appearance ideal is promoted in a society, people start endorsing the appearance as a standard 112

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and evaluating their own appearance in comparison to it, with adverse efects on their body image (van den Berg et al. 2002). Body dissatisfaction is highly prevalent among young females especially in Westernized nations including the United States and Japan (Rohde, Stice, & Marti 2015; Yamamiya, Shrof, & Thompson 2008). A study in which Japanese and Vietnamese adolescents were examined indicated that over 80% of Japanese girls expressed body dissatisfaction whereas only 55% of Japanese boys or Vietnamese adolescents expressed body dissatisfaction (Sano et al. 2008). In contemporary societies, the pressure of beauty standards remains greater for females than males, largely because a modern society evaluates the value of women based on physical attractiveness and men based on strength. The glorifcation of extremely thin female bodies in a society that leads to appearance comparison results in pursuit of a thinner body among women (Nishizawa et al. 2003; Thompson & Stice 2001), especially if they feel that they are not thin (or beautiful) enough (Lavin & Cash 2001). This desire for thinness seems to emerge during childhood. Even six-year-old girls in the United States and Japan express a desire for thinness (Collins 1991; Nishizawa et al. 1999). In addition, desire for thinness generally increases with age and becomes very high at the onset of puberty that results in increased body fat in girls (Stice 2003). Hence, females of various cultures express body dissatisfaction and desire for thinness, but body dissatisfaction and desire for thinness seem to be especially pronounced in Japanese women. Wardle, Hasse, and Steptoe (2006) have collected data from college students in 22 nations from fve geographic and political regions (North-Western Europe and the United States, Central and Eastern Europe, Mediterranean nations, Pacifc-Asia including Japan, and South America). More than half of female participants attempted to lose weight in many of North-Western European nations (for example, 52% in Ireland, 55% in Iceland), the United States (59%), Central and Eastern European nations (for example, 64% in Poland, 56% in Bulgaria), and Pacifc-Asian nations (for example, 54% in Thailand), but especially notable are North Korea and Japan in which a great majority of female participants (77% and 70%, respectively) tried to lose weight. In another study, more than a thousand adolescents in Japan and in Finland were compared (Maezono et al. 2019). The study showed that compared to Finnish girls, Japanese girls showed greater body dissatisfaction and desire for thinness. When Japanese and German women were examined in a study, women with a greater BMI expressed greater levels of body dissatisfaction and desire for thinness regardless of nationalities, but compared to German women, Japanese women showed greater body dissatisfaction and desire for thinness although they had a signifcantly lower BMI (Kusano-Schwartz & von Wietersheim 2005). Thus, among women in Westernized nations, Japanese women are particularly desirous of achieving a thin body. It may be because Japanese women are more likely to overestimate their weight, although young women invariantly overestimate their weight regardless of nationalities. For instance, when American, South Korean, and Japanese college women were compared, although body-size overestimation was observed among all of them, the extent of the overestimation of Japanese women was almost triple that of South Korean and American women (Kim et al. 2016). Moreover, the aforementioned comparison study by Wardle et al (2006) showed that Japanese female participants reported the greatest incidence of weight overestimation although the overestimation occurred in all 22 nations (range: 23% in Germany to 63% in Japan). Some studies have found that the overestimation of body size is correlated with body dissatisfaction (for example, Nishizawa et al. 2003). Suzuki (2014) investigated the body-size overestimation among young Japanese women by using a fgural scale and found that the participants selected not only a larger fgure as their current body but 113

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also an extremely small fgure as their ideal body, and the discrepancy between these fgures was correlated with body dissatisfaction. Even underweight girls and women desire to be thinner and try to lose weight in Japan (Ohara et al. 2014) due to their weight overestimation and body dissatisfaction (Hayashi, et al. 2006; Sano et al. 2008). The desired BMI among underweight women was 17, which is equivalent to the indicative BMI of mildly severe anorexia nervosa (American Psychiatric Association 2013; Mase et al. 2015). Consequently, the average BMI of women in their 20s has continuously declined since the 1970s and 22.5% of the women had a BMI below 18.5 in 2000 (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2010). On the other hand, the prevalence of eating disorders among Japanese female children and youths has been steadily increasing since the 1980s (for example, Chisuwa & O’Dea 2010). Before the 1980s, eating disorders were thought of as a culture-specifc disorder observed only among middle-to-upper-class white young females (Pate et al. 1992). However, epidemiological research indicated that by the late twentieth century eating disorders became as prevalent in Japan as in the United States (for example, Nakamura et al. 2000).

Aesthetic standards among men in the West and Japan The media place increasing emphasis and value on male appearance (Saladin 2015), suggesting heightened aesthetic standards for men. Young Western men mostly idealize unrealistically bulky bodies (Pope, Phillips, & Olivardia 2000) possibly because male fgures glorifed in the Western media and society have increasingly become bigger and more muscular. For instance, the bicep circumference of GI Joe has increased from 12.2 inches in 1973 to 26.8 inches in 1998, which is much larger than the bicep of any bodybuilder (Pope, Olivardia, Gruber, & Borowiecki 1999). Moreover, male bodies featured in Playgirl have become thicker and more muscular over 25 years (Leit, Pope, & Gray 2001). In Japan, a traditional male ideal is comprised of the physical functionality and strength associated with a powerful body without too much big muscle (Sugihara & Katsurada 1999). Even today, many young Japanese men highly idealize the so-called “hoso maccho (skinny-muscular)” body, which is a slim body with lean muscles. A body with too much visible muscle is viewed quite negatively in Japan (Andreasson & Johansson 2017). In addition, in the early twenty-frst century, a new trend of male ideal emerged in Japan, which was defned as “3S (skinny, small, and soft)” boys in a magazine (Monden 2012). Popular young male celebrities and pop idols in Japan typically have a delicate and “kawaii” face with an androgynous and underweight body. One interesting fnding is that adjectives like “feminine” and “kawaii” are used as compliments to heterosexual young men in the Japanese media. Thus, men’s body ideals are polarized into masculine “hoso-maccho” and feminine “kawaii” appearances in Japan (Kowner 2004). Consequently, boys and young men in contemporary cultures also display negative body image. In general, American boys and young men who experience body dissatisfaction desire a larger and more muscular body (Calzo et al. 2015). Moreover, six-year-old boys in Japan express their desire for a slightly larger body (Nishizawa et al. 1999). Various researchers (for example, McCabe, Ricciardelli, & Finemore 2002; Suka et al. 2005) have shown that young boys across cultures tend to perceive pubertal body changes toward a muscular body positively and desire more muscle tone. However, striving for an overly muscular body sometimes leads to the use of anabolic-androgenic steroids or AAS (Kanayama, Pope, & Hudson 2001). AAS mainly derived from testosterone can result in a drastic increase in muscularity and a decrease in fat tissues in users (Kanayama, Hudson, & Pope 2010). However, 114

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extensive use of AAS may lead to medical and psychological problems, such as cardiac problems (Akçakoyun et al. 2014) and aggressiveness (Beaver et al. 2008). In Japan, as mentioned earlier, a sizeable number of young men also strive for a slim body (Andreasson & Johansson 2017). Government data show that the proportion of young men categorized as “too thin” has increased from 9.4% in 1986 to 12.3% in 2010 (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2010). Moreover, the prevalence of thinness among Japanese adolescent boys has almost doubled from 2003 to 2011 (Inokuchi et al. 2014). In a study of Japanese high school boys, 9.2% admitted that they had tried weight-loss behaviors in the past, and half of them engaged in potentially unhealthy weight-loss behaviors (Kusaka 2008). Unlike girls, however, boys start a weight-loss behavior based on their actual weight status rather than weight overestimation; those who tried dieting behaviors were mostly overweight (Nishizawa et al. 2003). The predictive factors of weight-loss behaviors among Japanese high school boys were both higher body weight and the expectation to become attractive after losing weight (Kusaka 2008).

Mechanisms of infuence Becker et al. (2002) demonstrated the power of mass media as a disseminator of beauty standards. However, mere exposure to the media may not automatically result in the endorsement of media-dictated beauty standards. “Acculturation” refers to the adaptation of a new cultural value via extensive exposure to foreign values, including appearance ideals (Mussap 2009). Japan has experienced a rapid Westernization after World War II fostering a consumer culture, which emphasizes outward appearance (Sato & Kato 2005) and unattainable beauty ideals (Maynard & Taylor 1999). One study found that Japanese high-school students who endorsed modern-Japanese or Western values were more dissatisfed with their bodies than those who endorsed traditional-Japanese values (Brokhof et al. 2012), possibly because traditional Japanese culture highly emphasizes healthy dietary habits with less emphasis on body weight (Pike & Borovoy 2004). Dispositional pro-Western and pro-modern attitudes may be a reason why some people actively consume the media that promotes Western/modern values and internalize appearance-ideal promoted in the media, which, in turn, leads to greater negative media-exposure efects among those individuals, such as body dissatisfaction and weight-control behaviors. A number of studies have also shown that family and peers exert a strong infuence on body image (for example, Keery, van den Berg, & Thompson 2004; Yamamiya et al. 2008) and dieting behaviors (for example, McCabe & Ricciardelli 2001, 2003) because family and peers also serve as important agents to disseminate and promote beauty standards. Parents are especially infuential on children’s body ideals because children and parents share the genes and lifestyles that determine body shape (Lau, Quadrel, & Hartmann 1990). Moreover, parental comments regarding a child’s weight are associated with the child’s negative body image and weight-loss behavior (McCabe & Ricciardelli 2001, 2003). In addition, when a family member repeatedly tries dieting, a child tends to be highly concerned with their own body weight and try dieting as well (Packard & Krogstrand 2002). Young women perceive stronger parental messages regarding the ideal physique and evaluate the messages as more important than young men do (Stanford & McCabe 2002), probably because beauty is viewed as more relevant to women’s social role and success than men’s (Lavin & Cash 2001) in contemporary societies. A child’s internalized appearance ideal and perceived messages from parents are, in fact, highly correlated (Stanford & McCabe 2002). 115

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Mothers, in particular, have been found to infuence children’s desire for thinness and weight-loss behaviors (Rodgers, Faure, & Chabrol 2009a). More specifcally, how mothers feel and act toward their own and child’s body shape and weight, as refected in their feedback, criticism, and pressure about appearance, substantially afects the child’s body image (Cordero & Israel 2009; Rodgers, Paxton, & Chabrol 2009b). Adolescent girls’ body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, and weight-loss behaviors are related to maternal comments and modeling behaviors via thin-ideal internalization (Keery et al. 2004; Rodgers et al. 2009a). Moreover, college females’ perceptions of their mothers’ attitudes and behaviors toward body shape and weight signifcantly infuence the daughters’ body image more than the actual attitudes and behaviors of the mothers (Baker, Wiseman, & Brownell 2000). In Japan, the mother-daughter dyad has been found to be extremely close (see Kashiwagi 1998), and their relationship is much stronger and intimate than other dyads such as father-daughter, father-son, or mother-son (Mizumoto 2018). Moreover, Japanese college women tend to have stronger bonding with mothers and a weaker sense of independence than their American counterparts (Onodera 1993). As a result, great similarities between Japanese mothers and daughters in appearance-related attitudes and behaviors have been found. A study of Japanese children in elementary schools and their mothers suggests that maternal thin-ideal internalization was associated with daughters’ desire for thinness via the perceived maternal weight-related attitudes and behaviors toward the daughters (Yamazaki & Omori 2016). Moreover, eating disorders are observed among Japanese women who often talk about food and dieting with their mothers (Mukai, Crago, & Shisslak 1994). Weight-loss behavior is substantially infuenced by peers as well (Crandall 1988). In particular, adolescent girls in a clique frequently converse about body shape and weight, attractive appearance, and fear toward fatness (Levine & Smolak 2004). Moreover, girls in the same clique are found to have similar levels of weight concern, desire for thinness, and eating behaviors (Paxton, Schutz, Wertheim, & Muir 1999). Through recurrent conversations with peers regarding weight and weight-loss, young females may overestimate or normalize even seemingly unhealthy weight-control behaviors among peers including excessive dieting, which may rationalize their engagement in such behaviors (Berkowitz 2003). Then, they may engage in weight-loss behaviors in an efort to conform to the perceived norms (Krcmar, Giles, & Helme 2008). Japan is known as a typical collectivistic society where people strive to ft in and belong (for example, Markus & Kitayama 1991), thus the Japanese may be even more infuenced by sociocultural pressures than Westerners (Omori, Yamawaki, & McKyer 2015). For Japanese women, weight loss may be the way to ft in a social group and receive approval from others. In addition, self-criticism is a signifcant motivation in East-Asian countries including Japan (Karasawa 2001). It appears that Japanese people are motivated to fnd their faws and “fx” them to improve their appearance so as to approximate to a collective beauty ideal and obtain social approval from others (Kowner 2004). However, the need for social approval or acceptance has been found to be related to body dissatisfaction (Kowner 2004) and disordered eating (Mukai, Kambara, & Sasaki 1998) among Japanese girls and women, possibly because they perceive themselves as not living up to the societal standards. In addition, girls frequently receive criticism and teasing comments about their bodies from peers based on their weight (Calogero, Herbozo, & Thompson 2009). In fact, peers seem to be the primary source of body-related teasing in the United States and Japan (Cash 1995; Chisuwa-Hayami & Haruki 2017). Body-related negative commentary and teasing from others adversely infuence appearance concerns, body dissatisfaction, and weight-loss 116

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behavior (Haines & Neumark-Sztainer 2006; McCormack et al. 2011). Even at the fve-year follow-up, weight-related teasing predicts frequent weight-loss attempts among American girls (Haines, Neumark-Sztainer, Eisenberg, & Hannan 2006). Interestingly, a study conducted in the United States showed that appearance-related compliments were also as detrimental as criticisms though they might evoke positive feelings because such compliments objectifed women’s bodies and reminded women that their bodies were being evaluated (Calogero et al. 2009). Notably, women who felt good about compliments reported higher levels of body surveillance and dissatisfaction. Similarly, more Japanese adolescent girls than boys reported appearance-related teasing from peers (Chisuwa-Hayami & Haruki 2017). The proportion of girls who experienced teasing was double that of boys. Those who experienced appearance-related peer teasing tended to display weight-loss behavior, depressive emotions, and body dissatisfaction (Chisuwa-Hayami & Haruki 2017; Yamamiya, et al. unpublished). The risk factors for receiving appearance-related teasing were not only having a relatively high body weight but also perceiving themselves as “fat.” Moreover, Japanese adolescent girls with thin-ideal internalization (but not athletic-ideal internalization) perceived greater appearance-related teasing from peers (Yamamiya et al. 2016). Thus, in addition to the direct relationship between higher BMI and greater teasing episodes, there seems to be an indirect relationship between one’s attitudes toward body weight and teasing episodes. As for appearance-related compliments, there is no published study to examine their efects on body image in Japanese people yet, but considering that compliments indicate social approval from others, it may have an even greater (that is, worse) efect on body image of young Japanese women. In fact, young Japanese women whose self-worth was contingent on others’ approval tended to have higher levels of appearance comparison and self-worth derived from their appearance (Yamamiya, Shimai, & Homan 2020), which are correlated with body dissatisfaction (Yamamiya et al. 2008, 2020).

Conclusion and future outlook There is no doubt that body shape and body weight are the central components of one's physical attractiveness in many cultures, but how these components are perceived and evaluated may be diferent across cultures. This chapter highlights similarities and diferences of body ideals mainly between Japan and the United States in relation to body shape and body weight. Among women, a thin body is highly valued in both Japan and the United States. This similarity is frequently misconceptualized as Westernization but this explanation is too simplistic. Japanese young women idealize a much thinner and almost pre-pubertal physique and strive for a much smaller BMI than American young women. Moreover, although Japanese women tend to have smaller bodies, their body dissatisfaction is much greater than that of their American counterparts. This indicates that desire for thinness among Japanese women is more pronounced than that among American women, and it may be related to the traditional Japanese “kawaii” culture that glorifes girlish femininity. The cultural diference in body ideals between Japan and the West is even more pronounced in men. A highly muscular body greatly desired in Western cultures is not highly regarded or is even ridiculed in Japan. Instead, many Japanese young men strive for a slender body just like Japanese women. Some men desire a so-called “hoso maccho” body that constitutes a slender body with lean muscles whereas some men even desire a skinny and feminine appearance, which may be also related to “kawaii” culture. 117

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Hence, though beauty standards in Japan share some commonalities with those in the West, they are highly infuenced by traditional cultural values as well. Though the Western-origin “thin is beautiful” value is indeed accepted, new aesthetic standards have arisen from the integration of local and new values. In Japan, this “thin-beautiful” ideal is now widespread as the ideal has been promoted through interacting with multiple proximal sociocultural channels, such as the media, family, and friends. We need to consider the underlying cultural values that promote certain body types to prevent problematic behaviors such as extreme dieting.

Related topics Cross-cultural perspectives on body size Cosmetic surgery and the discourse of Westernization of Korean bodies Bumpah politics: The thick Black female body in the US and Caribbean academic discourse Size matters (in modeling) Fat activism and beauty politics

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Beauty standards in the west and Japan Pate J. E., Pumariega A. J., Hester C., & Garner D. M. 1992. “Cross-Cultural Patterns in Eating Disorders: A Review.” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 31(5): 802–808. Paxton S. J., Schutz H. K., Wertheim E. H., & Muir S. L. 1999. “Friendship Clique and Peer Infuences on Body Image Concerns, Dietary Restraint, Extreme Weight-Loss Behaviors, and Binge Eating in Adolescent Girls.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 108(2): 255–266. Pike K. M., & Borovoy A. 2004. “The Rise of Eating Disorders in Japan: Issues of Culture and Limitations of the Model of ‘Westernization’.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28: 493–531. Pope H. G. Jr., Olivardia R., Gruber A., & Borowiecki J. 1999. “Evolving Ideals of Male Body Image as Seen Through Action Toys.” International Journal of Eating Disorders 26(1): 65–72. Pope H. G., Phillips K. A., & Olivardia R. 2000. The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession. New York: Free Press. Rodgers R. F., Faure K., & Chabrol H. 2009a. “Gender Diferences in Parental Infuences on Adolescent Body Dissatisfaction and Disordered Eating. Sex Roles 61(11): 837–849. Rodgers R. F., Paxton S. J., & Chabrol H. 2009b. “Efects of Parental Comments on Body Dissatisfaction and Eating Disturbance in Young Adults: A Sociocultural Model.” Body Image 6(3): 171–177. Rohde P., Stice E., & Marti C. N. 2015. “Development and Predictive Efects of Eating Disorder Risk Factors during Adolescence: Implication for Prevention Eforts.” International Journal of Eating Disorders 48(2): 187–198. Saladin R. 2015. “Between Gyaru-o and Sōshokukei Danshi: Body Discourses in Lifestyle Magazines for Young Japanese Men.” Contemporary Japan 27(1): 53–70. Sano A., Le D-S. N. T., Tran, M-H. T., Pham H. T. N., Kaneda M., Murai E., & Yamamoto S. 2008. “Study On Factors of Body Image in Japanese and Vietnamese Adolescents.” Journal of Nutritional Science and Vitaminology 54(2): 169–175. Sato N., & Kato Y. 2005. “Youth Marketing in Japan.” Young Consumers 6(4): 56–60. Smith A. R., & Joiner T. E. 2008. “Examining Body Image Discrepancies and Perceived Weight Status in Adult Japanese Women.” Eating Behaviors 9(4): 513–515. Stanford J. N., & McCabe M. P. 2002. “Body Image Ideal among Males and Females: Sociocultural Infuences and Focus on Diferent Body Parts.” Journal of Health Psychology 7(6): 675–684. Stice E. 2003. “Puberty and Body Image.” In C. Hayward (Ed.), Gender Diferences at Puberty 61–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sugihara Y., & Katsurada E. 1999. “Masculinity and Femininity in Japanese Culture: A Pilot Study.” Sex Roles 40: 635–646. Suka M., Sugimori H., Yoshida K., Kanayama H., Sekine M., Yamagami T., & Kagamimori S. 2005. “Body Image and Body Satisfaction Play Important Roles in the Path to Dieting Behavior in Japanese Preadolescents: The Toyama Birth Cohort Study.” Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine 10(6): 324–330. Suzuki T. 2014. “Reexamination of Body Image in Adolescent Japanese Females with New Figural Stimuli [Atarashii Shiruetto-Zu Niyoru Jakunen-Jyosei No Body Image to Shintai-Ishiki No Kanren Nitsuiteno Saikento].” Japanese Journal of Social Psychology 30(1): 45–56. (in Japanese) Thompson J. K., & Stice E. 2001. “Thin-Ideal Internalization: Mounting Evidence for a New Risk Factor for Body-Image Disturbance and Eating Pathology.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 10(5): 181–183. Tiggemann M. 2002. “Media Infuences on Body Image Development.” In T. F. Cash & T. Pruzinsky (Eds.), Body Image: A Handbook of Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice 91–98. New York: Guilford Press. van den Berg P., Thompson J. K., Obremski-Brandon K., & Coovert M. 2002. The Tripartite Infuence Model of Body Image and Eating Disturbance: A Covariate Structure Modeling Investigation Testing the Mediational Role of Appearance Comparison.” Journal of Psychometric Research 53(5): 1007–1020. Voracek M., & Fisher M. L. 2002. “Shapely Centerfolds? Temporal Change in Body Measures: Trend Analysis.” BMJ 1447–1448. Wardle J., Hasse A. M., & Steptoe A. 2006. “Body Image and Weight Control in Young Adults: International Comparisons in University Students from 22 Countries.” International Journal of Obesity 30: 644–651. Yamamiya Y. 2020. Cultural Diferences of Physical Adornment [Yosooi Nobunka-Sa].” In T. Suzuki (Ed.), Psychology of Physical Adornment: Organizing and Decorating Mind and Behavior [Yosooi No Shinrigaku: Totonoe Kazaru Kokoro To Kodo] 222–236. Kyoto: Kitaoji Shobo. [in Japanese]

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13 BODY AESTHETICS & BEAUTY POLITICS IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AFRICA Case of the Sudan Nada Mustafa Ali Introduction1 Beauty in Africa, and especially in Sudan, is highly political as it is connected to constructions of identity that are embedded in the gendered processes of slavery, colonialism, and anticolonial nationalist struggles. As a cultural construct, beauty in Sudan is also deeply racialized and is embedded in gendered socioeconomic and political hierarchies that operate in the context of contemporary market-driven globalization. Community-level conversations, the advertising industry, popular culture, including female pop stars, and social media all constitute platforms where gendered and racialized political and social discourses about beauty play-out and shape public opinion and social life. Certain beauty-related practices, such as the use of skin-whitening cosmetics, impact women’s health as well as their access to social capital (see, for example, Hunter 2011) and economic opportunities. Despite all this, a theoretical, scholarly, or activist concern with beauty and fashion is often perceived as non-urgent, irrelevant, and apolitical in Sudan. Media reports in English and Arabic on the use of skin-lightening creams by women and girls in Sudan are relatively extensive, but scholarly publications are limited. A few recent studies focus on media and cosmetics and the use of skin-lightening products. Other studies focus on constructions of beauty, politics and identity. Abdelgabar (2016), for example, studied the messages and stereotypes in the advertising of cosmetics in three television channels in Sudan. Ahmed and Hamid (2016) examined the frequency of use of skin-lightening products among more than 300 students at Gezira University in Sudan. Other studies examine the intersection between beauty, politics, and identity (see Ali 2019, 2016, 2015; Brown 2017, 2014; Eltahir 2015; Elhassan 2014; Ahmed 2012; Fábos 2011, 2008; Sudan Cultural Digest Project 1996). This relative lack of literature is perplexing given the rich, expanding literature on beauty politics in African and African American studies (see, for example, African Studies Review 2019; Dosekun 2016; Feminist Africa 2016; Mougoué 2016; Roberts 2014; Gill 2010; Craig 2002). The limited academic literature on the intersection between beauty and politics in Sudan might be due to the political, economic, social, and cultural crises in a country that is in transition from military rule that extended over three decades, including through imposing certain aesthetics and dress code. Yet, as I argue elsewhere (Ali 2019), not only is 123

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beauty highly political and politicized; conversations in beauty parlors and elsewhere, including in women-only groups on Facebook, help shed light on the body politic. As Enloe (2010) argues, spaces such as beauty salons may constitute nonconventional arenas that shed light on the impact of political processes on the daily lives of women and communities. A concern with beauty is not irrelevant during war times or in the context of political and economic crises. Women looking at themselves in the mirror as tanks roll up their streets. Women thinking about the curl of their hair while their country is occupied by foreigners. Women spending money on their looks….and gossiping about marriage gone sour when serious people are struggling for power. Such trivializing dismissive images grow out of unexamined presumptions…: that femininity itself is not a battleground; that anxieties about women’s beauty are pre-political; that marriage is not about power, and that the same men who are immersed in national politics do not try to control women’s bodies. (Enloe 2010: 22) Enloe does not overlook the sociocultural, political, and economic complexities associated with beauty and beauty salons, however. She acknowledges that access, and the lack thereof to beauty parlors might be contingent upon social class, race, geographic location, and other aspects of diference. In addition, parlors might ofer low-paid employment for some women. Finally, Enloe argues that centering beauty parlors can “reinforce the already potent assumption that a woman’s physical appearance is her most valuable asset (or liability)” (Enloe 2010: 42; also see Ali 2019). In light of the above, this chapter provides an overview of selected debates and narratives about beauty in its intersection with politics in Sudan. The chapter examines constructions of gender and femininity that drive women and girls to use whitening cosmetics that are harmful. It discusses racialization and identity politics in Sudan. The chapter further discusses beauty spaces that have the potential to become sources of income for women, and/or hubs for mobilization around social and political change and transformation in twenty-frst-century Sudan. Finally, I discuss the political and spiritual functions that certain cosmetics and beauty practices play in Sudan.

Sudan’s context [I]f you’re asked about the ideal Sudanese woman, the majority of the answers would be/or include: “white, curvy, [with] long soft hair” Ibaa Alzaky (2016). In Sudan, ideas about beauty, and its intersection with politics, occur in a context where colonialism and post-colonial politics, including in the frst part of the twenty-frst century, have caused extreme inequalities on the bases of sex and gender, race and ethnicity, social class, region, diferent ability, and other aspects of diference. Elites that controlled Sudan since it achieved political independence from Britain in 1956 established and consolidated power structures and institutions that sanctioned social and political exclusion. Sudan’s incorporation into the global economy as marginalized (Ndikumana 2015: 8), and the adoption of a market driven economic path by successive post-colonial governments contributed to the country’s economic crises and intensifed inequalities and injustice. Successive governments in Sudan also imposed a singular identity, defned generally as “Arab” on a heterogeneous population. This involved the imposition of certain aesthetics 124

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which many intellectuals from marginalized parts of Sudan, such as the Nuba Mountains, have challenged (Ali 2015). Some scholars (for example, Fábos 2008) have argued that this construction of identity which considers “Arab” as a superior identity (also see Beswick 2005) partially explains the excessive use by many women in Sudan of skin-lightening beauty products. Fábos (2008) also argued that Sudanese women who are based in Egypt whom she interviewed often use skin-lightening cosmetics to conform with beauty standards that link “whiteness” and fair skin to higher social class in Egypt. Social, economic, political, and cultural exclusion of vast communities in Eastern, Western, and Southern Sudan contributed to conficts that started in 1955. These conficts resulted in the killing of millions, and to the displacement and exile of thousands. Populations in some areas lack basic necessities and rights such as food, water, shelter, healthcare, bodily integrity, and security. Women in these communities have been disproportionately afected by war, displacement, and public health crises such as COVID-19. A detailed discussion of these challenges is beyond this chapter. Women’s dress and clothing constitute important arenas for negotiating politics and identity in Sudan and beyond. Brown’s (2017) account of fashion politics in Sudan in the twentieth century, focused on al-tobe, a rectangular cloth that women wrap around their bodies. Brown argued that Anglo-Egyptian colonialism in Sudan created a market for imported commodities in the country. As society in Northern and Central Sudan gradually abandoned segregation of women and men, al-tobe enabled women to venture outside of their homes to receive schooling, and to take part in unions and party politics while also maintaining modesty entailed by the dominant culture at the time (Brown 2014: 502). Sudanese women, according to Brown, used al-tobe as a means of relating to modernity, nation-building and identity formation in the early twentieth century (2014: 503). Al-tobe also became a marker of a woman’s status as a state employee in the decades that followed independence. Women’s clothes and fashion came to the forefront of Sudan’s feminist politics and women’s organizing during the rule of the National Islamic Front/National Congress Party (NCP) (1989–2019). This regime used religion to control and reshape Sudanese societies. This has included the government’s imposition of Hijab [the veil] on Muslim women. Women who violated this code risked arrest for wearing “immoral dress.” They risked being fned and fogged up to 40 lashes, under Sudan’s criminal and public order law, repealed in 2020. Women’s movement activists questioned the government’s focus on women’s dress while ignoring provisions in Islam that safeguarded equality and social justice for all. It is important to distinguish between such critiques of the use of religion to control women and societies on one hand, and between Islamophobic discourses that utilize gender inequality in predominantly Muslim societies to justify war, for example, against predominantly Muslim countries (see Abu-Lughod 2013). Toward the end of the NCP’s rule, and during and after the 2018/2019 uprising, women and girls revived the use of al-tobe and wore the garment to political rallies and to demonstrations. The famous image and video showing a young Sudan’s woman, Alaa Salah wearing a white tobe at the headquarters of Sudan’s armed forces in April 2019 during the uprising, has drawn global attention to the tobe. Even though after the overthrow of the NCP regime, Sudan’s transitional government repealed laws that restricted women’s freedom of expression, including those mandating a certain dress code, dominant patriarchal ideas in Northern and Central Sudan continue to impose certain expectations on women. Women who violate these norms are often stigmatized. One example is that when a young woman activist posted a photo of her naked back 125

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and shoulder that showed signs of beating, allegedly at the hands of paramilitary militias in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, in June 2019, she received hundreds of hate messages in which bloggers criticized her for showing her bruised shoulder and back, which some claimed “seduced men.”

Te politics of everyday aesthetics Social media constitutes an important arena for approaching many social, political, economic, and cultural questions in Sudan. In Nairat or Thairat [Glamorous or Revolutionary?], I examined the narratives that women in and outside Sudan articulated in selected women-only groups on Facebook between 2014 and 2016. Conversations in some of these virtual groups refected unrealistic standards of beauty. Adhering to these standards, argued some of the participants, was crucial for achieving security in the form of a successful marriage and/or employment. Participants who were married described their daily beauty rituals. Many participants stated that the time allotted for beauty routines hindered their ability to attend to their other responsibilities within and outside the household. Yet many of these women felt they had to stick to their beauty routine so as to avoid social and economic penalties (Irvin 2016: 4). The economic policies that successive governments in Sudan followed since the 1970s, which involved the introduction of austerity measures which often resulted in high infation rates, an increase in the prices of basic commodities, and high unemployment. The same process involved the creation of an infuential advertising industry and increased consumerism. Popular women singers (al-gonat), for example, often pay for expensive beauty products or for cosmetic surgery to secure idealized beauty standards of “fner” facial features, a plump fgure with a small waist, long and sleek hair, and a light skin tone. Women popular singers then popularize and reinforce stereotypes of ideal beauty described above. As Elbagir (2017) puts it: Sudan isn’t the only African society where being overweight is a symbol of prosperity and power, boosting the “marriageability” of young women. But in this country, it embodies an ideal. It defnes the ultimate Sudanese woman – full-bodied and light-skinned  – epitomizing beauty and coveted as a wife. The iconic status of Nada Algalaa, a Sudanese singer whose looks are widely praised and emulated, is testament in itself. For some women, it is an ideal to be acquired by any means necessary. Elbagir (2017) Constructions of beauty in contemporary Sudanese societies are the product not only of socio-economic changes and of local cultures and their gendered meaning (Bordo 1993) but are also the product of dominant global cultures and the advertisement industry. Many women go to extremes to achieve this ideal, including through the use of harmful bleaching creams and prescription pills.

Harmful beauty & bodily practices In Sudan, it is possible to divide beautifcation rituals and practices that harm women into two broad categories. The frst involves practices that constitute a violation of women’s bodily integrity while serving other functions. These include practices such as Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation, and the extinct shilukh (face scarring) and dag al-shallufa (tattooing 126

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of the lower lip). These practices involve altering the body of a woman (or a man) as a means of controlling women’s sexuality, ensuring marriageability, and constructing a (Northern) Sudanese identity in the case of FGC/M; marking a woman’s (or a man’s) tribe in the case of face scarifcation; and marking a woman’s marital status in the case of lower lip tattooing. Al-shilukh and dag al-shallufa have been eradicated almost totally for various reasons, including changes in ideal beauty standards in Sudan. FGC/M is still prevalent in the country, but Sudan’s transitional government has criminalized it in 2020. An analysis of these practices from the perspective of beauty politics is beyond this chapter but is an important area of research. The second broad category of harmful practices includes the use of skin-lightening and body fattening products, which I discuss in this section. Numerous media reports and a limited number of studies have documented the tendency of many young women in diferent parts of Sudan to use skin-lightening cosmetics, and prescription pills to achieve a “bright” skin color and a curvy body that meets dominant standards of beauty. Many women use creams that lighten their skins. Some women also use various unauthorized prescription medicines to gain weight and to achieve a sand clock like body shape and frame (see Elbagir 2017; Eltahir 2015). These include pills that stimulate appetite; allergy medicines that contain the steroid hormone cortisone; and insulin medication usually used for patients with diabetes which cause swelling of the arms and legs as a side efect. Elbagir (2017) discusses the drastic impact of using unregulated fattening pills on the health of young women. Such pills and products circulate through clandestine networks. These include very few pharmacies in addition to individual entrepreneurs and owners of small kiosks that sell small portions of beauty products. Another source is women street vendors who sell tea and cofee. The pills are given names that describe their role in reshaping women’s bodies such as: al-geiran itkhala3u [the neighbors were shocked at the sudden increase of a woman’s weight], and al-tageel wara [wait till you see the heavy/large behind]. Even though the young women who use these products are aware of its negative impact on their health, they continue to consume the products so as to gain and maintain social capital. One young woman, for example, told Elbagir, “I’ve always been scared [to use fattening pills] because I’ve seen family members fall ill and close friends become dependent on appetite stimulants.” Another young woman told the same journalist, My aunt is on the brink of kidney failure and has blocked arteries from taking too many fattening pills, trying to get a bigger bum. Everyone in the family knows why she’s sick, but she won’t own up to it. She’s had to stop taking the pills on doctor’s orders. Elbagir argues that Fatalities are especially common among new brides, who traditionally undergo a month of intense beautifcation before their wedding day then abruptly stop using fattening pills and steroidal bleaching creams. Their deaths are put down to sudden organ failure. (Elbagir 2017: np) Research by Ahmed and Hamid (2016) among female students at Gezira University confrms the tendency of young women to use skin-lightening products although these products contain harmful chemicals and cause major health issues. The authors state that 74.4% of the 364 female students who participated in a survey they administered 127

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in July–September 2015 used skin-lightening products, even though 89.1% of the respondents reported that the use of skin-lightening products harmed health. Participants in this study listed several immediate reasons for using skin-lightening produces such as lightening dark spots and treating acne (57.1%); and seeking a more attractive “white” skin tone (34.3%). Some said they wanted to attract men (33.8%); and to look pretty or fashionable (28.9%). Some said women with lighter skin were treated better compared to women with dark skin (28.2%). Finally, 26.9% of the participants in this study stated that they wanted to gain self-confdence (Ahmed and Hamid 2016: 2–3). Eltahir’s (2015) qualitative research complements Ahmed and Hamid’s study and adds that young women often use skin-lightening products to ensure marriageability and to avoid discrimination when they seek employment.

Scent and identity Scent plays important aesthetic, sociocultural, and meaning-making roles in Sudan. Wearing certain perfumes, such as al-khumara (which is usually made of a mixture of dry and liquid perfumes) and Sandalia (a perfume extracted from sandalwood), indicates that a woman is married, and acts as a subtle aphrodisiac. Married women usually also use smoke baths and scrubs made of four, orange peel, and other items, mixed with perfume. As part of their beautifcation regime. Along with al-bakhoor, fragranced wood, mixed with sugar and perfumes, and tobe, these fragrances constitute an important part of the identities of married Northern Sudanese women. Through the use of perfume, women also negotiate power within the household. A discussion of these roles (which are changing) is beyond this chapter. Instead, I focus on ways in which perfumes and other beautifcation products help build and consolidate communities on the ground and online. Tracing the everyday life of traditional scent and scrubs is important given their roles as markers of identity and given that they are often made during women-only social and community-building gatherings named dag al-riha [pounding of scented products to use in making perfumes]. This is often a one or two-days long event in which women relatives and neighbors gather and prepare traditional perfumes and other beauty items, usually prior to a wedding or for a woman who is about to give birth. Ceremonies of dag al-riha ofer platforms for women to catch-up, exchange ideas and advice on diferent issues, and to seek and ofer material and social support and solidarity where needed. These gatherings are also arenas for certain kinds of transgression (some women smoke during these ceremonies – usually a male practice). Women package the beauty items produced, and hand them over to the bride or the pregnant woman. Women in the community receive small amounts named al-fal [good omens]. In recent years, women entrepreneurs started producing ready-made riha for various occasions. They market these through word of mouth and using electronic platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook. Al-Riha ingredients are usually pricy. Couples and families often negotiate the amount of ingredients needed. Couples may delay their wedding so the groom can save money to obtain these ingredients. In recent years, certain couples have decided to forgo al-riha and instead bought small ready-made amounts. It would be useful to investigate the impact of infation, and of crises such as COVID-19 on these practices (see Ali 1998, where I briefy discuss ways in which the economic crises of the 1980s and early 1990s have infuenced women’s beauty practices). The commodifcation of beauty items is another area of possible research. 128

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Kohl: beauty, spirituality, and transgression Given the labor (including the labor of love) that goes into preparing natural beauty items in various Sudanese communities, items such as kohl [powder eyeliner] are often also reservoirs of sentimental and spiritual meaning. They function as bridges to loved ones for immigrants, refugees, and displaced people. At times, these items embody spirituality as well as acts of political transgression, functions that go beyond simple body beautifcation. I use two examples to illustrate this point, the frst from my own autobiography. The last time I visited my late grandmother in my birthplace, Atbara, in the 1990s, I remember that early in the morning, on the day I was about to travel, my late grandmother held a small bottle in her hand, and poured black homemade kohl powder. She prepared the kohl patiently over several days by adding gum into and covering a mubkhar [incense container] with an aluminum plate. She monitored the gum as it burnt and lined the inside of the plate. I still remember the care with which she poured the powder into a small container. That was the last time I saw my grandmother prepare kohl because for a decade, I was not able to return to Sudan for political reasons. My grandmother passed away during this time, and I held on to the kohl. It accompanied me in my travels. I used it on occasions that I had hoped my late grandmother would attend and in which case she would have been a central fgure. I used that kohl on my agid day (the day of my religious wedding ceremony) and on the day we celebrated the birth of my daughter. Each time I used that kohl, it transported me straight back to my birthplace and to the arms of my late grandmother. The meaning of everyday beautifcation items for migrant and refugee communities feeing persecution is another area of possible research: are communities able to carry on with traditional beauty rituals? What social, political, and psychological meanings and functions do beauty items play and serve for refugees and immigrants? Beauty items such as kohl, may also serve important spiritual functions. Conversations about these items shed light on and help us understand the politics of gender in historical perspective. Psychologist Hadia Hassaballah, for example, recounts a memory from her childhood about the relationship of her grandmothers with al-mawlid [an annual celebration of the birth of Prophet Mohammed on the 7th (for Shi’a) or 12th (for Sunni Muslims) of Rabi’ al-awwal (third month in the Islamic lunar calendar)]. Hassaballah argues that this memory drew her attention to discrimination against women during Anglo-Egyptian colonial rule in Sudan (1899–1956): One of the things that might have drawn my attention to the injustice that women face was a story that my grandmothers told about their relationship with al-mawlid. …My grandmother Amna used to tell us that she and her sisters were keen on attending almawlid public celebrations. And because the British [colonial administration] wanted to show respect for local traditions [that were dominant at the time], they banned mixing of men and women in al-mawlid. Women were banned and could only enter the area where the celebrations were held after men left. [My grandmother and her sisters] would sit across from the entrance to al-mawlid, with half of their faces covered and with their backs to the men. Each one brought makhalata (her kohl bottle). Each would ask one of the small girls to place her Kohl bottle at the gate of al-mawlid celebration. They would line these Kohl bottles: a line of hearts that yearn to be at the celebration. My grandmother told me that they were rarely allowed in. But they were so pleased that each day they ap]. plied on their eyelids kohl that visited the light of Al-Mustafa [Prophet Mohammed (Hassaballah 2020 translated from Arabic by the author) 129

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The connection between kohl and defance continues to this day. As discussed above, the use of certain beauty products, including an eyeliner, is often dependent on age and on marital status of a woman. In many families, girls in their early teens are only allowed to use an eyeliner for special occasions such as a wedding of a close relative. Ishraga Hamid, an activist in the women’s movement said in 2020 that the frst time her mother beat her was when she used eyeliner despite her mother’s insistence that she was too young to use eyeliner. Hamid said she repeatedly used kohl, as a conscious act of resisting control over her body. Investigating and analyzing the life of one beauty item, such as an eyeliner, or kohl, enables an understanding of the workings of colonialism and gender relationships in Sudan, as well as contemporary gender relations. It also illuminates ways women negotiated space and navigated restriction levied on their movement.

Summary and conclusions In Sudan, beauty politics play out in a context of economic and political crises and extreme inequalities. The subfeld is still nascent and scholarly publications are limited. Everyday beauty rituals and body aesthetics ofer opportunities for community building. They also help illuminate power relations and politics at household levels, and at the levels of extended family, neighborhood, and community. Certain body aesthetic practices such as skin-lightening products and unregulated fattening pills and injections contain chemicals that are detrimental to women’s health. Yet young women in particular continue to use these products. Stereotypes, and society’s construction of ideal body shapes often inform women’s decisions to use these products. Women who use these products often seek to maximize their social capital and to avoid social and economic penalties associated with the lack of conforming to dominant aesthetics. The advertising industry reinforces and reproduces these ideal constructions. In this chapter I have highlighted several areas that warrant further research. Eltahir (2015) points to the need for qualitative studies that probe colorism and internalized stereotypes about beauty in Sudan and the impact on women. In-depth studies about beauty politics outside large cities, especially in marginalized parts of Sudan, would enrich this feld. Documentation and analysis of policy and civil society initiatives to address the impact of the use of harmful products is another area for potential research. It is important to consider the complexities associated with beauty politics in Sudan. This is particularly relevant in relation to certain traditional beauty rituals and practices. For example, society often dictates that women, especially married women, follow certain beauty regimes, but the processing of these beauty products, and their use, often enhances community spirit and enables women to share their experiences and to exchange ideas and advice where needed. A creative possible area of interdisciplinary research may involve studies of the healing and other qualities of natural beauty products; and of the potential of these practices in fulflling women’s and communities’ social, psychological, and spiritual needs.

Related topics Transnational feminist approaches to beauty Colorism and the racial politics of beauty Beauty, colorism, and anti-colorism in transnational India Cross-cultural perspectives on body size 130

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Note 1 I acknowledge that parts of this chapter draw on an article I published in 2019 in African Studies Review (Ali 2019). I also want to acknowledge an exercise in the Rift Valley Institute named “the social life of things” in which I spoke about the politics and aesthetics of al-tobe, each year between 2013 and 2016.

References Abdelgabar, Omar. 2016. “Sudan imported beauty: a content analysis of cosmetic advertisements in three Sudanese channels” (Arabic). Journal of Social Sciences – Kuwait University 44(2): 38–51. Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2013. Do Muslim women need saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. African Studies Review. 2019. “Forum: bodily practices and aesthetic rituals in twentieth- and twenty-frst century Africa” 62(2): 72–198. Ahmed, Anwar E. and Hamid, Mohamed E. (2016) “A survey of female Sudanese college students’ knowledge and attitude towards skin lightening.” Journal of Women’s Health, Issues & Care 5(4). Ahmed, I. I. 2012. “A thematic analysis of female university students’ perception of idealized body image in Sudan and their experiences of performing common beauty practices: (skin lightening, applying black henna dye and purposively induced weight)” Master’s Thesis. University of Glamorgan/Wales. Ali, Nada Mustafa. 2019. “Sudanese women’s groups on Facebook and #civil_disobedience: Nairat or thairat?(radiant or revolutionary?).” African Studies Review 62(2): 103–126. ———. 2016. “‘Gold poured of of her hair’: interrogating Sudan’s decolonial, opposition discourses from a feminist perspective”. Paper Presented at the National Studies Association Meeting, Montreal, Canada, November. ———. 2015. Gender, race, and Sudan’s exile politics: do we all belong to this country? Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ———. 1998. “The invisible economy, survival and empowerment: fve cases from Atbara, Sudan.” In Lobban, Richard A. (ed.), Middle Eastern women and the invisible economy. Gainsville: University Press of Florida. Alzaky, Ibaa. 2016. “Beauty standards in Sudan.” Prezi.com. Beswick, S. 2005. “Review of Nageeb, Salma Ahmed,” new spaces and old frontiers: women, social space, and Islamization in Sudan.” H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. www.h-net.org. August. Bordo, Susan.1993. Unbearable weight: feminism, western culture, and the body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brown, Marie G. 2017. Khartoum at night: fashion and body politics in imperial Sudan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2014. “Fashioning their place: dress and global imagination in imperial Sudan”. Gender and History 26(3): 502–518. Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I a beauty queen? Black women, beauty, and the politics of race. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dosekun, Simidele. 2016. “Editorial: the politics of fashion and beauty in Africa.” Feminist Africa 21: 1–6. Elbagir, Yousra. 2017. “Sudan’s ‘big and beautiful’ pills for women.” BBC News, 7 January. https:// www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40643504. Elhassan, Sara. 2014. “An ugly idea dissected: looks, age and language in Sudan.” African Arguments. December 2. http://africanarguments.org/2014/12/02/an-ugly-idea-dissectedlooks-age-andlanguage-in-sudan-by-sara-elhassan/ Eltahir, Nafsa E. A. 2015. “Colorism in context: how young African American and Sudanese women experience their skin color.” B.A. honors thesis. Harvard University. Enloe, Cynthia. H. 2010. Nimo’s war, Emma’s war: making feminist sense of the Iraq War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fábos, Anita. 2011. “Resisting blackness, embracing rightness: how Muslim Arab Sudanese women negotiate their identity in the diaspora”. Ethnic and Racial Studies 35(2):1–20. ———. 2008. “Resisting ‘blackness:’ Muslim Arab Sudanese in the diaspora.” ISIM Review. https:// openaccess.leidenuniv.nl. Feminist Africa. 2016. (Special issue on the politics of fashion and beauty in Africa). 21.

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Nada Mustafa Ali Gill, Tifany. M. 2010. Beauty shop politics: African American women’s activism in the beauty industry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hassaballah, H. 2020. “YouTube video on peaceful coexistence.” Sudanese Human Rights Initiative, 29 April. Hunter, Margaret L. 2011. “Buying racial capital: skin-bleaching and cosmetic surgery in a globalized world.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 4(4):142–164. Irvin, Sherri. 2016. “Introduction: why body aesthetics?” In Irvin, Sherri (ed.), Body aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–12. Mougoué, Jacqueline-Bethel. 2016. “African women do not look good in wigs: gender, beauty rituals and cultural identity in Anglophone Cameroon, 1961–1972.” Feminist Africa 21: 7–22. Ndikumana, L. 2015. “Integrated yet marginalized: implications of globalization for African development.” African Studies Review, 58(2): 7–28. Roberts, Blain. 2014. Pageants, parlors, and pretty women: race and beauty in the Twentieth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sudan Cultural Digest Project (SCDP). 1996. Coping with the dynamics of culture and change: the case of Sudanese in Egypt. Cairo: SCDP.

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14 FANTASTIC BODIES Navigating ideals of beauty in cosplay Erynn Masi de Casanova and Jeremy Brenner-Levoy

That kind of gets under my skin when people are like, “Oh, look. Another fat Harley Quinn.” And I’m over here like, “Fuck you. She feels pretty. Fuck of.” I’ve seen women wear six-inch heels all day at a con… twelve hours straight in heels, and I’m like, “I don’t know who this bitch is, but she deserves all of everyone’s attention.” These quotes show the risks and rewards of becoming a spectacle. They come from interviews with people who engage in cosplay, bringing fctional characters to life through their bodies. Cosplay is a growing hobby in the United States and beyond, where comics conventions and other fan conventions, called “cons,” bring people together to celebrate the fctional worlds and characters that inspire them. Cosplay was originally called costumed role-playing in the 1960s–1980s, when fans began dressing up as fantasy and science fction characters at conventions in the United States. This practice then caught on in Japan in the 1980s, spreading to anime and manga fan communities, who translated the popular role-playing competitions called masquerades into “costume play,” which was later shortened into the portmanteau cosplay (コスプレ or kosupure in Japanese) (Winge 2006). Cons are sociologically interesting for several reasons. As relatively recent social phenomena, they are understudied. Cosplay is a unique way that fans interact with source texts – including books, flms, video games, or television series – literally embodying their interpretation of the characters. Cosplayers’ bodies are displayed in a setting that is simultaneously fantastical or theatrical and, for insiders, everyday and familiar. We explore cosplay as a space for social interaction where ideals of beauty are enacted, enforced, and contested. Foregrounding cosplayers’ accounts of their embodied experience, we explore these questions: (1) How do people interpret and embody source texts through cosplay?, (2) How do cosplayers describe their bodies and body image?, and (3) How do cosplayers deal with other people’s perceptions? We argue that conventional ideals of beauty – especially for women – operate in cosplay spaces. However, cosplayers also espoused an ethic of acceptance in the face of these impossible ideals. Rather than perfection, they lauded creativity and confdence. Despite praising these qualities in other cosplayers, however, the research participants admitted applying unrealistic standards to their own bodies and fnding them lacking. By 133

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exploring beauty in a new setting, we highlight both the power of narrow beauty ideals and the propagation of alternatives to these ideals. Our fndings thus complement existing research by ofering insight into a space with less regulation and more body diversity than pageants or fashion runways.

Beauty ideals outside the con While earlier research on beauty focused on women’s oppression, often criticizing women’s allegiance to beauty (Chapkis 1986; Pauly Morgan 1991; Wolf 1991), recent scholars have taken seriously women’s pleasurable experiences of beauty culture, researching embodied practices rather than abstract ideals (Craig 2006; Lowe 2013; Wissinger 2015). We integrate these approaches, following the lead of our research participants, who simultaneously critiqued unrealistic ideals and judged themselves according to them. In presenting the dissenting voices of cosplayers dismayed by dominant beauty ideals, we build on research studies that fnd women – generally women who are seen as not-white or otherwise excluded from dominant ideals – enacting alternative ideals that difer from those in mainstream Western media (Balogun 2020; Balogun and Hoang 2013; Bobel and Kwan 2011, 2019; Casanova 2004; Connell 2013; Gentles-Peart 2013; Hoang 2015). Men are now part of scholarly and lay conversations about beauty. Men who identify as heterosexual increasingly feel pressure to approximate idealized masculine bodies, and claim to experience more public scrutiny of their physiques than previous generations (Barber 2016; Bordo 1999; Bridges 2014; Casanova 2015; Ocejo 2017). Our participants represent a variety of gender identities, and several recognized that the source texts for cosplay represent unrealistic versions of masculine and feminine beauty.

Studying cosplay Previous research typically lumps cosplayers together, disregarding diferences in source material (Lamerichs 2011, 2014; McLeod 2013; Pierson-Smith 2015; Rahman, Wing-sun, and Cheung 2012; Scott 2015). Yet cosplayers assume roles and costumes of characters from different genres including video games, comic books, and anime. These genres attract distinct, albeit frequently overlapping, communities. To provide context for cosplayers’ accounts, we begin by looking at gender and beauty in these texts. Cosplayers may face difculties cosplaying content from video games because of the extremely gendered character portrayals. Women characters tend to be highly sexualized and objectifed, portrayed as thin and busty, and in sexy poses (Burgess, Stermer, and Burgess 2007; Downs and Smith 2010; Martins, Williams, Harrison, and Ratan 2009; Near 2013). Men characters are more common than women, and tend to be muscular and hypermasculine (Burgess, Stermer, and Burgess 2007; Cacioli and Mussap 2014; Condis 2018). Video game characters are also overwhelmingly white (Dietrich 2013; Williams, Martins, Consalvo, and Ivory 2009). This is because video games are created mostly by men for an assumed audience of white heterosexual men (Paaßen, Morgenroth, and Stratemeyer 2017; Sweetser, Wyeth, McMahon, and Johnson 2013). Characters’ bodies difer from common stereotypes of video game players (“gamers”) as unpopular, unattractive, overweight, and socially inept (Kowert, Festl, and Quandt 2014). Characters are incongruent with the bodies of people who play video games, even those whose appearance does not ft the negative gamer stereotype. Disparities between ideal (character) bodies and actual people’s bodies shape real-world cosplay interactions. 134

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In comic books, women are sexually objectifed, particularly in cover art, and appear less frequently than men (Cocca 2014, 2016; Scott 2013, 2015). As in video games, men characters are strong and muscular (Cocca 2016). Comics also portray white characters more, and when they include characters of color, they are often portrayed negatively (Hunt 2019; Strömberg 2010). As in video games, comics’ depictions can bleed into the interactions and interpretations of cosplayers. Video games and comics share a Eurocentric male gaze, meaning that women are portrayed in ways consistent with their objectifcation by heterosexual men (Mulvey 1975). Anime, Japanese or Japanese-style animation, introduces new issues because of its otaku gaze (otaku loosely translates to “nerd” in English; Yiu and Chan 2013). Kawaii (shy, vulnerable, and cute) and bishojo (beautiful young girl) aesthetics have spread globally with the consumption of anime (Cooper-Chen 2010; Yiu and Chan 2013). While these idealized images of femininity often difer from the ultra-curvy, barely-clothed bodies in games and comics, they still objectify women and girls, denying them agency. Anime can present diferent gendered images than other source texts. Many anime fans are women, which is refected in the portrayal of more diverse women characters. Some sub-genres of anime show diverse, queer, and woman-positive images (Fennell, Liberato, Hayden, and Fujino 2012; McLeod 2013; Whitmer 2011). But anime fans may not see these images, depending on which texts they consume, and many texts still objectify women. Thus, diverse representations of women and queer people coexist with aesthetics that sexualize young, vulnerable girls. These complex fctional worlds present unique opportunities and risks for cosplayers. Most research on cosplay investigates cosplayers’ motivations, looking at convention culture and cosplayers’ performances. Some researchers argue that cosplay is about escaping the boundaries placed on our singular selves by embracing imagination and the performance of multiple selves (Casanova, Brenner-Levoy, and Weirich 2020; Pierson-Smith 2015; Rahman, Wing-sun, and Cheung 2012). These studies focus on the pleasure that escaping our everyday self can bring, and on cosplay as an opportunity to be someone else. Other research focuses on cosplay as a combination of self-expression and appreciation for the content, mediated by the cosplayer’s physical embodiment (Lamerichs 2011, 2014). Incongruence between the character body and the cosplayer’s body can be transgressive and empowering, but can also leave room for negative interpretations of the cosplayer’s body (Lamerichs 2014: 122). We incorporate these approaches to understand both the pleasure of escape and the performance of multiple roles, analyzing how cosplayers’ bodies and their ideas about characters’ bodies afect their experiences. Literature on cosplay is still scant, and much of it is not empirically rigorous. In most studies, embodiment and beauty have been ignored or discussed peripherally. Our research aims to fll this gap by demonstrating how bodies and beauty matter for cosplayers.

Methods Our ethnographic study explores the embodied dimensions of cosplayers’ experiences. We interviewed 23 cosplayers, most of them from the midwestern United States, and conducted more than 200 hours of participant observation at comic, gaming, steampunk, and anime conventions between 2015 and 2019. We initially recruited interviewees through social media (Facebook and Reddit) and on convention-specifc pages. All participants had cosplayed multiple times at diferent conventions. Most participants were white (78%), women (57%), or trans/non-binary (30%), queer 135

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(65%), with an average age of 25 (ages ranged from 19 to 40). Semi-structured interviews ranged from 30 to 90 min, and focused on cosplay activities, personal histories of cosplay, motivations, and aspects of gender, sexuality, race, and body. We coded interviews for common themes, with each interview coded by at least two researchers, who worked together to refne the coding scheme for analysis. Participants had the option to use their real names or a pseudonym. Six participants requested pseudonyms, and two opted to choose their own pseudonym. The sites for participant observation were intended to maximize variation of types of fan cosplays. We attended Matsuricon, Gen Con, Cincinnati Comic Expo, Animatic Con, and the International Steampunk Symposium. We shadowed cosplayer research participants to observe their interactions with others, and volunteered as con staf to understand cons’ behind-the-scenes activities. By observing cosplayers’ interactions across sites, we were able to ground interview accounts within these spaces and better understand and confrm material from interviews. The research team consisted of three white researchers, one woman and two men, of diferent ages and sexual orientations. One researcher participated in cosplay regularly, and the other two had family members involved in cosplay. Our familiarity with conventions, and with the source material and fan cultures, combined with participant observation at cons, allowed for a holistic approach to cosplayers’ experience. Our insider/pseudo-insider status helped guide our interview questions, build rapport, and helped us understand many of cosplayers’ references. It is difcult to know how typical these accounts are, although participants made claims about the composition of these communities (as queer-friendly spaces, for example). We speculate there may be more explicit valuing of body diversity among a group with more women and more queer people, who may be more likely to oppose sexism and rigid beauty ideals. We found internalized beauty ideals among this group, however, and we would expect to encounter even more of this internalization if we had included more men or heterosexual cosplayers.

Ideals of beauty in source texts Cosplayer interviewees often referred to the idealized, beautiful bodies in the anime, comics, flm/television, or video game texts they consumed. Although we did not ask specifc questions about these idealized bodies, the topic arose in nearly every interview. Whereas beauty ideals in other types of media are difcult or impossible to achieve, participants reminded us that these ideal bodies might not even be fesh-and-blood. They saw animated or computer-generated bodies as presenting ideals even more unrealistic and unachievable than ideals embodied by actual humans (photoshopped and enhanced as they may be). As interviewee Annabell, a 19-year-old white woman who identifed as homosexual, put it: “a lot of anime characters are like, super-sensationalized when it comes to body type… no one looks like that… no one has that fgure.” Later in the interview, she said, “no one has the body types of people that literally aren’t real.” The obviously fantastic elements of these portrayals may make them easier for media consumers to dismiss than idealized images in other types of media. The characters that cosplayers have to choose from tend to be stereotypically attractive. Cece, a white woman aged 23 who identifed as lesbian, said: “unless you are very thin and very white, you are an outsider in cosplay… you know, all anime characters are thin and pale” (for a discussion of race in anime, see Fennell et al. 2012). She added that characters 136

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are also “able-bodied,” something other participants mentioned, saying, “I think [this] is a problem that we see in all media,” rather than something specifc to cosplay. Annie, a 27-year-old, white, bisexual woman, critiqued mainstream standards of beauty while also admitting to internalizing them: “through society, I’ve been told ‘skinny, skinny, skinny’ and then I looked at the Victoria’s Secret runway models, and I’m like, ‘that’s not healthy… you are emaciated.’” Cosplayers suspected that unrealistic ideals of bodies in cosplay texts could motivate cosplayers to try to change their bodies: everyone draws characters with big titties and perfect bodies, and… it’s defnitely motivation for people to look like that, which is awesome, but it also causes people depression and stuf like that, ‘cause some people will never look like that, no matter how many times you go to the gym or how many surgeries you have. (Harlee, white, 26, genderfuid) As in other settings, trying to achieve ideal bodies in cosplay could have negative consequences. Even though we and the participants observed a discourse of body acceptance at conventions, many cosplayers judge themselves and are judged by others in relation to the same rigid beauty ideals that appear in the source texts. Characters in source texts tend to be gendered masculine or feminine along a rigid binary. Participants noted that women’s bodies are particularly idealized, as one young woman participant, Aria, put it: “anime very much is just kind of made for men’s gaze.” However, others pointed out that men’s bodies were also presented in unrealistic ways: “Nobody looks like He-Man” (Emma, white, bisexual, age 22). Although most participants agreed that women cosplayers had a harder time living up to beauty ideals and received harsher criticism, according to Harlee, who participated in drag and had cosplayed both men and women characters, the latter were less work: “it’s easier to hide stuf [cover or camoufage certain body parts] than go to the gym.” Harlee said, “I don’t wanna work out and be ripped so I can portray a ripped [male] character. I’d rather just be half-naked and have long hair on [as a female character].” As we discuss later, however, people playing women characters tend to be judged more harshly for falling short of idealized bodies than do those playing men characters. These critiques are justifed by calls for “realism” and faithfulness to source texts. Despite describing characters’ bodies as impossibly beautiful or perfect, some cosplayers felt they could reject aspects of these ideals, or that ideals were more fexible in cosplay settings than elsewhere. Some interviewees said they saw room in cosplay to depart from ideals or to embody alternatives. “One of the cool things about cosplay,” said Maggie, an 18-yearold white, non-binary participant, “is that you don’t have to make it look just like that. You can mold them to yourself, rather than mold yourself to them.” This recalls the more fexible body ideals that researchers have found among women of color, who emphasize creativity and “making it work” rather than perfection (Casanova 2004; Parker et al. 1995). Another participant, Alexis, a 27-year-old biracial (Black/white) woman, echoed this point, saying, cosplay is about changing things to ft your needs, so if you want to be a character, but you don’t wanna wear contacts, then don’t. Or if I wanna be a boy, but I don’t wanna wear a binder ‘cause it hurts, I’m not gonna. Perhaps because the ideals were so unrealistic, cosplayers felt free to adapt the characters they portrayed in ways that worked for their bodies. 137

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Yet others felt limited in their ability to embody alternative ideals. Mileena, a Black bisexual woman college student of 21, said, my stomach might be accentuated, and like, my legs might be… I know [in] my Sailor Venus [costume], I didn’t really feel very confdent… I felt like I was really fat and my legs were out, and… I enjoy wearing the cosplay, but I just don’t really like looking at myself for too long in it. Experiences like these, combined with impossible/idealized bodies in source texts, can lead cosplayers to choose characters thoughtfully, with “realism” in mind – and sometimes, to tell themselves that they can’t cosplay a particular character.

Deciding which characters to cosplay Often when we asked cosplayers during observations or interviews how they decided which characters they wanted to dress as, they mentioned identifying with favorite characters, or simply liking the look of a character. Yet, some interviewees mentioned the desire to be able to approximate the body of the character: “I try to cosplay characters I feel like I can pull of. That’s something that’s really important to me” (Aria, white, straight, woman, age 24). London, a white heterosexual woman of 26, said, “I think what I’m starting to look for is, like, giving myself a leg up by picking someone who looks similar to me.” Some cosplayers recognized that their physical characteristics give them an advantage: “I’m an average-sized white girl, so I can cosplay the average-sized white characters, which is the majority of them” (Selena, heterosexual, age 20). Cece said she considered body type while choosing characters: “I’m not gonna cosplay a character that is super-shapely and has big boobs, ‘cause I’m not like that… I just don’t think that I could do it very well.” How much of the body a costume reveals may also infuence whether a cosplayer decides to wear it: “more quoteunquote ‘sexy’ characters or whatnot, I feel more intimidated to cosplay as” (Rachel, age 28, white, bisexual). “Sexy” characters and costumes also may be subject to more harassment, as we describe later. Often, people’s body insecurities outside of costume led them to choose which characters to cosplay. Annie said, I would love to be ffty pounds lighter, because there are costumes I just can’t pull of in the body type that I am… I will never be like Rapunzel from Tangled or… anybody who’s like, skinny waifu [a Japanese adaptation of the word “wife,” commonly used to describe women love interests in anime and manga texts]… I’m not built for that… But at the same time, I kind of long for it, but I’m not sure if that’s my longing or pressure from society to be thin, because you’re bombarded with it all the time. When the interviewer agreed that the line between self and society seems muddled, Annie said, “and there are some times when I go, ‘fuck you’ to society.” Like non-cosplayers, then, cosplayers have complicated relationships to idealized images of bodies and might react to them in seemingly contradictory ways. Marie, who is 24 years old, white and non-binary, said of a friend, “she is you know, real titty [has large breasts], and I don’t have that… I would feel like a fake doing it [cosplaying that character].” However, just moments before, they had said “your body has nothing to do with embodying the character and pulling of the costume.” These contradictory sentiments resemble those of women in other studies, who 138

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espouse body positivity and yet critique their own bodies harshly (Czierniawski 2015; Gruys 2012). Despite pressure to proclaim body acceptance in cosplay settings, our data show that cosplayers tend to be more accepting of others’ non-ideal bodies than their own. Only once in an interview did a cosplayer deem their body too close to the mainstream ideal to embody a character. Claire, a white woman of 20 who identifed as lesbian, said, I really love Amethyst from [the animated TV program] Steven Universe, and she is like a short, chubby girl… she’s thick, and I don’t really have her body type, but I really do wanna cosplay her… I’m trying to get over that, um, that inhibition of “I don’t really look like her.” More often, cosplayers reported the opposite: the character they liked had a body that was too close to mainstream ideals, and they felt they could not realistically portray the character. There are few characters with body types that, like Amethyst, are more similar to bodies we encounter in everyday life. Yet, ironically, critiques of cosplayer’s bodies often employ the language of “realism.” A “realistic” cosplay portrayal is one that approximates the impossible ideals of the source text. Cosplayers in our study reported encountering this critique, and some employed it. Yet they largely dismissed narrow views of realism, espousing instead a more tolerant and accepting view of bodies. They said that this tolerance was one of the most positive aspects of doing cosplay.

Support versus negativity in cosplay The tension between cosplay as a welcoming environment and the possibility of negative reactions to cosplayers’ looks ran throughout the interviews, and we observed both supportive and discouraging/harassing behavior during conventions. Despite study participants’ general insistence on cosplay as a big tent where many diferent types of costumes and bodies are accepted, all of them had heard of or experienced negative comments or reactions. According to interviewees, many negative commenters use a discourse of realism to put down cosplayers with other-than-ideal bodies. Most who discussed negative reactions to cosplay agreed that women were more likely than men to be targeted. Often in the same interview, a person would speak about positive and negative aspects of cosplay settings. Nicole (age 40, white, straight woman) recalled hearing comments about cosplayers, such as “Oh, why did she even try to put that on?” and noted that the critiques did not attack the costume’s craftsmanship, but instead the wearer’s physique. She described these comments as “body-critical,” marveling that “people would even be critical of guys and their bodies,” as criticism of women was less shocking. Christopher, a 33-year-old Black man who identifed as pansexual, argued that women were already judged more harshly for their appearance outside of cosplay, and the fact that they were judged more harshly within cosplay was “just kind of a double whammy.” He thought critics seemed to be saying to cosplaying women, “how dare you have the body you have,” and said critiques were more negative online as opposed to in person. Many interviewees also argued that the most negative critiques came from non-cosplayers. They must be outsiders, some claimed, because “the cosplay community doesn’t lend any credence to, like, you have to physically look like the character that you’re cosplaying in terms of your body” (Marie). Participants used harsh language to describe people who disparage someone’s cosplay: “don’t be that asshole,” said Maggie, echoing other participants. Whether criticism was coming from men or women, it was often framed as a concern about realistic portrayal of a 139

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character. Aria gave examples: “she shouldn’t be wearing that, because she’s X, Y, or Z… [or] well, your boobs aren’t big enough,” critiques focused on body types that difered from the images in source texts. Annabell noticed that “a lot of the people that were giving women hate, were men that, like, thought they were show purists.” Others used the words “screen accuracy” to describe a costume that looked identical to the source text. An emphasis on purity or accuracy is evident in critics’ complaints that “if you look like this, then you can’t cosplay a character that looks like this” (Kamal, South Asian, age 25, heterosexual man). Putting down women’s eforts to embody a character can be justifed as not body-shaming, but a concern for canonical authenticity. Yet men whose bodies did not match up with their characters’ images were not usually targeted. Many cosplayers said these vocal critics were in the minority and “that’s totally not what that con was about. It was like, complete, 100 percent acceptance… Everybody has a body. Nobody’s body looks the same” (Nicole). Alexis said, “everyone is really, really welcoming, no matter what,” and, “everyone’s having a good time, no one’s judging.” Some participants directly connected this supportive environment to a sense of well-being and confdence. “I would say cons have helped me so much,” said Annie, “because you get that positive afrmation no matter what state of body you’re in.” In cosplay settings they had experienced, participants agreed that “most people are really on the positive side” and that negative comments usually came from “people who aren’t really in the cosplay community” (Rebecca, white, straight). We routinely observed positive interactions at cons, with cosplayers receiving compliments from other cosplayers and non-cosplayers. Some of the cosplayers we accompanied at cons were stopped and asked for photos, or asked how they fashioned their costumes or props. Several participants mentioned that they felt anxious and socially awkward in non-cosplay settings, but that the warmth and acceptance in cosplay spaces helped them to overcome those feelings, if only temporarily.

Attractiveness and objectifed bodies While the word “beauty” did not come up much in our interviews, related words like “attractive,” “hot,” “sexy,” and “cute” did. Three topics repeatedly surfaced in our analysis of the interview transcripts. First, nearly all the cosplayers agreed that while cosplay is not primarily about presenting an attractive physical appearance, being attractive “helps.” In a typical explanation, Annabell said: “someone that happens to be more conventionally attractive might get more attention in the same outft than someone that is less than, which is sad and upsetting.” Interviewees thought other aspects, such as cosplayers’ ability to act like the character, or the work that went into their costumes, should matter more than attractiveness. Attractiveness was not solely conceived of as physical beauty, but involved approachability and friendliness: at a convention, “everyone will defnitely go to the person who is really bubbly, really outgoing, and really cute, every time” (Emma). Claire was surprised to overhear others’ positive comments about her: “I was just walking around, and someone was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s the hot Roxy’, and I…” The interviewer ofered: “You were the hot Roxy.” Claire responded, “I guess… that was a huge confdence boost.” Some participants felt that attractiveness in cosplay is more important for women, or more associated with women. In a situation in which cosplayers want to get attention for their cosplays, Steve, a 37-year-old white man who identifed as straight, said, “It’s just hard for guys to – guys feel like it’s hard for us to get recognized in comparison to the sexy women.” We noticed in our ethnographic observations that women cosplayers did tend to receive more attention in convention settings, and more women participated in competitions or as professional cosplayers at the cons. 140

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The second theme related to attractiveness was professional cosplay, which participants also associated with (beautiful) women. The prevailing attitude here, too, was that you don’t have to be attractive… but it helps. While many cosplayers dismissed unrealistic ideals of beauty for their own cosplays, saying that it’s about having fun or making it work, they see these ideals represented in professional cosplay. As Selena said, “The cosplayers I follow on Instagram… have thousands of followers ‘cause they’re like, really hot or whatever… [in one example] it’s an attractive guy portraying the character. And I also feel an element of realism.” Again we see the idea of fdelity to the source text, or a realistic portrayal, as requiring an attractive body and face. When interviewees mentioned professional cosplay, they discussed sexualized portrayals of women. According to Marie, “it certainly does help to be pretty if you want to monetize it… as in most things… it can help to have large breasts… [and] a conventionally attractive body.” They then qualifed this statement, saying there are other cosplayers who “don’t ft that” and who are maybe not, like conventionally supermodel attractive… do not have size zero bodies, and are just famous solely on their craftmanship. But that is, like, a hundred times harder than taking a really nice, sexy photo… as in most things, it is a little bit easier if you are white and attractive. This discussion of professional cosplay, much of which is viewed online rather than in person, hints at something else: some people see the process of making or assembling costumes as separate from, or even opposed to, attractiveness. If a cosplayer is famous, or “hot,” people may assume they are not involved in the creative process of making costumes. Whereas people seen as straying from beauty ideals are criticized for “unrealistic” portrayals, attractive cosplayers are seen as inauthentic, not real fans, or as sex objects. This is especially the case for cosplayers who pose for erotic photographs called “lewds.” Marie said, “if you do lewds, everyone… assumes your craftmanship is bullshit… and that you’re only in it for the sex appeal, and… to make money.” When viewing attractive cosplayers online, she and other participants were skeptical: “Photoshop is being increasingly more common in cosplay and increasingly more severe, to my disappointment.” Thus, these online images, already impossibly beautiful, are open to doubt in a way that an in-person encounter might not be. The third topic discussed was the relationship between sexualized images of women cosplayers and characters, and objectifcation of real-life cosplayers. Although professional cosplayers that participants mentioned might engage in self-objectifcation to gain followers and earn money, when people objectifed a cosplayer in real life, this might lead to harassment or disparagement. Emma described experiencing this frsthand, saying that when a woman dresses as a character that is very sexual, the people who view that person view them as also very sexual, and that could not be the case at all… I cosplayed as a character one time who wore… a bikini top… and that was honestly one of the hardest cosplays I’ve ever had to do, because you could just tell that people weren’t really looking at you. They were just looking at your body and… you felt uncomfortable and unsafe. This is a sensitive story to tell, as we can see by Emma’s shift into the generic second-person (“you felt uncomfortable”). Cons have tried to address the harassment – particularly unwanted touching – that stems from objectifcation of cosplayers, and most of our interviewees demonstrated awareness of this problem and attempts to eliminate it. Most said they had 141

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not been touched against their will in cosplay settings, but had either witnessed harassment or knew people who had been harassed. A less blatantly troubling efect of objectifcation that participants also mentioned is the dismissal of attractive cosplayers’ skills. According to Marie, “being an attractive woman will immediately discredit you and people will immediately think that you can’t make anything, because you’re attractive and appearing to be as a woman.” In concordance with John Berger’s idea that “men act, and women appear” (Berger 2008 [1972]), naysayers would assume that women cosplayers who approximated ideals of beauty were not good at making costumes.

Negotiating beauty in cosplay Cosplayers’ accounts show that cosplay spaces, while allowing for body-positive discourse and a range of spectacular fan embodiments, are spaces where conventional beauty ideals still hold sway. These ideals, drawn from idealized character depictions in a range of texts, often appear in critiques that some cosplayers lack “authenticity” or “realism.” The possibility of such critique and cosplayers’ internalization of social ideals afect their decisions about which characters to cosplay. Still, they describe cosplay settings as places where they can experiment with their appearance, where their cosplay eforts are rewarded, and where they defend others (if not themselves) against mean-spirited comments. Most cosplayers explicitly reject narrow ideals of beauty, although they are more generous with others than with themselves in accepting divergent body shapes and character portrayals. We need to know more about whether men and straight-identifed cosplayers, a minority among our interviewees, describe similar attitudes and practices. Cosplay researchers should also further theorize the gap between explicitly body-positive language and negative feedback that cosplayers experience.

Acknowledgments Thanks to the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati for funding this study, and to Cole Weirich for research assistance. Thanks also to the cosplayers who generously shared their time and insight.

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PART THREE

Beauty, activism, and social change

15 THE RISE OF DISABILITY AESTHETICS Reframing the relationship between disability, beauty, and art Ann M. Fox Te historical relationship between disability and aesthetics To write about disability aesthetics at this moment is to experience a familiar paradox that disability studies scholars have long negotiated concerning disability itself; even as it seems to locate itself everywhere, there seems to be a kind of invisibility to cultural consciousness about it. Put another way, tell a new acquaintance you write about and curate based on disability aesthetics (as I have done for some time now) and you’re likely to get a puzzled look. But this seeming cultural invisibility is belied by the fact that a disability presence in the arts is vibrant; institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art are reexamining and reframing their collections with disability aesthetics in mind, exhibitions are being curated that purport to foreground works imbued with disability aesthetics, and even a cursory search of the term shows several recent dissertations and scholarly articles that engage with the term. Disability aesthetics is subject, then to a strange duality; both invisible and omnipresent, amorphous yet widely engaged. While for purposes of this chapter I am speaking about disability aesthetics as a principle of visual art, we can identify it at work in other diverse art forms, including poetry, music, flm, drama, dance, graphic medicine, literature, curation, and design. Yet many, including readers of this chapter, may be unfamiliar with the term. What, then does this concept mean, and how might we deploy it to better understand – and intervene into – the representation of disability in visual art? The presence of disability in art relative to aesthetics, broadly defned, is nothing new; indeed, the two have been deeply intertwined across representational history in prolifc, if troubling ways, in which aesthetics is “the source of ableism as ideology of bodily normalcy” (Davidson 2015: 26). Indeed, disability studies critics have long explored the complex interrelationship between traditional aesthetics and disability, noting that while beauty and disability seem to be oppositional terms, they have historically depended on each other for defnition. As Brenda Brueggemann et al. observe, For scholars in disability studies, even seemingly benign value judgments like those about beauty are politically charged. Especially since so many art objects represent 147

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human bodies, the determination of artistic beauty is often closely related to the determination of acceptable bodies. (Brueggemann et al. 2012: 59) Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has argued, for example, that participants in the beauty pageant and the freak show “enter into culture not as agents or subjects, but as ultra-visible icons, contrived fgures whose cultural work is to ritually verify the prevailing sociopolitical arrangements arising from representational systems such as gender, race, and physical ability” (Garland-Thomson 1998). Yet despite the common roots beauty and disability share in buttressing the hegemony of normalcy, there is no doubt which holds greater cultural sway. As Michael Davidson points out, the notion of “aesthetics” is itself another way in which the power beauty wields has depended on the oppression of disability, reminding us that “[w]hether addressing ideas of beauty in nature or works of art, aesthetic judgments implicate disability insofar as they presume a normative standard of perception and an ideal of bodily perfection as the object of afective response” (Davidson 2015: 26). Put another way, the monstrous or twisted appearance of disabled characters in the Western canon (from, for example, the Greek god Hephaestus, imagined as limping and ugly in appearance, to the wild-eyed, animalistic portrayal of mad woman Bertha Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre) has been emphasized in order to better defne their physical and moral opposites. (The example of Bertha Rochester is a reminder that the construction of disability intersects, too, with that of gender and race in creating the Other. Bertha’s Creole (mixed-race) heritage means that her race and disability are seen as intertwined, and her madness likewise denotes her divergence from normate femininity.) This literary inheritance extends to popular culture; time and again, whether in popular fairy tales like the Disney’s Beauty and the Beast or popular series like Game of Thrones, literal beauty and monstrosity face of until the latter is tamed: “What the disabled body disturbs in the moral universe, the redeemed, healthy body recuperates” (Davidson 2015: 27). Insidiously, then as now, such discourses in representation have had material efects on bodies defned as deviant or nonnormate, including disabled bodies. For example, the visual spectacles of “ugliness” and “deformity” were used as literal disqualifers for citizenship, as in US ugly laws or the sorting methods used to winnow out disabled (or supposedly disabled) immigrant bodies on Ellis Island. Nazi exhibitions of so-called “degenerate” art vilifed the seemingly deformed in service of lauding ideals of perfection and proportion, underscoring the aims of propaganda that overtly targeted the disabled as lives unworthy of life. We can see the strength of the extent to which disability and nonnormate appearance remain disqualifers for humanity in the US political environment of the late 2010s; this, not just in the obvious and infamous example of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s mockery of a disabled reporter, but in the fact that many of the protestors who continue to resist Trump choose to do so through belittling his appearance – not seeing the problem in also, like Trump, using physical beauty as a marker of moral and intellectual superiority even as they protest his racist and oppressive policies.

Does disability art equal disability aesthetics? This still doesn’t quite answer the question, however: what exactly is disability aesthetics? Before we discuss what disability aesthetics can do, however, we need to distinguish what it is. When I was a young girl, a neighbor often gifted blank writing cards to my mother that featured beautifully proportioned, vividly colored images of fowers printed on the front. 148

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When I turned the cards over, I saw a note on the back indicating the images had been mouth-painted by paralyzed artists. Other than my knowledge that the artists were disabled, nothing stood out to me as particularly diferent or special about the cards themselves from other anodyne images of the type. In retrospect, the images beg the question: should I call such works an example of disability aesthetics? With the continued hypervisibility of disabled people in the media happening at the same time as real legal and social gains for disabled people in society, the proliferation of disability in the arts, and the maturation of critical disability studies in the humanities after almost three decades, understanding disability aesthetics is more important than ever. Yet disability aesthetics, like the term aesthetics itself, is a capacious one that contains many possible meanings. At its most basic level, it can be defned as considering the ways in which disability informs the creation of a work of art, but this is a limited defnition that can quickly slide into stereotypical ways of thinking about disability. Why? To the casual critic or uninitiated observer, it might seem logical to say that disability art and disability aesthetics are interchangeable terms. But it is important to underscore that this is not necessarily so. As critic Tobin Siebers observes: “It is certainly not the case that any art object eliciting the image of disability will qualify as a successful work of art” (Levin 2010). Disability art, broadly defned, can also include work that still retains conventional attitudes toward disability – the very ones that, wittingly or unwittingly, have led to the suppression of perspectives that allow a more expansive view of disability. Therefore, any discussion of disability aesthetics frst must make a distinction between disability art and disability aesthetics. While works manifesting disability aesthetics can also be considered disability art, work that fts in a broadly defned category of disability art does not necessarily embody disability aesthetics; the latter takes more of a turn toward activism, redefnition, and the creative/generative power made possible through (and not in spite of ) disability. Let me further explain what I mean here. In other words, as a broad category in its own right, disability art might conceivably include the following under that broad term; yet many of these kinds of work contravene the purpose of disability aesthetics: 1

2

Art created by disabled people that does not take disability as a subject or concern. We might draw an analogy to art by female artists; not all of it could be defned as feminist art, even though the person creating it is a woman. To reiterate, this does not mean we cannot seek to understand whether there is a disability aesthetic in the work by a disabled artist, but it does mean that identity does not automatically guarantee the presence of a disability aesthetic. And equating identity with disability aesthetics raises other dilemmas: do we then compel disclosure in order to defne work as “disability art”? If we insist on disability identity as a mark of disability aesthetics, what are we to do with the fuctuating, mutable nature of disability identity – for example, how do we classify work by a temporarily disabled artist or a fat artist? What if the artist rejects disability as part of their identity? It is also worth noting that to equate disability art with disability identity alone implicitly excludes art made by nondisabled people, an exclusionary move that does not align with the inclusive nature of disability studies nor the nuanced ideas behind and creative possibilities of disability aesthetics. Art created by disabled people in which the identity of the artist or the creation of the work itself is framed in ableist ways. It is here where I think those notecards of my childhood fall. Artistically, they were perfectly nice, inofensive, and unremarkable images of fowers that refect similar images found on any conventional greeting card. But their sale was premised on notions of charity (buy this card in lieu of a donation), overcoming 149

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(buy this card to honor the idea that a disabled person could paint “in spite of ” their disability), and even enfreakment (buy this card because it is evidence of a kind of wondrous talent – to be able to paint according to conventional standards of virtuosity without using the hands). That last connotation echoes the days of the freak show, in which spectators could marvel at nonnormate bodies of someone writing calligraphy with their feet or lighting a cigarette with no hands. Art in which the principal way of engaging with disability within it is through a medicalized lens. For example, art using medical imaging does not manifest disability aesthetics if it is simply aestheticizes medical technology, afrms bodily normalcy, or perpetuates stigma. While art therapy is valuable and important, just because it is created in a therapeutic context does not mean it embodies disability aesthetics. Another popular way of framing disability art has been in retrodiagnoses of famous artists through careful scrutiny of their paintings. Using artwork this way, however, places the emphasis on solving the puzzle of the painter’s impairment rather than seeking to ask how disability might have been a generative creative force. For example, if Van Gogh’s prolifc painting and color choices refect a brain malady, what does that understanding contribute to our interpretation of the work? If we ascertain that Monet’s worsening eyesight shifted his choices of color, what do we do with that knowledge as we examine his canvases? In such a schema, art is reduced to a diagnostic tool, and disability is reduced to old tropes from overcoming to tragedy, as one short essay diagnosing Van Gogh refects; it muses that had “lithium carbonate therapy been available, van Gogh might have defeated his manic depression, avoided his tragic fate, and grown further as an artist” (Wolf 2001: 348). The tale told here is of an overcoming narrative lost, and a tragic fate re-asserted. At a minimum, such retrodiagnoses purport to speak for disabled people, and are “almost never placed within the context of their own time, place, and situation” (Brueggemann et al. 2012: 57). Art which relies on disability depictions that both perpetuate stigma and stereotypical uses of disability as a visual metaphor. Here, the viewer is invited to view disability in typical ways and use it as interpretive shorthand. Sharon L. Snyder points out, for example, that in the history of Western painting, images of disability have been used to reinforce the sanctity of the savior, saints, and prophets who provide cure; disability’s “twisted” forms, contrasting with the classical symmetry of the divine image, serve to better highlight its perfection (Snyder 2002: 187). The short-statured fgures of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) highlight the beauty of the typically-bodied Infanta at the portrait’s center. Images such as the many portrayals of Samson in Western art underscore the moral model, where disability is a punishment for deviation from divine grace, by its very nature marking the line between disability as moral failure and beauty and wholeness as good. Disability might also confront the powerful satirically as in Pieter Breughel the Elder’s 1568 painting The Cripples, or dramatically criticize war through the devastation wreaked on soldiers’ bodies, as in Otto Dix’s 1920 works War Cripples and Skat Players. Or it might not signify at all, as we erase it by willfully looking past it; consider the ways in which we imagine the missing limbs onto classical statuary such as the Venus de Milo or missing noses onto Egyptian statuary. It might be a mark of artistic skill; Davidson points to the example of eighteenth-century critic Gotthold Lessing, who held that “realistic depiction of a ‘misshapen man’ [in painting] is less important for its verisimilitude than for its demonstration of artisanal superiority” (Davidson 2015: 27). There is something of an analogy here to debates over casting nondisabled actors in movie, television, and stage roles featuring disabled characters. Is 150

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the point of such casting, critics ask, to simply hold up the virtuosity of the nondisabled actor even as stock disabled characters replicate old, tired disability stereotypes? Art that uses disability or disability-related imagery for decorative or exoticized effect. Like other kinds of cultural appropriation, disability imagery can be used for aesthetic appeal or to perform inclusion even as the work itself neglects attending to any of the relevant disability issues raised. We see examples of this in everyday life where access is provided for show rather than practical efect (an example my students frequently point out on our own campus is a dorm door opener marked for wheelchair users that leads only to a stairwell landing). Disability imagery used as decoration while perpetuating the erasure of larger disability issues falls into this category. For example, I once had dinner at a restaurant housed in what had historically been an old blind school in Liverpool, England. This was the frst school for the blind established in England and only the second such school in the world. The restaurant (now defunct) was named “The Old Blind School” and featured décor that was a nod to the building’s history; in a main dining area, for example, there was an installation that featured six all white panels with simple objects on them (a shoe, a purse, and a spoon, for example) and large braille labels underneath. The braille dots, ironically, were too large to be read by a Braille reader; the labels formed a quick lesson in spotting braille by sighted restaurant goers but no real lesson in comprehension. Instead, they were simply blind-themed decoration for those who see. Indeed, the simplistic, picture-book design of the work seemed to reinforce the idea of blind thinkers and students simply as childlike. (More interesting were the old shoe lasts used to decorate one wall, a reference to the school’s history of vocational training. Here one might better see a disability aesthetic at work: the reference to the economic training of students, the intriguing replication of small wooden feet, and the presence of material objects that quite literally conjured the presence of the bodies that had once bent over them.) We might say of the paintings under which I sat what critic Georgina Kleege observes about similar art that uses Braille as for ornamentation: braille “is appropriated for sighted purposes, leaving blind people at the margins of society – out of sight and out of mind” (Kleege 2017: 56).

Te radical rise of disability aesthetics It is a paradox of a broadly defned “disability art” that it can embody and afrm traditional formulations of disability as medicalized, stigmatized, or exoticized. This is a key reason, then, that defning disability aesthetics itself is so crucial, for as Siebers argues, “the rejection of disability limits defnitions of artistic ideas and objects” (Siebers 2010: 3). Instead, he posits, [T]he history of modern art unveils increasingly as it evolves a powerful connection to disability. Aesthetics opens us to more expansive and diverse conceptions of the human, and disability has become a powerful tool for rethinking human appearance, intelligence, behavior, and creativity. (Levin 2010) While Siebers was not the frst scholar to discuss the relationship between disability and aesthetics, his is the most prominent theorization of the term “disability aesthetics.” In his foundational 2010 book of the same name, he explored those practices which have undergirded 151

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the evolution of modern art, as well as highlighting “the aesthetic practices of disabled artists whose work engages in a critique of ableist attitudes” (Davidson 2015: 29). He writes, Disability aesthetics refuses to recognize the representation of the healthy body – and its defnition of harmony, integrity, and beauty – as the sole determination of the aesthetic. Rather, disability aesthetics embraces beauty that seems by traditional standards broken, and yet it is not less beautiful, but more so, as a result. (Davidson 2015: 3) Siebers fnds that disability is a central motivating force in the movement of art away from the symmetrical sameness of bodily ideals that informed everything from classical fgures to Nazi kitsch. Rachel Adams underscores Siebers’ argument: “Given the sensations of loathing and disgust aroused by the disabled body, Siebers notes the paradoxical fact that those same bodies are seen as beautiful when they become the subjects of art” (Adams 2013: 504). Such an assertion is important for several reasons, not the least of which it de-individuates the notion of disability as an artistic subject. Or to put it another way, disability aesthetics is not simply about the mimetic representation of disabilities. Siebers argues that this more nuanced approach is principally accomplished in two ways: “(1) [establishing] disability as a critical framework that questions the presuppositions underlying defnitions of aesthetic production and appreciation and (2) [elaborating] disability as an aesthetic value in itself worthy of future development” (Siebers 2010: 3). Therefore, disability aesthetics is neither about cataloguing individual representations of disability as one-of cameos in the canon of Western art, nor artistic retrodiagnoses, nor icons of innocence or infamy. Likewise, our recognition of disability aesthetics within a work rests not only on whether disability is present, but how it presents and is presented diferently. How does this presentation happen, and how might we classify some of its ends? What exactly, to repeat my earlier question, does disability aesthetics do? 1

It defamiliarizes and combats the ways in which the disabled body traditionally has been either highly stigmatized, or completely erased in visual art – and by extension, the society it constitutes. Disability aesthetics makes us keenly aware that aesthetics itself is socially constructed and intimately linked to ideologies of normalcy and ability: Disability aesthetics asserts that any defnition of beauty is necessarily political since it must say something about what kinds or proportions of bodies are beautiful. Consequently, disability aesthetics is an important addition to any consideration of beauty in art and design, urging us to remember that our bodies and backgrounds condition our assumptions about beauty, and to make explicit those implicit infuences on our understanding of aesthetics. (Brueggemann et al. 2012: 60)

For example, Riva Lehrer, a foundational artist in disability culture, created the groundbreaking series Circle Stories, which depicted important fgures from disability culture, activism, and art. In doing so, she not only disrupted the conventions of portraiture (that is, who is considered worthy of sitting for a portrait), but in so doing, also asks how we write history (in this case, through the visual) and who has been included in or excluded from it.1 Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren underscores this aspect of disability aesthetics, which “foregrounds the value and power of human variegation, and. . . challenges the ways in which disability has typically been viewed as a defcit” (Kochhar-Lindgren 2006: 63). 152

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Figure 15.1

Ann Millett-Gallant, Still Life with Apple, Snow Peas, Mandarin Oranges, and Ann’s Hands Ink Drawing, acrylic and ink on paper on canvas, 16 × 20 in., 2019b

Artists can also use disability aesthetics to interrogate how the bodies of disabled artists are marked and framed. In a series of four still-life paintings featuring various fruits and vegetables (2018), Ann Millett-Gallant places small 3″ × 3″ pictures of her fngerless limbs holding a paint brush in a corner of each of her paintings. (The title of the four paintings are: Still Life with Snow Peas, Apple, and Mandarin Oranges, and Ann’s Hands Ink Drawing(Winter); Still Life with Pineapple and Watermelon (Spring); Still Life with Tropical Fruits (Summer); and Still Life with Winter Squashes (Fall).) In so doing, she makes us mindful of the body that created the work – but not in a sensationalistic or overcoming way (see Figure 15.1). She writes, “I meant for them to serve as metatheatrical and comical gestures to my creative acts. The four compositions hopefully evoke visceral and contemplative reactions from viewers.” Millett-Gallant (2019a) therefore simultaneously exposes and cheekily rebukes spectators’ desire to fetishize how she created the works. Here, the images seem to say; I know you’ll wonder, so here is how I painted. If you want to stare, take a good long look, but remember your curiosity does not equal my identity.2 As the disability justice movement reminds us, ableism is intertwined with and mutually constituted by racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and capitalism. Disability aesthetics can also reveal and resist these foul snarls. For example, the 2019 installation work Black Power Naps by Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa shows how rest is a marker of privilege which people of color have been denied, frst by the conditions of slavery, and further on by the disabling labor conditions that presumed – and continue to presume – that their bodies are disposable.3 Even today, people of color have what Acosta and Sosa call a “sleep gap” – the labor demanded of them, and the stereotypes of laziness used against them, mean any modicum of rest is at best, hard won, and at worst, lifethreatening (consider how rest can be criminalized as “loitering,” or that the June 2020 murder by an Atlanta police ofcer of Rayshard Brooks, an African American man, began with a police call because Brooks had fallen asleep in a fast-food restaurant drivethru). Instead, Acosta and Sosa’s (2020) sculptural installation creates a place on which 153

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people of color can rest, and a space of care and sustenance that, in their words, “reclaims laziness and idleness as power.” It conveys a more complex sense of disability embodiment for its own sake and as an epistemological force. Disability aesthetics moves to convey a more complex sense of disability embodiment. This moves us past a simplistic understanding of disability of the kind that might be generated by traditional visual archetypes of disability as only sufering, struggle, or tragedy. Instead, such work moves to ofer knowledge rather than perform simulation based in nondisabled perception. For example, in a twist on traditional (and deeply problematic) disability simulation exercises, blind artist Carmen Papalia leads “blind feld shuttle” walks as part of his art practice. In them, he leads a human chain that can contain dozens of (typically sighted) participants, each with their hands on the shoulders of the person in front of them and their eyes closed.4 But this walk requires the active participation everyone on it: to share information about potential obstacles, and to orient themselves and each other by privileging other senses such as touch and sound. In this way, Papalia reveals that blindness does not limit, but rather, creates access to other modes of navigation that privilege nonvisual senses and interdependence. Art like this allows us to imagine disability, but also “unsettles conventional ways of knowing and communicating,” and to understand disabled embodiment as a source of new kinds of knowledge, expression, or design (Kochhar-Lindgren 2006: 63). Papalia’s work likewise moves us out of ocularcentric and passive forms of spectatorship within the gallery, instead relying on sense and movement to create an active and innovative social practice. Disability aesthetics is present in art created by disabled people for disabled people to explore what it means to have a disability identity. Disabled people have been spoken for by nondisabled people for far too long. And as in life, disability in art does not exist for the edifcation of nondisabled people. Although there are important things nondisabled people can learn about human variation and possibility from disability aesthetics, it is important to emphasize that disability aesthetics also includes work in which disabled people speak to others in their community about what it means to be part of disability culture and live disability identity. For example, Riva Lehrer’s installation around her painting of Carrie Sandahl, created in collaboration with Sandahl and sound artist Christophe Preissing, documents the process of how Sandahl’s portrait was created.5 This included the chair on which Sandahl sat and the afordances used to make her comfortable; it also included preliminary sketches, etchings on the wall, and 23 wall texts written on handmade paper contributed by Sandahl and Lehrer. On them, they document their feelings about the work, about disability in art, and how they cared for each other during the process. In addition, Preissing taped the sittings and created a soundscape that played on a loop as part of the installation. A spectator was able to hear snippets of the conversation between Lehrer and Sandahl about life with disability, as though they were eavesdropping at a restaurant (to use Lehrer’s description) but there was no extended conversation to follow; at the end, the full conversation was kept between the women themselves. Disabled people are speaking for themselves and speaking to others within their community about their experience of disability. (As I noted earlier, this does not mean that disability aesthetics cannot be contained in work created by nondisabled people. Indeed, insisting on such a deeply identity-based qualifcation would be deeply problematic: it would belie inclusion, compel disclosure, and be premised on a disabled/nondisabled binary that is rather more porous than absolute.) 154

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Disability aesthetics transforms our notions of the beautiful. In works that embody disability aesthetics, we are reminded both of the politics of how “beautiful” bodies have been defned, and actively encouraged to shift that paradigm. Siebers continually underscores this potential: “because of the role currently played by disability, works representing disability have a strong and unique capacity to summon feelings and thoughts that make us perceive the human condition anew” (Levin 2010). This reimagination is radical, and moves past half-hearted attempts to celebrate “authentic” looks without truly challenging beauty norms (one thinks of the famous Dove campaign for real beauty or no-makeup movements in which women who go barefaced are lauded for their bravery). Instead, we might think of Marc Quinn’s famous statue, Alison Lapper Pregnant, which is often cited by disability studies scholars as a distinct vision of beauty that pushes back through disability aesthetics. The statue, displayed as part of the Fourth Plinth Project in Trafalgar Square from 2005–2007, is a white Carrara marble depiction of British artist Alison Lapper, born with phocomelia, depicted pregnant with her son. The statue both calls our attention to the fact that we have in the past idealized armless statues such as the Venus de Milo while repudiating disability, and replaces that paradox with a full embrace of Lapper’s embodiment as a version of the beautiful and desirable. In such redefnition comes not only a broader sense of human variation, but an appreciation of that variation as pleasing and valuable.

Contemplating the contradictions in disability aesthetics There are possible contradictions and legitimate questions that face anyone engaging disability aesthetics. Some of the sites in which we might locate disability aesthetics can themselves be unstable. For instance, the conservation of art is premised on maintaining a work’s integrity; what are we to do with works that degrade or are damaged or vandalized? Do they, as Siebers asserts, have the potential to yield new kinds of meaning? Do they allow viewers to “discover in vandalized works an image of disability that asks to be contemplated not as a symbol of imperfection but as an experience of the corporeal variation found everywhere in modern life”? (Siebers 2010: 10) Or should we prioritize preservation of works over brokenness of any kind? Siebers locates the rise of disability aesthetics in modern art, but can we locate disability aesthetics in works that precede the modern without being anachronistic? What should we do regarding works that contain problematic disability politics? For example, should we see the photographic work of Diane Arbus manifesting disability aesthetics in valuing of human variability, or should we see in its production the old story of the fame of an artist being built on the backs of disabled people? What happens when disability studies critics vehemently disagree on what an image or representation is doing, when one sees representation where another sees exploitation? Should we speak of multiple kinds of disability aesthetic, given the plurality of disabilities that exist? What about works created and curated outside traditional academic, gallery, and museum spaces? What about works created by artists who work outside traditional training and apprentice systems? How can disability aesthetics better represent people with cognitive or intellectual disabilities beyond the problematic label of “outsider art”? As Benjamin Fraser asks, “Are the insights produced by disability work emphasizing physical disabilities transferrable to work foregrounding cognitive disabilities?” (Fraser 2018: 3–4) Can disability aesthetics make a connection even in the face of audiences disposed to read any disability representation in highly deterministic ways? How might the work cross over into a more commercial, popular sphere? Should it? 155

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Conclusion At an historical moment when we are constantly bombarded with images online and in person, it may seem there is nothing new under the representational sun. Yet disability aesthetics contradicts such a notion; it provides an exciting way to understand and explore disability culture, invigorate our understanding of representation, and practice social justice. It reminds us that human variation stretches beyond what might be dreamt of in our own philosophies, bolstering important knowledge and nurturing empathy and appreciation. Disability aesthetics and what it brings forth simply makes us all better: more imaginative, just, inclusive, and creative; given that, who wouldn’t want crip art or to crip art?

Related topics Philosophy and the politics of beauty

Notes 1 Circle Stories can be accessed at: www.rivalehrerart.com/circle-stories. Readers interested in learning more about Lehrer’s work should also access her superb Golem Girl: A Memoir (One World, 2020), which includes vivid reproductions of and fascinating background stories for each of her artworks. 2 Millett-Gallant’s work can be accessed at: www.annmg.com/. 3 Acosta and Sosa’s work Black Power Naps can be accessed at: blackpowernaps.black. 4 Papalia explains the “blind feld shuttle” work on his website, which can be accessed at: carmenpapalia.com/2010/01/01/blind-feld-shuttle/. 5 Lehrer’s portrait of Sandahl can be accessed at: www.rivalehrerart.com/carrie-sandahl.

References Acosta, Navild and Fannie Sosa. 2020. “Black Power Naps.” Black Power Naps. Accessed 18 June 2020, https://blackpowernaps.black/. Adams, Rachel. 2013. “Disability Studies Now.” American Literary History 25(2): 495–507. Brueggemann B., N. Hetrick, M. Yergeau, and E. Brewer. 2012. “Current Issues, Controversies, and Solutions.” In Brenda Brueggemann (ed.) The Sage Reference Series on Disability: Key Issues and Future Directions, Arts and Humanities. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 63–99. Davidson, Michael. 2015. “Aesthetics.” In R. Adams, B. Reiss and D. Serlin (eds.) Keywords for Disability Studies. New York: New York University Press, 26–30. Fraser, Benjamin. 2018. Cognitive Disability Aesthetics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 1998. “The Beauty and the Freak.” Michigan Quarterly Review 37(3): 459–474. Kleege, Georgina. 2017. More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta. 2006. “Aesthetics.” In G. Albrecht (ed.) Encyclopedia of Disability, Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 62–66. Levin, Mike. 2010. “The Art of Disability: An Interview with Tobin Siebers.” Disability Studies Quarterly 30. Millett-Gallant, Ann. 2019a. “List of Works (All 2018).” ———. 2019b. Still Life with Apple, Snow Peas, Mandarin Oranges, and Ann’s Hands Ink Drawing, acrylic and ink on paper on canvas, 16 × 20 in. Siebers, Tobin. 2010. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Snyder, Sharon. 2002. “Infnities of Forms: Disability Figures in Artistic Traditions.” In S. Snyder, B. Brueggemann, and R. Garland-Thomson (eds.) Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: Modern Language Association, 173–196. Wolf, Paul. 2001. “Creativity and Chronic Disease: Vincent Van Gogh.” Western Journal of Medicine 175(5): 348.

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16 “THERE IS SOMETHING CHIC ABOUT WOMEN WEARING MEN’S CLOTHES” Lesbian activists as fashionable women in the fght for queer rights in the United States, 1955–1972 Malia McAndrew In March 1959 a women’s magazine called The Ladder published an illustration of a young, white woman with dark lipstick, fnely plucked eye brows, and a sweeping French twist hairdo on its cover. The front page of the November 1960 edition of this publication struck a similar tone. Standing in a fashion model’s pose with her cat-eye sunglasses, the cover girl’s tailored button-up trouser set neatly accentuated her thin yet, busty frame. In August 1961, The Ladder again published images of the era’s predominate standard of female pulchritude, this time by showing the profles of two make-up clad women carrying a sultry gaze on its front cover.1 In many ways The Ladder was unremarkable in its depiction of the idealized American woman of the era. At times The Ladder printed glamourized photographs of its readers. On other occasions, it depicted idealized drawings of women. However, the only notable diference between the cover images found in this publication and those of other magazines that targeted women was the fact that the feminine fgures depicted in The Ladder were those of lesbians. Sexual minorities faced a precarious situation in the mid-twentieth-century United States. Because homosexuality was widely considered an immoral act perpetrated by weak and unstable persons, lesbian women and gay men were tagged as strange, sinful, and mentally ill persons. As a result of their perceived abnormality sexual minorities were socially ostracized and discriminated against by law, society, culture, and medicine. For example, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders used by psychologists and psychiatrists of the era claimed gay men and lesbian women sufered from a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” Depictions of sexual minorities in the popular media were equally derisive. The cheap pulp fction novels popular during the 1950s and 1960s routinely cast lesbians as either as misft loners or as dirty, hypersexual predators whose stories routinely end in either suicide or some other calamity. As a result of their perceived abnormality, sexual minorities found their communities under constant attack at the hands of politicians, religious leaders, health professionals, and ordinary citizens, who believed queer lifestyles to be unhealthy and even un-American. In addition to the omnipresent threat of physical violence at the hands of outsiders, sexual minorities lived in fear that they could be fred by their employer, dismissed 157

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from school, kicked out of their home, dishonorably discharged from the military, or even jailed for “vice.” In this homophobic atmosphere, the way one looked and dressed was an important marker of lesbians’ perceived deviance. Indeed, the simple act of wearing “mannish clothing” in public might land a woman in jail should she be swept up in one of the era’s many police raids of lesbian bars (D’Emilio and Freedman 1988; Penn 1994). Sexual minorities thus faced almost unparalleled social rejection in mid-twentiethcentury America. As The Ladder put it in 1961, the United States was flled with “those who are yet so uneducated that homosexuals strike fear in them as do child molesters, dope addicts, and the mentally ill.” 2 The pervasive homophobic atmosphere of the era drove many queer communities underground and relegated countless other individuals to lives of social isolation. On June 29, 1969, the Gay Liberation Movement was launched when police forcibly raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gathering spot for the queer community in Greenwich Village, New York. On that night patrons fought back against police brutality with physical resistance and, although such raids were routine for the era, law enforcement quickly lost control of the situation. On the next night crowds returned to the Stonewall Inn and a newly emboldened group of nascent activists started to publicly protest for access to spaces where openly gay men and lesbian women could enjoy their leisure time without fear of arrest, harassment, or bodily harm. Because of the boldness and bravery exhibited that night, and for years to come, as well as its impact on American society as a whole, much scholarly and popular attention has been directed at the Gay Liberation Movement’s role in queer history (see, for example, Carter 2010; Duberman 1994; Engel et al. 2001). Gay Liberation, however, was not born overnight. Indeed, its eventual emergence was built upon the existence of strong queer networks developed in earlier eras. Without the group cohesion, camaraderie, and sense of shared identity that was fostered by earlier queer communities, an organized movement for gay and lesbian rights could not have emerged in 1969 (Taylor 2002). The frst modern queer communities to be documented in the United States arose in American’s urban centers around the turn of the twentieth century (Chauncey 1994; Hartman 2019). Here, lesbian and gay communities openly thrived as a part of America’s new urban landscape. While sexual minorities may originally have congregated in working-class bars, private house parties, and other social spaces for the purpose of fraternization, it was from this base that a communal consciousness and political identity arose (Kennedy and Davis 1993). Stifed during the economic woes of the Great Depression, by mid-century World War II brought new opportunities for gay and lesbian communities to reformulate as longterm, same-sex military service commitments allowed same-sex social networks to proliferate (Bérubé 1990; D’Emilio 1983). The years of virulent homophobia and McCarthyism that commenced after the end of World War II prompted some gay men and lesbian women to form what became the nation’s frst organizations to advocate for the rights of sexual minorities in the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s gay and lesbian activists focused much of their attention on diminishing the severe social stigmas faced by those in their community. At the time, a sense of conformity and consensus dominated American culture, and as such queer activists attempted to use the politics of assimilation to carve out a place for lesbian women and gay men in the larger American story. Members of what came to be called the Homophile Movement focused their energies on carefully recasting gay men and lesbian women before the public eye. They directly confronted the widely held belief that sexual minorities were “perverts” who should be excluded from society by stressing the ways in which the members of their group conformed to popular social mores and cultural ideals. In this way, their assimilation was a form of early resistance (Meeker 2006; Rupp 1999). 158

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The Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), a San Francisco-based lesbian organization, took the lead in forwarding the Homophile strategy among women. Started in 1955 by the pioneering lesbian couple Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the DOB worked to “promote the integration of the homosexual into society.” The group provided a community for lesbian women to join, taught its members about their legal rights, published group-afrming research on same-sex couples, and attempted to educate the public at large about the lesbian community (Faderman 1992; Gallo 2006). With the publication of their monthly newsletter, The Ladder, the Daughters of Bilitis was able to provide its movement with a national voice. Published from October 1956 to September 1972, The Ladder was the frst mass-circulation periodical for lesbian women in the United States (Streitmatter 1995). Its pages chronicle the strategy, tactics, and goals of the female Homophile activists who wrote and edited it, as well as the thoughts and reactions of ordinary readers who sent their comments and criticisms into the publication. It was within the pages of this magazine that fashion, beauty, and the politics of personal appearance became sites where the strategies of the Homophile Movement were embodied.

Fashion as a Homophile strategy Because sexual minorities were popularly viewed as people who failed to conform to society’s most basic standards and norms, The Ladder encouraged its readers to publicly demonstrate the similarities they shared with heterosexual Americans. Its creators believed that being perceived by others as feminine and fashionable was an important step in gaining popular social acceptance for lesbians. This strategy included actively crafting a physical appearance that was in line with mainstream perceptions of beauty, femininity, and heterosexual attractiveness. By the mid-twentieth century, the use of cosmetics and other commercial beauty preparations had become a standard part of the ordinary woman’s daily grooming routine. Likewise, in the 1950s, wearing clothing styles that were up-to-date with popular fashion trends, as well as selecting matching handbags, purses, and accessories, was seen by mainstream society as a must for all women who wished to succeed in marriage, motherhood, business, or social afairs. By mirroring popular aesthetic standards, the Daughters of Bilitis believed other Americans might begin to view the lesbian as less deviant and thereby start to accept her presence in workplaces, educational institutions, social settings, and other spheres of American life. The politics of assimilation and the politics of appearance were thus intimately tied to the DOB’s call for greater civil rights and social acceptance in mid-century America. Indeed, this chapter argues that during the 1950s and 1960s, lesbian activists attempted to fashion a new identity for their community by consciously stylizing their dress, hair, and general appearance in accordance with popular defnitions of female attractiveness. It contends that lesbian activists consciously employed American ideals of beauty, fashion, and femininity as part of their purposeful efort to reshape public perceptions of their group. As a part of this process, lesbian leaders even attempted to gently push heterosexual understandings of suitable attire for the everyday woman in a more lesbian-friendly direction. In contrast to the frilly and girlish styles of the World War II pin-up era, lesbian activists in the late 1950s and 1960s promoted a more sophisticated and mature feminine look which, was trending among high-fashion clothing designers of the era. In contrast to the derogatory depictions of lesbian women that proliferated in popular media, The Ladder presented images of lesbians that were visually akin to their normative, white, middle-class, heterosexual counterparts. While appearance was not the main focus of The Ladder, it regularly featured articles about femininity and fashion within its pages. 159

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Fighting against public perceptions that judged lesbians as either whorish women unable to fnd respectable employment or unattractive manly outcasts not capable of living a “normal” lifestyle, The Ladder provided an alternative image of the “typical” lesbian. She was most often young, slender, and white – although on a few occasions women of color were also represented on its pages. She was fashionable and feminine. And, she was mostly indistinguishable from her heterosexual counterparts portrayed in the larger media landscape. In this way, The Ladder promoted a lesbian aesthetic that was unremarkably mainstream. From this place of aesthetic conformity, the publication encouraged lesbian readers to confdently interact with the world around her. In addition to fashion advice, The Ladder gave readers practical tips for entering the workforce, highlighted the lives of lesbians who enjoyed monogamous, long-term partnerships, and promoted social spaces, such as at DOB’s national convention, where members of the lesbian community could publicly connect with one another in uncontroversial settings (as opposed to gathering at lesbian bars or other popular drinking establishments). Aesthetic conformity was sold by The Ladder as the lesbian woman’s ticket into a wider world that had for too long had shunned her. When in early 1958 a male commentator writing for San Francisco’s Pageant magazine attempted to slander the Daughters of Bilitis by calling the editor of The Ladder “burly,” the publication did not hesitate to respond. Running an article entitled “WE DO HEARTILY DENY THAT PHYLLIS LYON IS BURLY” the publication quickly enumerated its editor’s petite and ladylike physique. “Those who have made the personal acquaintance of Phyllis Lyon would hardly call her large of body, bulky, or stout” DOB President Del Martin said in response to the depiction of her partner. She further specifed that Lyon “has a trim fgure – 34 bust, 24 waist (may be slightly larger after recent Holiday parties) and 36 hips – considered by many as very nice.” Asking the rhetorical question “Is our editor burly?” the DOB heartily responded, “We think not!”3 While imitation of heterosexual codes of appearance, dress, and conduct was an important tactic that the Daughters of Bilitis used to forward the integration of lesbian women into American society, such an approach was not without criticism from within lesbian ranks. “Perhaps some may feel we are advocating conformity,” The Ladder asserted in a 1961 editorial written by Jaye Bell, the second president of the Daughters of Bilitis. “We are,” she unapologetically declared, going on to argue “this is outward conformity, the same outward conformity demanded of numerous groups of people who are in positions foreign to the public at large.” Bell however made certain to diferentiate the outward conformity she promoted from the societal pressure lesbians received at the hands of outsiders to change their sexual orientation. As Bell made clear to her readers, “conformity in one’s personal life is another matter.”4 Thus while members of the DOB advocated a carefully crafted physical appearance meant to ease the bias readers might experience in their daily lives, they did not forward such ideals as a way for the queer woman to mask her identity as a lesbian. Rather, crafting a careful personal appearance was posited as one way for the woman who lived openly with another woman to secure the rights that all American citizens – including those who enjoyed same-sex love – were entitled to. Reiterating this strategy for mainstream acceptance in her own words, a reader, simply identifed as N.R. from California wrote into the publication to express her gratitude that throughout the years, I have learned…chiefy through the Daughters of Bilitis, that a full-fedged, honest-to-God lesbian can hold down a responsible position, can wear skirts reasonably, comfortably, and gracefully, can wear her hair long, and can do a million and one other things any other female can do in society – with ease and poise too. 160

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Further echoing the overall strategy of the Homophile Movement, N.R. went on to assert that “if we homosexuals want to feel integrated into society, we in turn must ofer something useful and desirable to accept.”5 Also forwarding this strategy for social acceptance, another reader who called herself Z.N. trumpeted her own success with engendering heterosexual approval of her lesbian lifestyle. “The frst outward step is that of advocating a mode of behavior and dress acceptable to society” Z.N. instructed her fellow lesbians. She continued her line of argumentation by stating that “any minority group wishing to be accepted must conform to the majority group where frst impressions are concerned.” In fact, she argued, the strategy of conscientious dress and deportment had changed a heterosexual’s opinion of her sexuality in “more than a dozen cases.”6

Masculine attire In its discussions of fashion, the subject of masculine clothing was a topic of frequent conversation in The Ladder. Because women who wore men’s attire threatened to contradict the feminine appeal that The Ladder wished to engender, it dealt with the subject head on. “Fem” (sic) partners were encouraged by The Ladder to check that their signifcant other not appear “too butchy” before the public eye and suggested the woman gently introduce “less butchy” looking clothing into her partner’s wardrobe. However, as a June 1957 article on masculine attire cautioned its readership, while “conformity has been recommended as a solution” for those women who preferred to wear masculine styles, “too often forced conformity is the mother of further neuroses” and, it posited, such action might easily lead to further pain. As such, The Ladder sought to map out a path forward which, could satisfy both the butch woman’s personal sense of style and help her to gain acceptance from a society quick to judge her every action. Again fnding its answer in fashion, The Ladder gallantly proclaimed that “for those who must be mannish can do so, if they care, with style, class, and sophistication.” Womanly attention to detail and a purposeful efort to carefully craft ones look, it seemed, might help to draw attention away from the specifc type of attire that the lesbian woman wore, even when those choices were more masculine than not.7 Furthering this message for lesbians and non-lesbians alike, The Ladder additionally argued that variations on male clothing were fast becoming popular components in the everyday American woman’s wardrobe. In 1964 The Ladder covered the Nina Ricci fashion show in Paris where, it reported, the audience applauded as a model stepped out wearing a tailored tweed jacket, white shirt, grey fannel skirt with trouser pleats and a cuf, and a tiny beret worn down to the level of one eyebrow. Next came masculine coats, suits, dinner suits, and at-home outfts. As the publication triumphantly related to its readers “fashion experts agree, a girl can hardly look too much like a boy these days.”8 Citing Vogue, Harper’s, The New York Times, and other mainstream publications, The Ladder reprinted articles on fashion from the mainstream press, which described an emerging masculine turn in women’s wear. These news items included a January 1962 article in This Week, a popular magazine supplement included in many American newspapers, entitled “Women Take Over the Pants” which, reported that the manufacture of women’s pants had become a multi-million-dollar industry. As early adopters of such garb, The Ladder used the growth of shorts, jeans, capris, and slacks among heterosexual women as evidence that lesbian women were ahead of the fashion curve. Enumerating such trends, The Ladder 161

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reported that 78% of American women under the age of 25 now owned at least three pairs of trousers, and the majority of all women had at least two pairs of pants in their wardrobe.9 “It’s such a defnitive fashion statement,” the American designer Stan Herman stated in regard to women wearing pants in 1964. Printing this quote alongside others from prominent domestic and foreign fashion designers and couturiers, including Anne Klein, Eloise Curtis, and Pauline Trigère, The Ladder grew its arsenal of defense.10 Far from “sickos” and social misfts, through The Ladder the DOB painted a picture of lesbian women as stylish and chic sophisticates at the cutting edge of international fashion trends. Suggesting that the average American woman look to Europe, the historic birthplace of Western fashion, and New York City, America’s longtime fashion capital, for her sartorial inspiration, The Ladder sidestepped any criticism that a lesbian might receive for wearing pants in her own community. In April 1964, Esme Langley, creator of the Minorities Research Group, the frst organization to openly advocate for the interests of lesbians in the United Kingdom, sent a special message to The Ladder’s predominantly American readership. Langley claimed that she had been “turning heads” for years through her adoption of pants, tall boots, leather jackets, and other garb years before they became a fashion craze in mainstream America. “I don’t follow fashions, I set them” Langley proudly asserted following that: “When Christian Dior runs out of notions, I daresay he’ll be cabling me to help him out!”11 Through its discussions of fashion, The Ladder thus encouraged its readers to conform to popular standards of feminine dress, while at the same time pushing the boundaries of how normative womanhood was being popularly defned. It’s articles, commentaries, and fashion reviews consistently presented the bodies of lesbian women (even when they were stylized in masculine garb), not as evidence of social deviance, but rather, as representative of fashion-forward styling choices that any woman might subscribe to.

Assimilation and resistance Some contemporary readers who have lived their entire lives in the post-Stonewall era, might bristle at the politics of assimilation that the Daughters of Bilitis so proudly asserted in the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to the Homophile Movement, the movement for Gay Liberation that took shape in summer of 1969 rejected the notion that homosexuals should have to conform to the mores and values of society at large. Promoting a new sense of solidarity, its members proclaimed that distinct gay subcultures should be seen as points of pride to be respected by society as a whole. The purpose of this analysis is not to advocate for the DOB strategy but, to point out the important place that fashion and beauty (seemingly insignifcant, and even frivolous topics) came to play in their consequential social and political project. At the height of queer persecution by mainstream American society, lesbian activists used beauty culture as a tool to win civil rights and achieve greater social acceptance. Instead of sitting by as the passive victims of a society that wanted nothing to do with them, members of the DOB fashioned themselves as agents of their own destiny. Through cosmetics, hairstyling, fashion choices, and the use of other seemingly superfcial aspects of American beauty culture, they launched an avowedly political campaign that was an important part of the larger rights conscious ethos of mid-twentieth-century America. Indeed, the Daughters of Bilitis were not alone in their use of beauty culture as a tool for social and political change; their assimilationist strategy highlights a popular mode of resistance used by several groups of Americans who found themselves sidelined by mainstream culture. 162

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When the Black Power, Gay Liberation, and Women’s Rights movements almost simultaneously emerged in the third quarter of the twentieth century, their leaders directly questioned the inequitable power hierarchies that had long shaped American society. Among the most visible protests that feminist activists of this era launched was the 1968 rally that took place outside of the Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City. Here members of a second-wave feminist group known as the New York Radical Women tossed bras, girdles, hair curlers, copies of girlie magazines, and other “instruments of female torture” into their “freedom trash can.” In protesting the Miss America Pageant, the longest-running and most prominent beauty contest in American history, these activists directly confronted the contours of a sexist American culture that expected the masses of American women to constantly compete for male attention by habitually consuming uncomfortable and unnecessary beauty goods that hypersexualized women’s bodies. Since this time, a strand of feminist literature on beauty culture has continued to illuminate the powerful ways in which mainstream aesthetic norms are detrimental to women. Emblematic of this genre is the popular 1991 book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, in which writer Naomi Wolf argues the fashion and beauty industries have unscrupulously profted by selling women a set of utterly unattainable, unhealthy, and continually changing beauty standards. While such assessments still ring true for many today, they nonetheless downplay the full range of reasons why various groups of women have historically chosen to participate in America’s robust beauty culture, despite its drawbacks. Indeed, a number of scholarly assessments have looked to the ways in which racial and ethnic minorities have used mainstream beauty culture as a tool to fght against discrimination. For centuries in the United States, people of color have been relegated to an outsider status by a power structure that privileges white Americans. Working within the constraints of this oppressive atmosphere, scholars have pointed to the ways in which some women in the Japanese American, Chinese American, Arab American, and African American communities have all used gendered notions of how a woman should look and act in order to bolster an elevated position for their group within America’s social hierarchy. Malia McAndrew’s (2014) work, for example, shows how during World War II, some young Japanese American women held inside America’s incarceration camps used beauty pageants as a means of asserting their patriotism and fundamentally American identity. As part of this avowedly political project, incarceration camp newspapers presented an image of second and third generation Japanese Americans who were stylistically indistinguishable from their white female counterparts. At times holding beauty pageants on signifcant patriotic holidays such as, the Fourth of July, camp newspapers described incarcerated contestants by highlighting their quintessentially all-American looks. For example, coverage of an incarceration camp beauty pageant in Arkansas described one contestant as having a “Coca-Cola smile” while another competitor was designated “a walking breakfast-cereal ad.” According to Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (1997), beauty pageants were an important tool of resistance in postwar America because they were able to promote a positive representation of American minority groups without threatening mainstream society. Her analysis of the Miss Chinatown USA pageant brings to light the many ways in which the greater Chinese American community promoted racial equality for their group by stylizing the bodies of beauty contestants as glamorous femme fatales. In contrast to the ways in which mainstream society stereotyped Chinese women as drab “slaves” with bound feet, pageant contestants represented the Chinese American body by wearing stiletto heels, dresses with high slits up their side, and tops that showed ample cleavage. With beauty pageants as the marquee event at large Chinatown festivals in West Coast cities such as Los Angeles, it was hoped that 163

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beauty queens might both recast Chinese Americans before the public eye and draw outside business to Chinese American commercial districts, places popularly deemed as “dirty” by white American consumers. Martina Koegeler-Abdi’s (2016) analysis of the Lebanese American beauty queen Mary Hakim illuminates a similar story. As Koegeler-Abdi shows, the 1954–1955 titlist in the frst ever Miss Lebanon-America pageant used her beauty queen aesthetic as a way of both fashioning her identity as a patriotic American and consciously setting herself apart from the bodies of other Arab Americans whom some looked upon derisively. Contrasting herself with veiled Muslim American women in her autobiography, Hakim presented her idealized pageant aesthetic as evidence of the fundamentally American identity held by the members of her Christian Arab community in juxtaposition to those whose clothing choices she saw as evidence “backwardness.” Reaching back centuries, African Americans have long used the “politics of respectability” to claim a more equal footing in the United States. By displaying “lady-like behavior” and perfectly executing the dictates of white middle-class culture, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (1993) explains how Black church women used dress and public presentation to foster interracial cooperation for Black advancement during the Jim Crow Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In post-World War II America, the works of Tiffany Gill (2010) and Malia McAndrew (2010) similarly detailed the ways in which Black beauty entrepreneurs – including the owners of hair salons, charm schools, and modeling agencies – all used an assimilationist beauty culture to forward Black economic empowerment and racial advancement during the civil rights era. Taking beauty pageant politics to the next level, Maxine Leeds Craig’s 2002 book highlights the eforts of Black women who integrated traditionally white beauty contests in the early 1960s. Often backed up by the NAACP or other leading Black community organizations, winning a beauty title in an integrated space, as opposed to an all-Black space, was seen by its promoters as mainstream validation of the race and therefore progress in the struggle for Black equality. Many female activists in the early Black freedom struggle styled their bodies in line with popular notions of respectability, including processing and straightening their hair and wearing a middle-class wardrobe. However, as Tanisha Ford (2015) chronicles, fashions changed as the movement intensifed and younger and more progressive civil rights organizations emerged. Maintaining a traditionally respectable body proved difcult for protesters who met frequently with police and mob violence, or for those who were dedicated to the work of rural canvassing. Soon natural hair and unisex denim overalls overtook the politics of assimilation, and an emerging soul style was worn by a younger generation of activists who had a more progressive vision for American race relations. As examples from the literature on Japanese American, Chinese American, Arab American, and African American communities in the 1950s and 1960s make clear, physical assimilation was a pervasive tactic used by some members of a diverse set of America’s racial and ethnic communities to fght against their exclusion from mainstream society. The evidence found in this chapter extends the conscious political use of aesthetic assimilation to the lesbian community. Through their choice of clothing styles, hairstyles, and other aspects of American beauty culture, minoritized groups contested their second-class status in the United States. A carefully constructed aesthetic was one way in which some members of these communities attempted to claim respect and acknowledgement from a society that had regularly dismissed and ridiculed them. Aesthetics are a short hand for identity. They express on the physical form inner defnitions of who we believe ourselves to be. Far from meaningless and superfcial cultural artifacts, 164

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bodies are what the theorist Susan Bordo (1993) has called a sort of “cultural plastic” from which the individual can mold her or his identity and set its basic form. Portraying more than an individual canvas, Maxine Leeds Craig (2010: 243) has further asserted that bodies are sites “where status inequalities and boundaries are formed, sufered, upheld, and transgressed.” The body is in this way a canvas for the political battles of the age in which it is produced. In America of the 1950s and 1960s, before the antiracist cry “Black is Beautiful” was uttered, or the queer mantra “We’re Here, We’re Queer –Get Used to It!” was popularized, groups like the DOB sought simply to be seen. Their strategy was one of assimilation, yet in their quest to organize and resist they helped to provide a foundation for group solidarity, self-defnition, and hegemonic resistance that later generations of queer activists would build upon. In this way, the politics of appearance were a means for contesting the inequities of the American body politic.

Related topics Democratizing looks: the politics of gender, class, and beauty in early twentieth century United States

Notes 1 The Ladder 3, no. 6 (March 1959); The Ladder 5, no. 4 (November 1960); The Ladder 5, no. 11 (August 1961). 2 Jaye Bell, “DOB Anniversary Message from the President” The Ladder 6, no. 1 (October 1961), 5. 3 Del Martin, “Is Our Editor Burly” The Ladder 2, no. 4 ( January 1958), 16–17. Emphasis in original. 4 Bell, “DOB Anniversary Message,” 5–6. 5 N. R., “Readers Respond” The Ladder 5, no. 7 (April 1961), 24. 6 Z. N., “Readers Respond” The Ladder 3, no. 1 (October 1958), 30. 7 Barbara Stephens, “Transvestism: A Cross-Cultural Survey” The Ladder 1, no. 9 ( June 1957), 10–14. 8 “Cross-currents” The Ladder 8, no. 8 (May 1964), 11. 9 “Here and There” The Ladder 6, no. 4 ( January 1962), 26. 10 Melanie “Focus on Fashion” The Ladder 9, no. 2 (November 1964), 16. 11 Esme Langley. “Fashion Notes from London, England” The Ladder 8, no. 7 (April 1964), 20–21.

References Bérubé, Allan. 1990. Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two. New York: Free Press. Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carter, David. 2010. Stonewall: The Riots That Started a Gay Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Chauncey, George. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World. New York: Basic Books. Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. “Bodies, Beauty, and Fashion.” In Handbook of Cultural Sociology, edited by Laura Grindstaf, John R. Hall, and Ming-Cheng M. Lo, 243–251. New York: Routledge. D’Emilio, John. 1983. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. D’Emilio, John and Estelle B. Freedman. 1988. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper & Row. Duberman, Martin. 1994. Stonewall. New York: Plume.

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Malia McAndrew Engel, Steven M., Jefrey C. Alexander, and Steven Seidman. 2001. The Unfnished Revolution: Social Movement Theory and the Gay and Lesbian Movement. New York: Cambridge University Press. Faderman, Lillian. 1992. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth- Century America. New York: Penguin. Ford, Tanisha. 2015. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gill, Tifany. 2010. Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Gallo, Marcia. 2006. Diferent Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. 1993. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky and Madeline D. Davis. 1993. Boots of Leader Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge. Koegeler-Abdi, Martina. 2016. “Performing Transnational Arab American Womanhood: Rosemary Hakim, US Orientalism, and Cold War Diplomacy.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 7 (1). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item9713d14n McAndrew, Malia. 2010. “A Twentieth Century Triangle Trade: Selling Black Beauty at Home and Abroad, 1945–1965.” Enterprise & Society 11 (4): 786–812. ———. 2014. “Japanese American Beauty Pageants and Minstrel Shows: The Performance of Gender and Race by Nisei Youth during World War II.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7 (1): 42–64. Meeker, Martin. 2006. Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Penn, Donna. 1994. “The Sexualized Woman: The Lesbian, the Prostitute, and the Containment of Female Sexuality in Postwar America.” In Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, edited by Joanne Meyerowitz, 358–381. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Rupp, Lelia. 1999. A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Streitmatter, Roger. 1995. Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America. Boston, MA: Faber and Faber. Taylor. Verta, Elizabeth Kaminski and Kimberly Dugan. 2002. “From the Bowery to the Castro: Communities, Identities, and Movements.” In Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies, edited by Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman, 99–114. London: Sage Publications. Wolf, Naomi. 1991. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: W. Morrow. Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. 1997. “’Loveliest Daughter of Our Ancient Cathay!’: Representations of Ethnic and Gender Identity in the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. Pageant.” Journal of Social History 31 (1): 5–31.

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17 FAT ACTIVISM AND BEAUTY POLITICS Carla A. Pfefer

We all run from the ugly. And the farther we run from it, the more we stigmatize it and the more power we give beauty. Our communities are obsessed with being beautiful and gorgeous and hot. What would it mean if we were ugly? What would it mean if we didn’t run from our own ugliness or each other’s? How do we take the sting out of “ugly?” What would it mean to acknowledge our ugliness for all it has given us, how it has shaped our brilliance and taught us about how we never want to make anyone else feel? What would it take for us to be able to risk being ugly, in whatever that means for us? What would happen if we stopped apologizing for our ugly, stopped being ashamed of it? What if we let go of being beautiful, stopped chasing “pretty,” stopped sucking in and shrinking and spending enormous amounts of money and time on things that don’t make us magnifcent? Mia Mingus (2011) In this chapter, I provide a selected overview of some of the more compelling and fraught themes and tensions at the intersection of fat activism and beauty politics. Primarily, these intersections involve consideration of the messy and productive interplay between fat activism and beauty culture across the contexts of stigma and abjection, feminism, health/ ism, and ugliness. Ultimately, I argue that analyses of fat activism and beauty culture must centrally address their always-already raced, classed, and gendered dimensions. Further, I consider fat activist alignments with the politics of ugliness as a refreshing and potentially more promising alternative to investments in beauty and beauty culture.

Stigma and abjection Fat activism is part of a social movement that now has over 50 years of history (Cooper 2016). One core component of fat activism across time has been to address anti-fat stigma and abjection. As summarized by Farrell (2011) in her book, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, Erving Gofman defned “stigma” as a “discrediting attribute” that holds the potential to become such a “master status” that it “spoils” one’s identity and calls into question one’s character (6). Various defnitions and derivations of “abject” link it to rejection, the vile, utter wretchedness, that which must be thrown away, maximal badness, misery, and a complete absence of pride and dignity. LeBesco (2004) takes up the topic of 167

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the sense of revulsion that often adheres to contemporary representations of fat bodies and personhood, demonstrating how fat people’s ability to redefne their identities and resist fatphobia is a difcult and complicated process (see also Braziel and LeBesco 2001). In contemporary US mainstream culture, representations of fatness and fat people are broadly and closely associated with all of these characterizations (Kwan and Trautner 2011). It is no surprise, then, that much of the critical writing on fat activism and beauty culture addresses abject representations of fatness. Embodied fat, itself – think mufn tops, cellulite, double chins, bat wings, cankles, back fat, FUPA, and rolls – has its own lexicon, depicted as something to be reviled and eradicated rather than as simply variants on potential human embodiments (see Gay 2017, for further consideration). In abject representations of fat personhood, Kent (2010) and others (for example, Kargbo 2013; Lupton 2018) argue, fat people are rarely fully realized as people but, rather, most frequently positioned as “before” – in the tragically frozen position of not-yet-realized personhood. In ubiquitously present before and after weight-loss photos, advertisements, and television shows, for example, fat people are most often depicted looking disheveled, hopeless, and forlorn – juxtaposed with their glowing and beaming “after” images and lives. While fatness may seem visually self-evident, coming to self-acceptance as a fat person often involves a process of “coming out” as fat in order to recuperate the self (Murray 2005; Saguy and Ward 2011). Indeed, in many instances, fat people are depicted in the media without heads at all – in shaming “headless fattie” imagery, as fat activist and scholar, Charlotte Cooper (2007), has termed this genre of media fatsploitation. Representations of bodies, fatness, and beauty are also intricately bound with processes of racialization and class-status-making (Craig 2006; Saguy 2012; Williams 2017). Over time, thinness has become associated with middle/upper-class whiteness and social status (Boero 2012; Cottom 2019; Farrell 2011; Saguy 2013; Snider 2018, 2019; Strings 2019). Strings (2019) presents a historiography that traces the emergence of raced, gendered, and classed fatphobia from the ffteenth to early twenty-frst centuries. This analysis also reveals how standards of white and middle- and upper-class beauty were developed in direct juxtaposition to the embodiments of Black, Irish, and poor and working-class women. Kent (2010) draws parallels between abject media representations of fatness and Blackness, highlighting social processes by which abjection serves to shore up normative representations of non-fatness and non-Blackness as normative and favorable. As Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, “beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order” (2019: 44). One of the common tensions in writings about abjection involves positioning of subjecthood in terms of binary opposites. If stigmatizing and abject representations of fatness and fat personhood involve rendering fat subjects “other,” hideous, monstrous, and ugly, then writing about resisting stigmatizing and abject representations of fatness often positions fatness (diametrically) as glorious, powerful, and beautiful. For example, Kent (2010) begins a chapter focusing on fghting abject representations of fatness with the sentence, “Fat is beautiful” (369). LeBesco (2004) traces the historical and cultural evolution of representations of fatness, demonstrating that fatness is not inevitably tied to abjection. A website (Substantia Jones’ The Adipositivity Project) and several print volumes have taken up the project of artistically and photographically depicting (primarily) the beauty of fat women’s bodies (see Edison and Notkin 1994; Nimoy 2007; Snider 2018). The paintings of Peter Paul Rubens and the statue of the Venus of Willendorf have been held up by some as exemplars of positive assessments of the fat female form in earlier time periods and cultures (Klein 2001). 168

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Entire projects, organizations, podcasts, guides, radio shows, edited collections, “fatshion” lines, and subcultures have emerged celebrating the inherent worth, attractiveness, desirability, and beauty of fat people and their bodies (see, for example: Blank 2005, 2012; Chastain 2012; Erdman 1995; Frater 2005; Gurrieri and Cherrier 2013; Jarrell and Sukrungruang 2003; Klein 2001; Pausé 2019; Pyle and Klein 2011; Rothblum and Solovay 2009; Shanker 2004; Wann 1998; Whitesel 2014). Beauty product companies – such as Dove through their “Real Beauty” campaign – have launched print and video advertisements with the intention of ofering a more inclusive (including body size) range of beautiful bodies (Saguy 2013; see Johnston and Taylor 2008; Snider 2018, for critiques of corporate appropriation of fat activist rhetoric). Saguy (2013) describes such approaches as “beauty frames” of fatness. Snider (2018) notes the similarity, in terms of composition, lighting, and representation, of many of these attempts to expand notions of beauty to include those who are fat, to mainstream beauty depictions. As Snider (2018: 343) cautions: One of the most pernicious problems with promoting the expansion of beauty as a goal in fat activism is the ease with which the visual and verbal rhetoric of beauty can (and has been) co-opted by capitalists in search of ever more profts without regard to social justice, self-confdence, or the hard work performed by fat activists and others to gain even a small foothold in/against fatphobic Western society. Indeed, taken to its extreme, exalting fatness as beautiful and desirable also holds the potential to transform it into fat-fetishism, much of which involves abjection, social injustice, and abuse. A thriving culture of fat-fetishism exists today, populating internet porn sites and driving fat-fetish (which are largely heterosexual and focused on fat women) sexual subcultures both online and on the ground, populated by devotees of gaining (large amounts of weight purposefully), feeding (others with the intention of making them fatter), hogging (having sex with fat people with the express purpose of exploitation), and squashing (sexual desire to be crushed by a fat person) (Saguy 2013; Swami and Tovée 2009; for a critical feminist analysis of feederism, see Murray 2008). Fetishization of fatness particularly targets some groups of people of color (Saguy 2012; Williams 2017). The gendered, raced, and classed power dynamics of many of these subcultures often mirror, reinforce, and even exaggerate existing racial, gender, class, and sexuality inequities. It is a rather poorly kept secret that, despite the intentions of its founder, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA – now the leading national rights organization for fat people) began as a predominantly social organization to facilitate romantic and sexual connections between men who were fat admirers (or FAs; for more, see Swami and Tovée 2009) and the fat women they desired (Saguy 2013). NAAFA continues to serve as one venue through which fat women and FAs connect, often through annual conferences that enable fat women to access beauty culture from which they are generally excluded through provision of events (such as dances and fashion shows) and retailers that target their particular embodiments – such as plus-size lingerie merchants (Gimlin 2002; Saguy 2013). Not all NAAFA members appreciate the (hetero)sexualized environment of NAAFA events, however, and some formed a Fat Feminist Caucus to focus centrally on NAAFA’s political and activist aims (Gimlin 2002). The focus in the Fat Feminist Caucus was less on ensuring that fat is considered beautiful and desirable and more on ensuring that fat people are not discriminated against on the basis of their weight, size, or shape, or excluded from public venues, healthcare, fair legal representation, and employment (see Solovay (2000) for an overview of legal discrimination against fat people). 169

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Feminism Fat activism and feminism have a complicated and longstanding relationship. Susie Orbach’s (1978) Fat is a Feminist Issue, Kim Chernin’s (1981) The Obsession: Refections on the Tyranny of Slenderness and (1985) The Hungry Self, Naomi Wolf’s (1990) The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, and Susan Bordo’s (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body ofered feminist analyses and calls to action about the perils of succumbing to beauty culture norms and demands. According to these texts, beauty culture demands and rewards preoccupation with the fear of fatness and with the desire to be, become, and remain thin, contributing to the subjugation of women, competition between women, eating disorders, and ensuring women’s second-class-citizen status. Yet some of these approaches to situating fat as a feminist issue also draw upon stigmatizing and gendered popular psychology notions of fatness. Across much of this feminist writing, a parallel message is that women must develop critical consciousness around the origins of their fatness, which often includes presumptions that fat women eat excessively and do so to assuage emotions connected to injustice, outrage, oppression, and the maternal. In this way, feminist authors are not immune from adopting false consciousness approaches that view fatness as a personal failure or dysfunctional emotional investment. Further, these same authors assert that feminist interventions are needed to change presumably disordered (and unfeminist) relationships to eating and to restore the body to health (see Boero 2012, for a critique of gendered weight-loss programs; Murray 2008, for extended discussion of framing women’s fatness as food addiction; and Saguy 2012, for an update on why fat remains a feminist issue). As such, some feminist works on fatness simultaneously decry the way fat is villainized within beauty culture while engaging in sidestepping that underlines fat’s apparent dangers to feminists and their bodies. Perspectives like these are not historical artifacts, however. Indeed, feminist philosopher Lauren Berlant, writing in 2007, describes fatness (taken up through the medicalized language of “obesity”) as a form of late-capitalist “slow death” (particularly among the poor and people of color), an embodied cultural artifact of the toxic pleasures and dependencies of our society’s own making. Even fat-afrmative feminist texts (for example, Frater 2005) often ofer proscriptively normative beauty advice to fat women, urging them to “look hot” and not “frumpy” and to wear horizontal stripes to make breasts look larger and vertical stripes to make legs look longer. A number of feminist groups, however, have been more radical in their approaches toward fat activism and responses to mainstream beauty culture. Some of these groups include the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) Fat Feminist Caucus, Body Image Task Force (BITF), Fat Underground (FU), NOLOSE (formerly known as the National Organization for Lesbians of SizE), and the Chubsters (Aful and Ricciardelli 2015; Cooper 2016; Saguy 2013). Much feminist fat activism involves critiques of dominant (as well as some feminist; see Williams 2017) beauty ideals, using the tools of visual and media culture in the “fatosphere” (magazines and zines, blogs, vlogs, fatshion runways, plus-size fatshion clothing exchanges, and retailers) to broadcast their messages (Aful and Ricciardelli 2015; Webb, Thomas, Bonar, Davies, and Etzel 2017). Just as feminism, fatness, and beauty have complicated relationships, so too do health, fatness, and beauty.

Health/ism As noted in the vast literature on health and disability, cultural associations between health and beauty are quite strong (for example, Clare 2017; Siebers 2008, 2010; Thomson 1996). It would be difcult to conceive of a fat activist response to mainstream beauty culture that 170

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did not address its association with presumptions around health and healthfulness. Much has been written about the cultural and medical construction of fatness as negative health indicator or outcome vis-à-vis its medicalization as “overweight” and “obesity” (see Boero 2012; Kwan and Trautner 2011; Saguy 2013 for excellent overviews). Most notably, fat and fatness in the United States, since at least the mid-twentieth century, have generally been constructed – both culturally and medically – as increasing in prevalence (for example, the “obesity epidemic”) and as unhealthy and fatalistic (for example, the “obesity timebomb”) (Boero 2012; Kwan and Trautner 2011; Saguy 2013). While health might seem like a relatively straightforward biological aspect of being, critical scholars of health note the many ways that health is also a cultural product as well as a tool of maintaining existing social hierarchies, allowing certain people and groups access to consideration as “healthy,” or to services and treatments most likely to sustain or restore health. As such, there is reason to consider how health might also be weaponized in the service of establishing venerated groups of “healthy” people and bodies and selectively and moralistically meting out or withholding health and social resources based on determinations of relative deservingness. In such a context, health itself becomes a regulated social status, status marker, and stratifying agent, and one deserving more focused and critical scholarly assessments as a particular form of moralism – “healthism” (for an overview, see Metzl and Kirkland’s (2010), Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality). It will be unsurprising to most readers that fatness is generally understood in US culture today as disqualifying for consideration as “healthy.” Indeed, fatness itself is situated as a disease or disease process itself through the medicalization of fatness as “obesity.” Moral imperatives to become or remain thin may even be driven by religiosity or religious ideals (Gerber 2012). In such a context, fat people themselves often have antagonistic relationships to discourses of health. It is also within this context that Health at Every Size® (HAES®) approaches have emerged. According to these approaches, it is fully possible for fat individuals to maintain or restore their health through exercise-based approaches to wellbeing (for an overview, see Bacon 2010; see Webb, Vinoski, Bonar, Davies, and Etzel 2017 for a discussion of cultural uptake). The emergence and predominance of this paradigm within some sectors of fat activist communities and media representation has, according to some analyses, led to a “good fattie” versus “bad fattie” moralism, whereby fat people who enact exercise and eating behaviors considered “healthy” are deemed “good” while those who enact behaviors deemed “unhealthy” are labeled “bad” (Chalklin 2016; Webb, Thomas, Bonar, Davies, and Etzel 2017). In opposition to what may be viewed as a proscriptively normative framework, with little hope that fat people will receive full social inclusion in exchange for full compliance (see also Meleo-Erwin 2012), some fat activists have proposed a radical counter-movement (“rad fatties”) that rejects health-aspirational imperatives altogether (Chalklin 2016; Cooper 2016; White 2012, 2013, 2014). Radical fat activist politics in this vein might even be described as anti-beauty or postbeauty in their highly visual and performative approach, embracing embodied representations of fatness as unselfconsciously hedonistic, campy, naked, ordinary, celebratory, gloriously grotesque, and socially disruptive (Chalklin 2016; Gurrieri 2013; Gurrieri and Cherrier 2013; Johnston and Taylor 2008; Meleo-Erwin 2012; Owen 2015; Snider 2018, 2019).

Ugliness It may seem inconceivable that, in a time and culture when and where fatness is so bound up with normative notions of morality, goodness, and health, that there might also be insight and power to rejecting beauty altogether. In her book The Fat Female Body, Samantha 171

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Murray (2008) outlines her quest for a counter-aesthetic to the “fat is beautiful” mantra that circulates within fat activism. This quest is motivated, in part, through concerns over how this paradigm often involves inversion of existing troubling forms of subjecthood and intersubjectivity (some of which has been outlined in the preceding section on fetish/ism). Ultimately, Murray concludes that there is “an inherent impossibility in the ways in which [such counter-aesthetics] can be taken up and seen as ‘beautiful’ by mainstream society” (2008: 129). And yet impossibilities are often generative; what if we pursued another project altogether – one that considers the power of embracing a politics of ugliness? Mia Mingus’ powerful quote from her keynote address for the Femmes of Color Symposium serves as the epigraph for this chapter. It urges us to consider the potential in moving away from beauty-focused desirability politics and toward a more substantive focus on the politics of ugliness. As Rodrigues and Przybylo (2018) write in their edited collection, On the Politics of Ugliness, In identifying and locating ugliness as a political [rather than purely aesthetic] category, [we strive] to imagine new ways of seeing ugliness and being seen as ugly by fghting against its categorization and use as a pejorative denomination of visual injustice. (2) Ingraham and Boero argue that: “fat studies could beneft from additional focus on direct experiences of fat lives rather than content analysis of public perceptions of fatness or public health hand-wringing over fatness” (2020: 123; see also Murray 2005). In her book, Thick: And Other Essays, Tressie McMillan Cottom does just that as she discusses her own embodied experiences and perceptions: When I say that I am unattractive, concede that I am ugly, the antithesis of beauty, I sound like I am internalizing a white standard of beauty that black women fnd hard to rise above. But my truth is quite opposite. When oppressed people become complicit in their own oppression, joining the dominant class in their ideas about what we are, it is symbolic violence… Ugly is everything done to you in the name of beauty. Knowing the diference is part of getting free. (2019: 57, 72) In Cottom’s analysis, situating beauty in an always-already raced and classed system of capitalist production and consumption, and aligning with the desire to be or become beautiful, constitutes complicity with this racist and classist system. Ugliness, as such, holds potential as a politics of conscious and embodied resistance. As Charlotte Cooper notes of her work with Chubsters: “Embracing fat stereotypes enabled us to subvert them, and perhaps rob them of their power over us” (Saguy 2013: 65). Indeed, in her study of women’s greatest fears about imagining what their body could become, Breanne Fahs (2018) found that the threat of becoming ugly had a profound emotional valence – bound up with feelings such as disgust, “fear, dread, loathing, anger, embarrassment, shame, sarcasm/humor, hesitation, and sadness” (250). The potential power of ugliness does not stop at considering only what it means for fat activists to embrace ugliness, but also what it means to recognize and grapple with the power of one’s own and others’ assessments and treatments of it. A politics of ugliness must also wrestle with a politics of failure – failure to achieve societal and personal measures of success, happiness, health, and wellbeing (for more on embracing failure, see Halberstam 2011; 172

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LeBesco 2014). In her book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxanne Gay (2017) discusses the personal disappointment of failing to be comfortable and to feel beautiful and healthy living in her body at any size, despite her knowledge about fat and size acceptance and her connections to fat activist communities that hold these possibilities as central aims and messaging. The stories that Gay tells are her own – those of a very fat (or “superfat,” a term often used within fat activist communities), Black woman – bodies for whom plus-size retail clothing, subway turnstyles, airline seats, and perhaps even fat-activist politics themselves so often fail to incorporate and have not been designed to ft (see also Williams 2017). As Rodrigues and Przybylo (2018) note, “categories of ugliness are interlaced with and deeply underwritten by ability, age, gender, race, class, body size, health, and sexuality” (4). Gay discusses feeling and being unhealthy (vis-à-vis high blood pressure) and its probable connection to being superfat. Writing and research on Health at Every Size® focuses disproportionately on lived experience and health outcomes among those in “overweight” and Class 1 or 2 “obesity” categories; rarely does it address the embodied experiences, health challenges, and health outcomes of the superfat – those categorized in Class 3 “obesity” and its rightward tail (BMI above and far over 40). Most of what the public knows about superfat people derives from exploitative media representations on television – such as “My 600-lb Life.” Gay has been reluctantly candid about her decision to pursue weight-loss surgery (a  sleeve gastrectomy) in 2018 and has also discussed that, at her highest weight, her BMI was over 70. Electing to pursue weight-loss surgery is an exceedingly fraught process given the relatively high mortality rate and long-term morbidity associated with these procedures (Meleo-Erwin 2011). Further, weight-loss surgery is generally considered anathema within many fat-activist communities (for an overview, see LeBesco 2014; Meleo-Erwin 2011). NAAFA’s ofcial position statement on weight-loss surgery is that fat people should avoid such surgeries, that they should be discontinued, and that they should no longer be subsidized by insurance companies (NAAFA 2016). Marilyn Wann, a long-time and outspoken leader in the fat-activist community, frequently describes weight-loss surgeries such as gastric bypass as elective “stomach amputation” of a perfectly healthy organ. Yet LeBesco (2014) would have us consider whether or not the desires of some fat people to pursue weight-loss might be more akin to the experiences of medically facilitated gender transition for those who are transgender – even if these weight transitions may only be temporary. Are Gay’s stories and experiences part of fat activism or of fat shame? Is it possible that they are both? In giving voice to seemingly unspeakable truths and tensions like these within fat activism and beauty politics, embodied stories and analyses like the ones featured in this chapter are powerful, ugly, beautiful, and necessary.

Related topics Bumpah politics: the thick Black female body in the US and Caribbean academic discourses Size matters (in modeling) Beauty standards and body-image issues in the West and Japan from a cultural perspective

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18 BUMPAH POLITICS Te thick Black female body in US and Caribbean academic discourses Kamille Gentles-Peart

Many Black women in the African diaspora report a preference and desire for a “thick” body (Gentles-Peart 2016; Poran 2006). Thick or voluptuous bodies are curvy with big hips, and round, prominent buttocks – what many in the Caribbean refer to as the “Coca Cola bottle” shape (Gentles-Peart 2016). However, that very body, particularly large rear ends, has historically been used as an important symbol of racial oppression. That is, gendered racial inequalities have been upheld by constructing and normalizing ideologies about Black women’s buttocks (Morgan 1997). Not surprisingly, this relationship among Black women’s booties, Black womanhood, and Black women’s oppression has been the subject of much academic discourse. In this chapter, I explore literature on thick Black female bodies, particularly their bottoms, in American and Caribbean contexts. I highlight scholarship that investigates how Black women’s buttocks are constructed and positioned in colonial and postcolonial contexts, how they are mobilized and commodifed for diferent agendas, and how they are enacted by everyday women.

In the shadow of the Hottentot Venus The role of thick Black female bodies in solidifying white supremacy is a central focus in the literature on Black women’s bodies. Scholars highlight the ways in which Black women’s bodies, particularly curvy bodies, were mobilized to concretize white body superiority and underwrite colonial projects in Africa. Jennifer Morgan (1997), in her analysis of early European explorers’ writings on Africa, demonstrates how white male travelers and writers used Black female bodies to solidify racial diference and position African women as having grotesque, monstrous, un-womanly bodies that were dangerously, aberrantly hypersexual, and not intended to be beautiful and admired (as the delicate bodies of their white counterparts). These travel narratives, dating from 1500 to 1770, often depicted African women’s bodies with exposed breasts and genitalia, appearing animalistic and mythical, which supported popular views of Africa’s “lack of civilization” and beauty. The most analyzed woman in this regard in the North American literature is Sara Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus.” Baartman, an enslaved woman from South Africa, was brought to Europe in 1810 for the purposes of “displaying her enlarged genitals and buttocks” (Mason 2013: 687). Her body was exhibited across Europe as an example 177

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of African and Black female bodies. Many writings demonstrated how colonial discourses around the body of Sara “epitomized the ways in which black women’s buttocks, in particular, were constructed as ‘sexually grotesque’ and reinforced an aesthetic that depicts black bodies as diseased, animalistic, deviant, and hypersexual” (McKay & Johnson 2008: 493). Janell Hobson (2003, 2005) demonstrates how Baartman’s body – by virtue of her skin color, femaleness, and body type – was framed in the context of freakery, ugliness, and disability. Framed in this way in white discourses, Baartman’s voluptuous body and backside contributed to prevalent ideas of Black female deviance and hypersexuality. Her exhibitions further propagated the idea that this “ugliness” was desired by men in Africa, which not only constructed an ideology of racial diference, but also perpetuated white Europeans’ sense of racial superiority. Hobson further argues that Baartman’s exhibition across France, and the subsequent “scientifc” investigation of her genitalia, continue to inform contemporary constructions of Black female bodies. The long-lasting efect of these exhibitions of Black women’s bodies in European and American culture is that “black women en masse are often ‘known’ to have big behinds, à la the Hottentot Venus” (Hobson 2003: 93). Hobson (2003) continues to say: Baartman … came to signify the “ugliness” of her race [emphasis in original]. It is this connection between blackness and grotesquerie that has haunted many people of African descent, especially those living under the infuence of dominant white culture, to the point that a slogan such as “Black is beautiful” seems a radical statement. (93–94) Building on Hobson (2003), Simone Alexander (2014) examined how Baartman’s body – and by extension those of African and Black women in general – was not and could not be given personhood in the context of white coloniality. She says, as “a member of the Khoisan herder tribe, Baartman, as a result of her endowed fgure, her feshy buttocks, her ‘excess fesh,’ became the object of desire and derision, fear and adoration … Baartman’s inability to attain citizenship was a foregone conclusion, since her body, in many ways did not correspond to the national (read white) body” (24). Sharpley-Whiting (1999) further argues that Baartman’s body was used to judge states of Western evolution by which to discern identity, diference, and progress. Designating Baartman “primitive” made Europeans, by contrast, human and developed. In addition to the construction of Black women as hypersexual, unhuman, and ugly, other scholars have also illuminated how thick Black female bodies served to undergird Black women’s masculinization. This body type was used to justify white Europeans’ use of Black women as slave labor (Beckles 1999; Morgan 1997). Hilary Beckles explains this link between “defeminization” and slave labor within a Caribbean context: The black woman was ideologically constructed as essentially “non-feminine” in so far as primacy was placed upon her alleged muscular capabilities, physical strength, aggressive carriage, and sturdiness. Pro-slavery writers presented her as devoid of the feminine tenderness and graciousness in which the white woman was tightly wrapped. (Beckles 1999: 10) These “monstrous” and “sturdy” bodies were used to signify and justify Black women’s only utility as producers of crops and bearers of children, and thus afrmed Europe’s use of Black women for slave labor (Morgan 1997: 168–169). 178

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These scholars demonstrate that the real and imagined thick bodies of Black women – many of the accounts were written by men who never traveled to Africa or encountered African women and so were likely fabricated (Hobson 2003) – were used to justify colonialist agendas and racial domination. Such ideologies and images were conceptualized well before the frst slave plantations were established in the Americas and the Caribbean (Morgan 1997), but they continue to haunt Black women from one century to another, from Africa to the Americas (see McKay & Johnson 2008; Tate 2016). Research on contemporary constructions of thick Black female bodies continues to interrogate and unearth the presence of colonial thinking and white body supremacy in representations of Black women. Much of this research focuses on African diasporic popular cultural forms (such as hip-hop, dancehall, soca, and calypso) and public rhetoric surrounding Black female bodies on display in media. Jaime Schultz (2005), who explores media coverage of and commentary on tennis player Serena Williams, identifes age-old themes of “freak,” animalistic, unfeminine, hypersexual, and masculinity in the rhetoric surrounding her body. She says, “Rhetorical strategies … continue to stigmatize and marginalize Williams’s femininity in ways that clarify the boundaries and reassert the dominance of that center” (349). For example, Williams’ buttock is described as formidable and constituting its own, separate entity. In contrast, the backside of Anna Kournikova (a tall, thin, white professional tennis player) has been called sensational and photogenic. Such commentary and statements perpetuate ways of thinking about Williams’ buttocks as something of a “sideshow oddity” (Schultz 2005: 350). James McKay and Helen Johnson (2008) also interrogated the representation of African American sportswomen in international media. They concluded that Venus and Serena Williams’ bodies have been simultaneously positioned by narratives of “pornographic eroticism” (where sexuality is constructed as their primary characteristic) and the “sexually grotesque.” They fnd that “the complex and ambivalent ways in which the Williams sisters have been constructed – exotic/erotic yet deviant and repulsive, athletic yet animalistic and primitive, unfeminine yet hyperfeminine, muscular yet threateningly hyper-muscular – is a re-inscription of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ genealogy” (500).

Invoking Nanny of the Maroons Those who write about Black women’s behinds within circum-Caribbean contexts, scholars such as Carolyn Cooper (1995), Bibi Bakare-Yusuf (2006), and Susan Harewood (2006), read the bottom through the lens of anti-colonial representations. As Harewood (2006: 39) says, whereas in the North-American focused literature the legacy of Sara Baartman seems to shape the bottom’s meaning, in the literature that focuses on the Caribbean the legacy of Nanny of the Maroons ofers the possibility of re-coding the meaning of the bumper. Nanny of the Maroons was a transgressive fgure in Jamaican history. Not much is known about her, but in the documents where she appears, she is depicted in both masculine and feminine terms, in warriorhood and domesticity (Cummings 2012/2013). More importantly, her unruly body emerges as the site of varied mythical folk tales. Chief among them is the story of how she stopped colonizers with her substantial behind: legend has it that she used her ample buttocks to catch bullets from the British to save her community from invasion. While the role of Nanny’s buttocks in the defeat of British colonizers is fctitious, its symbolism should not be dismissed. As Ronald Cummings (2012/2013) argues, “the 179

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Nanny we know and narrate is largely the product of the demands of a post-independence Jamaican nationalist discourse” (Cummings 2012/2013: 144). Thus, in considering narratives about and representations of Nanny, “the historical moment of her actual existence is less important than the consideration of sites and moments of her fgurative construction both in historiographical, literary and popular discourses” (Cummings 2012/2013: 144). Specifcally, the embracing and codifying of Nanny’s buttocks in Jamaica intersects with the re-interpretation of Jamaican culture and people in the post-independence era. In this way, the image of Nanny and her “batty” are seen as a contrast to Sara Baartman (Hobson 2003), the former connoting decolonization and resistance of anti-blackness, the latter colonialism and white body supremacy. This theme of the Black female butt as a symbol of resistance to white supremacy and colonialism permeates the work on thick Black female bodies coming from the Caribbean. Largely exploring Black Caribbean musical genres and popular culture, this work acknowledges the patriarchal white European discourses about thick Black female bodies embedded in these genres, but simultaneously aim to re-code/reframe thick Black female bodies. Scholarship in this area thus challenges white Victorian beauty standards and middle-class respectability ideals in the postcolonial Caribbean. While having admittedly ambivalent relationships to Caribbean popular art forms (such as reggae, calypso, soca) and the dances that accompany them (wining and “wukking up”), these scholars use a postcolonial Caribbean feminist lens to reframe the images and discourses of thick Black female bodies, especially the “bumpah” or the “batty,” in Black Caribbean popular culture. Using Eve Sedgwick’s (1990: 230) phrase, they “renegotiat[ed] … the representational contract” between the voluptuous Black female body and the world. For example, in her seminal studies of dancehall culture in Jamaica, Carolyn Cooper (2004, 1995) re-interprets dancehall culture and the bodies of voluptuous Black women who are the subjects of and participants in dancehall music. Throughout her work, she insists that we recognize the liberatory space that dancehall culture creates for Black women through its lyrics that celebrate their body, especially their buttocks, and its culture that allows working-class thick Black women to invert the roles and mores constructed by classist and racist European society. As Carolyn Cooper (2004) says: The gender politics of the dancehall that is often dismissed by outsiders as simply misogynist can be read in a radically diferent way as a glorious celebration of full-bodied female sexuality, particularly the substantial structure of the Black working –class woman whose body image is rarely validated in the middle-class Jamaican media, where Eurocentric norms of delicate female face and fgure are privileged. The recurring references in the DJs’ lyrics to feshy female body parts and oscillatory functions … signal the reclamation of active, adult female sexuality from the entrapping passivity of sexless Victorian virtue. (86) Bibi Bakare-Yusuf (2006) also explored voluptuous women of the Jamaican dancehall, and their self-expressions through dress. She argues that presenting their thick bodies as a site of spectacle, Black women in dancehall culture create a world and state of being that challenges Eurocentric, gendered, and class-based ideas about femininity and womanhood. BakareYusuf (2006) argues that “the voluptuous black female body came to embody upper-class anxiety over the moral status of the lower class” (8). In embracing the voluptuous, Black female body, women excluded from the elite class (the vast majority of Black women in the 180

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English-speaking Caribbean) rejected the negativity associated with voluptuousness, and celebrated “an unruly voluptuosity - the joy of being fat” (Bakare-Yusuf 2006: 10). Analogously, Susan Harewood (2006) examines how soca female stars, specifcally Barbadian calypsonian Alison Hinds, create an alternative story of Black womanhood partially through using the bumpah to enact and express power (“bumper politics”). This includes “pooching” or pushing out her bumper, looking back at it with admiration as it protrudes, and “pooching” on men selected from her audience. Harewood concludes that “performances are not innocent of racism and sexism, but demand visibility…. They advance the possibilities of women’s power and thus re-imagine a nation of greater gender equality” (44). Jennifer Springer (2007) supported Harewood’s analysis by demonstrating how, as a representative of the Barbadian calypso scene, Alison Hinds reclaims calypso and its dance forms to empower women cross-culturally, particularly Black women. Springer notes that Hinds’ emphasis on the bottom departs from male representations as she “invites the crowd to view the gyrations of her waist, hips, and behind, not to objectify her body but to validate it as beautiful and to celebrate its form” (111). These scholars echo Hobson’s (2003) conclusion that “shoving” the behind is a defant gesture that dares to claim the female batty as visible, pronounced, sexy, and beautiful. This resistance is not just an individual protest. Rather … [it is] a defance of a historical tradition that degrades black women’s bodies. (102) Largely refecting the embodied legend of Nanny of the Maroons, these scholars present Black female bumpahs as conduits to a collective project of liberation. They demonstrate that the mere presence and celebration of the bumpah does not in itself overturn broader social structures of inequality, but it may signal some forms of maneuver, negotiation, and departure from white body supremacy.

Existing between the Hottentot Venus and Nanny Much of the literature on thick Black female bodies in the Caribbean and the United States also highlights the complex relationship among thick Black female bodies, capitalism, and agency. They not only look at how women are represented, but how women represent themselves and how they fashion themselves through and against coloniality. These scholars do not present a simple story of domination or liberation; they show that, as so many women still participate in dominant media and culture as DJs, revelers, and spectators, and negotiate ways to strategically re-present themselves, their practices both challenge and are constituted by the racialized, gendered, and sexualized colonial discourses of thick Black female bodies. These works thus highlight the ambiguity and unpredictability of Black women’s complex relationship to colonial discourses about thick Black female bodies. They explore the intersections of the Baartman and Nanny of the Maroons discourses of thick Black female bodies, demonstrating that both women form part of the discursive regimes that shape understandings about women’s bodies. One woman allows us to pay attention to capitalism’s continuing exhibition and exploitation of women’s bodies. One woman allows us to identify the “small but potent culturally refexive public space(s)” (Rose 1994) from which women re-accent the meanings of the bottom. (Harewood 2006: 39) 181

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They ask, can the exploitations of fetishization and commodifcation be subverted through the politics of self-fashioning and counter-fetishization by Black women? For example, Natasha Barnes (2000) explores how the transgressive potential of women appearing in Carnival in Trinidad is limited within contexts of capitalist appropriations, specifcally media coverage. She says, The collusion of global capitalism in the marketing and commodifcation of Caribbean popular culture has limited the extent to which women’s sexual play in Carnival can be seen to be emancipatory or resistive …. When cable television networks make images of Carnival revelers available to global audiences, what is delivered in these screens, devoid of history and context, are parades of scantily clad, gyrating women that appear to market the island and its culture as a destination for sex tourism. (96) She reminds us that the presence of thick Black female bodies in this very public and global event can signal Black women’s empowerment, but can simultaneously re-enact male patriarchal stereotypes of Black women as sexually available, and promote Trinidad as a place where tourists can encounter exotic, gyrating women. Therefore, this visibility of Black women in popular culture does not necessarily equate with empowerment, and has “uneven emancipatory potential” (Barnes 2000: 105). Scholars also illustrate how, even as Black women employ their bumpahs/batties/booties to negotiate diferent forms of femininity and capitalism, popular culture images of Black women with prominent rear ends serve to naturalize the idea that Black women’s physicality is indicative of their hypersexuality. In analyzing Black women’s bodies, specifcally buttocks, in flms and videos, bell hooks (1992) concludes that while some Black women beneft fnancially from using their bodies in popular culture, in reality, these images ensure the Black female body is noted “only when it is synonymous with accessibility, availability, when it is sexually deviant” (66) and thus “do not successfully subvert sexist/racist representations” (64). Aisha Durham (2012) makes similar observations about hip-hop/R&B star Beyoncé. She notes that while colonial discourses suggest that all Black women are voluptuous, in the hip hop world, big booty has been reassigned to working-class Black women specifcally. Thus, the booty represents racial as well as class diference for Black women. This genre refers to the booty as junk, ghetto, bubble, big, or bootylicious not only to assess its physicality, but also its value and the “ghetto” positionality of women who possess that body type (41). Durham (2012) argues that Beyoncé’s celebration of her booty is in part a “reclamation of the Black booty that is prevalent in vernacular culture throughout the African diaspora” (43). However, production conventions in her music videos, such as the “backward gaze” (camera gaze directed at the butt, that does not refect her point of view, and do not show her face) concurrently undermine her agency.

Te way forward Research on thick Black female bodies has grown over the last decade. However, much still needs to be done. First, central to the issues of representation, self-presentation, agency, and resistance for thick Black female bodies has to be a more sustained look at the question of space and place. Do some popular culture sites of production hold better possibilities for the emancipation of Black women’s bumpers/batties/booty than others? What forms might such 182

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spaces take (and possibly are taking) to escape from the reproduction of colonialist scenarios and ideologies that are damaging to Black women’s well-being? Natasha Barnes (2000) argues that dancehall may aford more transgressive potential for Black women compared to Carnival, largely because of dancehall’s relatively subcultural position in Jamaica and less connections to exploitative capitalist appropriation. For Carole Boyce Davies (2010: 187), “the implications of the controlled, inside and staged notion of carnival and the woman’s location in these inner spaces, as opposed to outside, street-based carnival, is signifcant.” She argues that the staged version – where women move through the parade in raised foats in some carnivals – is more of a site of containment and voyeurism (“making space”) as opposed to the “grounded” carnival where “people ‘[take] space’ or [control] their own space, taking over the streets and making their own movements” (193). Might this argument also be true for thick Black female bodies, which have been historically marked as “vulgar bodies” (Cooper 1995) of the street and not worthy of being “raised” (elevated)? How do every day thick Black women feel about these spaces and their own sense of pleasure, resistance, and safety in dancing on the streets versus on the stage? Second, while a lot of literature on thick Black female bodies revolves around the symbolic, representational, textual, and historical, signifcantly less work exists on the embodied experiences of Black women in their everyday lives, and how they engage with the dialectic discourses around thick Black female bodies. In other words, two areas that remain understudied in the scholarship are a critical understanding of how discourses of the thick Black female body manifest themselves in the everyday lives of “ordinary” Black women and Black women’s own voices and refections on their embodied social realities. A few scholars are working to center the voices and experiences of actual Black women in the United States and the Caribbean. I have taken up these themes in my current research projects, which explore how immigrant Black Caribbean women in the United States (specifcally those of the working and lower-middle class) participate in and struggle with the voluptuous beauty standard expected of Black women (Gentles-Peart 2016, 2018). For example, in Romance With Voluptuousness: Caribbean Women and Thick Bodies in the United States, I use interviews and focus groups to examine how these women pursue and maintain thick bodies in the United States, the challenges they face by pursuing this body type, and how they negotiate discourses and practices that marginalize and exclude their thick bodies from economic, social, and political spaces. In another work (Gentles-Peart 2020), I also examine the extent to which Black Caribbean women participate in what I refer to as “emancipatory thick body politics,” discourses that challenge and resist the dehumanization of thick Black female bodies. Third, scholars in this area also need to more explicitly explore and articulate the nuances within discourses and practices of thick Black female bodies. For example, it is important to note that there is a diference between a voluptuous Black female body and a fat one (Shaw 2005a). Black communities make strict distinctions between Black female bodies with ample derrières, hips and thighs – the desirable shape – and Black female bodies that are round and plump. As Shaw notes, the presence of fat Black female bodies allow other (smaller) Black women to “assume the posture of their white counterparts by recognizing themselves to varying degrees as being physiologically what the fat black woman is not” (Shaw 2005a: 151–152). Indeed, white supremacist colonial discourses surrounding the images of the Hottentot Venus are often set against the more palatable image of the loveable Mammy, a domestic help whose fat body signifed asexuality, and an overabundance of maternal resources (Collins 2000). Therefore, both bodies are read diferently in white supremacist spaces and, while both are used to anchor Black women at the bottom of social hierarchies in African diasporas and 183

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to codify their inhumanity, they are mobilized in diferent ways: the fat body of Mammy signifed “an infnite reserve of maternal dedication, suggesting an inability of black women to be oppressed since their supply of strength, love, and other emotional resources can never be depleted” (Shaw 2005a: 146); the Hottentot Venus, with her protruding buttocks, is a symbol of hypersexuality, promiscuity, and danger that can corrupt pure whiteness (Hobson 2003). Therefore, we have to look at the discourses, representations, and experiences of thick Black women and fat Black women separately, acknowledging the similarities as well as the diferences, the places of community as well as the sites of divergence, to ensure that the struggles of fat Black women do not remain invisible. Scholars such as Andrea Shaw (2005a, b, 2006), Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2003), and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes (2001) have already taken up this work. Finally, if we are to account for the full range of representations, self-articulations, and lived experiences of thick Black female bodies, we must complicate this body, not only in terms of historical period, class, gender, and culture, but also in terms of queer positionalities and identities. Using Petermon and Spencer’s (2019) concept, we need to employ a “queer Black feminist critical lens” to our interrogations of thick Black female bodies, which “centers the lives and experiences of queer Black women” and focuses on people “often ignored or intentionally and violently excluded not only from public memory and academic research, but from life itself in many cases” (4).

Related topics Fat activism and beauty politics Some’s thin, some’s voluptuous but they all fne: feminine beauty in black publications 1827–1909

References Alexander, Simone. 2014. African diasporic women’s narratives: Politics of resistance, survival, and citizenship. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi. 2006. “Fabricating identities: Survival and the imagination in Jamaican dancehall culture.” Fashion Theory 10(3): 1–24. Barnes, Natasha. 2000. “Body talk: Notes on women and spectacle in contemporary carnival.” Small Axe 1: 93–105. Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Tamara. 2003. “Strong and large? Exploring relationships between deviant womanhood and weight.” Gender & Society 17(1): 111–121. Beckles, Hilary. 1999. Centering “woman”: Gender discourses in Caribbean slave society. Kingston: Ian Randle. Boyce Davies, Carole. 2010. “Black/female/bodies carnivalized in spectacle and space,” in Deborah Willis (ed.) Black Venus 2010: They Called Her Hottentot. Philadelphia: Temple University Press (pp. 186–199). Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Cooper, Carolyn. 1995. Noises in the blood: Orality, gender and the “vulgar” body of Jamaican popular culture. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2004. Soundclash: Jamaican dancehall culture at-large. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cummings, Ronald. 2012/2013. “Jamaican female masculinities: Nanny of the Maroons and the genealogy of the man-royal author(s).” Journal of West Indian Literature 21(1/2): 129–154. Durham, Aisha. 2012. “‘Check on it:’ Beyoncé, Southern booty, and Black femininities in music video.” Feminist Media Studies 12(1): 35–49. Gentles-Peart, Kamille. 2016. Romance with voluptuousness: Caribbean women and thick bodies in the U.S. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Bumpah politics ———. 2018. “Controlling beauty ideals: Caribbean women, thick bodies, and white supremacist discourse.” Women’s Study Quarterly 46(1/2): 199–214. ———. 2020. “‘Fearfully and wonderfully made’: Black Caribbean women and the decolonization of thick Black female bodies.” Feminism and Psychology 30(3): 306–323. Harewood, Susan. 2006. “Transnational soca performances and gendered re-narrations of Caribbean nationalisms.” Social and Economic Studies 55(1 & 2): 25–48. Hobson, Janell. 2003. “The ‘batty’ politic: Toward an aesthetic of Black female body.” Hypatia 18(4): 87–105. ———. 2005. Venus in the dark: Blackness and beauty in popular culture. Great Britain: Routledge. hooks, bell. 1992. Black looks: Race and representation. Boston: South End Press. Mason, Katherine. 2013. “Social stratifcation and the body: Gender, race, and class.” Sociology Compass 7(8): 686–698. McKay, James & Helen Johnson. 2008. “Pornographic eroticism and sexual grotesquerie in representations of African American sportswomen.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 14(4): 491–507. Morgan, Jennifer. 1997. “‘Some could suckle over their shoulder:’ Male travelers, female bodies, and the gendering of racial ideology, 1500–1770.” William and Mary Quarterly 54(1): 167–92. Petermon, Jade A. and Leland G. Spencer. 2019. “Black queer womanhood matters: Searching for the queer herstory of Black Lives Matter in television dramas.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21(1): 1–18. Poran, Mayan. 2006. “The politics of protection: Body image, social pressures, and the misrepresentation of young Black women.” Sex Roles 55(11): 739–755. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Schultz, Jaime. 2005. “Reading the catsuit: Serena Williams and the production of blackness at the 2002 U.S. Open.” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 29(3): 338–357. Sedgwick, Eve. 1990. Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy D. 1999. Black Venus: Sexualized savages, primal fears, and primitive narratives in French. Durham: Duke University Press. Shaw, Andrea. 2005a. “The other side of the looking glass: The marginalization of fatness and blackness in the construction of gender identity.” Social Semiotics 15(2): 143–152. ———. 2005b. “‘Big fat fsh:’ The hypersexualization of the fat female body in calypso and dancehall.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 3: 2. ——— 2006. The embodiment of disobedience: Fat Black women’s unruly political bodies. Oxford: Lexington Books. Springer, Jennifer. 2007. “‘Roll It Gal’: Alison hinds, female empowerment, and calypso.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8(1): 93–129. Tate, Shirley A. 2016. “A tale of two Olympians: Beauty, ‘race,’ nation,” in S. Irvin (ed.) Body aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press (pp. 94–109). Townsend Gilkes, Cheryl. 2001. If it wasn’t for the women…: Black women’s experience and womanist culture in church and community. Maryknoll: Orbis.

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19 ROOTED On Black women, beauty, hair, and embodiment Kristin Denise Rowe

In early 2020, it seemed that everyone was talking about Black hair. The Matthew A. Cherry short flm “Hair Love” received the award for best animated short flm during the 92nd Academy Awards. During Cherry’s acceptance speech, he spoke in support of the CROWN Act, which stands for “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair.” First introduced in California in January 2019, the act aims to ensure protection against discrimination based on hair texture and protective styles, and it has since been made law in seven states. The legislation has been led by the CROWN Coalition, founded by Dove beauty brand, National Urban League, Color of Change, and the Western Center of Law & Poverty. For some, both Cherry’s Academy Award win and his name checking of the CROWN Act were an eye-opening look into how Black hair and beauty politics shape the lived experiences of Black people in the United States. For many Black women and femmes, the moment was a familiar nod to the experiences that they know from deep in their roots. Hair has always been integral to Black women’s lived experiences. It provides a way for them to connect and communicate with other Black women, such as in physical spaces like beauty salons (Boylorn 2017; Jacobs-Huey 2006). It provides a space for embodied forms of self-expression, that is, through the stylization of cornrows, braids, wigs, and sew-in extensions. Mothers, aunts, sisters, and grandmothers socialize Black girls into Black womanhood by teaching them hair practices (hooks 2001). Meanwhile, Black hair has also been politicized through larger colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist world-building. Here, Black women’s hair is hyper-scrutinized and held to longstanding and narrow hegemonic standards of beauty, which privilege straighter hair and loose, wavy curl patterns – known colloquially and intra-racially as “good hair” (Byrd & Tharps 2014; Mercer 1994; Patton 2006; Rooks 2000). For many Black women, hair is also an extension of their bodies – tied to salient, afective understandings of their embodied experiences. In understanding the histories and political contexts for Black women’s relationship to their hair, we fnd revealed intimacies, (re)negotiations, (re)articulations, and radical possibilities of Black women’s embodiment and the potentiality of “beauty” as a construct. This chapter has four key objectives: frst, I review relevant literature about Black women’s relationship to beauty. Second, I historicize Black women’s hair practices and politics, 186

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as well as their dynamic, shifting, and heterogenous relationships to beauty culture. Third, I chart the expansion of the recent contemporary natural hair movement, in which a critical mass of Black women has chosen to forego chemically relaxing their hair in favor of “natural” hairstyles. Finally, I ofer some future directions in which the study of Black women’s relationship to hair and beauty culture can expand, including transnational global analysis, the burgeoning feld of Black girlhood studies, and Black queer and trans relationships to beauty. My analysis of Black women, hair, and beauty culture uses hair as a vehicle for recovering the agency and interiority within Black women’s uses of their bodies, within a cultural landscape that constantly tries to tell them who and what they are.

Black women and beauty politics Since modernity, as a product of colonialism and slavery, Eurocentrism and anti-Black racism interact in order to denigrate what are viewed as phenotypically “Black” features. In terms of concepts of beauty, this interaction results in a privileging of features associated with whiteness, including pale skin, long and straight hair, and thin angular noses. Meanwhile, dark skin, kinky hair, and large round noses are denigrated (Byrd and Tharps 2014; Hunter 2005; Lake 2003). Acceptance of Eurocentric beauty ideals has been documented across populations of people of color, and across the African diaspora. Within this context, the idea that straightened hair is indicative of low self-esteem, lack of political consciousness, or assimilationist tendencies, while natural hair is indicative of an imagined polar opposite, has existed across time and space. The notion can be traced to global Black liberation movements stretching back to the early 1900s, including: Garveyism (United States/Jamaica), Rastafarianism ( Jamaica), Black Power (United States, United Kingdom, Anglophone Caribbean), Afro-Black aesthetics (Brazil), Black Consciousness (South Africa), and Negrismo (Dominican Republic). Margaret Hunter (2005) argues that these beauty standards serve the interest of two privileged social groups: white people and men. They allow whiteness to continue to be privileged as most beautiful of all, while maintaining patriarchal society, as women divide, compete, and are ranked regarding who is allowed space within the marketplace of beauty. In a world where qualities such as beauty, femininity, and delicacy are socially rewarded in women, these socially constructed standards of beauty ideals have material stakes. Historically “tests” were done to determine if Black people’s skin was light enough, or their hair was “good” enough to be accepted in certain social spaces. While evaluations like the “brown paper bag test” functioned to police skin tones, evaluations like the “comb test” concurrently policed hair textures. Obiagele Lake’s work depicts advertisements for products as far back as the 1880s that promised to make “kinky hair grow long and wavy” (2003: 54). The “good” hair/“bad” hair dichotomy is also linked to questions of maintenance, as some Black women feel that “bad” hair needs to be straightened and styled, while “good” hair is more ready-to-wear (Robinson 2011). As Tracey Owens Patton states, this hierarchy of hair textures “does not come solely from the African American community but also from the Euro American community, which promotes the acceptable standard of beauty” (2006: 39). While “good” hair is often conceptualized as a marker of bi-racial or multi-racial identity, “nappy” Afro-textured hair is accordingly associated with people who are “fully” Black, a set of assumptions dating back to slavery. As documented in slave narratives, “good hair was thought of as long and lacking in kink, tight curls, and frizz. And the straighter the better. Bad hair was the antithesis, namely African hair in its purest form” (Byrd & Tharps 2014: 18). 187

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Black feminist scholars have argued for the specifcity of Black women’s experiences, as well as the potentiality for Black women to reclaim ownership of their bodies and their understandings of beauty. Janell Hobson argues Black women have historically been erased or othered (that is, hypersexualized, made “grotesque”) within the landscape of beauty (Hobson 2018). For Hobson, Black women have by necessity carved out spaces to reclaim and recover “beauty” for themselves, such as in the flms of Black director Julie Dash – of Daughters of the Dust (1991) acclaim (Hobson 2018). Black feminist scholars have consistently expanded and complicated ideas of beauty, by maintaining that women of color have a unique relationship to beauty, one that is shaped by more than blanket experiences of sexism and misogyny. Instead, specifcity is necessary, because notions of beauty are defned and shaped by interlocking and intersecting systems of oppression. Historian Tanisha Ford (2015) argues that across diferent spaces and times in global Black history, Black women have used clothing, hairstyles, and accessories to construct counter-hegemonic, context specifc forms of “soul style.” Meanwhile, Maxine Leeds Craig argues that it is most helpful to understand Black women’s experiences through multiple standards of beauty, which are contextual, moveable, and varied. She states: I suggest that we look at beauty as a gendered, racialized, and contested symbolic resource. Since beauty is contested, at any given moment there will be multiple standards of beauty in circulation. By thinking about competing beauty standards and their uses by men and women in particular social locations, we can ask about the local power relations at work in discourses and practices of beauty and examine the penalties or pleasures they produce. (2006: 160) In any given historical context, Black women navigate a complex set of expectations which may involve region, race, gender, class, political orientation, color, and more. For example, Craig’s analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American beauty contests reveals more complicated patterns regarding skin tone preferences (Craig 2002). Or, Craig’s reading of the practices of middle-class Black women from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century reveals that Black women’s adornment was likely to be shaped by their region, class, and the politics of respectability. In each of these cases, the context, and how Black women “negotiated” that context, is key. As Craig pushes back against the idea of a singular, Eurocentric standard of beauty that Black women are measured up against, she and other beauty scholars of color continue the work of interrogating entrenched assumptions that have existed within beauty literature. Work such as Craig’s complicates a tendency of analysis on beauty to fall into binaries and dichotomies that mark the ways that beauty culture is either “good” or “bad” for women. Black women in particular fnd themselves uniquely situated within this landscape, as they may be situated in binaries that are uniquely raced, gendered, and classed. Black women navigate a complex landscape in terms of the ways their hair and beauty practices are politicized. For decades, both scholarly and popular discourse have encouraged us to view Black women’s hair practices in direct relationship to what we now know as “Eurocentric” standards of beauty. Through this lens, much of how we understand Black hair politics is reactionary, located within a dichotomous framework that holds Afros, African printed scarves, and cornrows as “subversive” and “liberatory,” meanwhile hair weaves, “relaxers” (chemical straighteners), and straightened hair are indicative of assimilation (at best) and self-hatred (at worst). Following this logic, each day Black women make choices to adorn their bodies that 188

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either reify or disrupt a larger system of oppression. But in the twenty-frst century, what are the limits of still understanding these choices as a zero-sum game? Within this binary, Black women’s agency, narratives, and experiences are often obscured. The complex constellation of interlocking factors that inform how Black women experience and conceptualize beauty at any given moment – including nationality, gender identity, sexuality, region, class, size, and ability – are made invisible. Indeed, many contributors to both popular and scholarly discourse have reinforced a dichotomous way of understanding hair practices. Consider the huge success of the 2010 flm by Black male comedian Chris Rock entitled Good Hair. Much of the flm is spent pathologizing Black women for the amount of time, money, and efort they spend on straightening, styling, and installing extensions to their hair (Carr 2013). The flm engages in “playing in the dark” through the dominant ideological gaze. Toni Morrison describes playing in the dark as framing through “racial object” instead of “racial subject” (1993: 90). Not only is whiteness centered in the flm in that “wanting to be white” is given as the central reason for common Black hair practices, but whiteness is also centered in that Black hair culture is constantly discussed in relationship to whiteness. White standards, white people, and the white gaze lurk in the background of the flm, rather than defning the contours of a Black hair culture that exists at least partially on its own terms. Kobena Mercer (1994) ushers in one of the frst post-modern interventions in understandings of Black hair politics, by allowing space for hybridization, creolization, improvisation, and diversity. Mercer’s work is crucial because it reframes Black people (and hair practices) in a way that underscores their agency, multiplicity, fexibility, and creativity. This reframing feels crucial to Black women in particular, who are more likely to be objectifed and judged on their physicality. Shirley Anne Tate extends Mercer’s work in ways that center Black women and Black feminism. Tate argues that beauty is something that is done – through mimicry, hybridity, and performativity. Thus, she “sees women as having agency in terms of beauty practices, getting pleasure from them and being empowered by stylizations” (2009: 11). For example, many within both academic and popular discourse may argue that Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s and other Black women’s wearing of long, thick, blonde weaves is actually a refection of their self-hatred of their own shorter, “kinky” hair. However, based on her interviews with Black women, Tate argues that they see styles like this one as playful, performative, and one of many available options. For Tate, styles like these purposefully exaggerate the “artifce” or the artifcial – playing with concepts of “natural” and serving as props Black women use to have fun. Meanwhile, Amber Jamilla Musser does very diferent work to disrupt the self-love/selfhate binary (2016). She thinks about the texture of Black hair through the notion of “defensiveness,” and argues that conversations around it actually “work to produce an ideology of black female diference” (2) Musser states: The narratives I explore juxtapose assimilation and radicality, “naturalness” and toxicity. Though these fantasies around hair and agency difer, they both produce the black female body as the primary source of agency and resistance. In these contexts hair makes a diference. It marks individuality, normativity, and desirability. However, this agency through hair is, I argue, illusory. Hair is situated as a defense against structures (neoliberalism, colonialism, modernity) that already compromise the possibility of agency in deep and complex ways. The schism between the vulnerability of the black female body and the desire to make hair signify resistance results in a defensive posture. (8) 189

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Musser pushes back against viewing embodied practices as a space of agency for Black women, because they all remain confned to certain scripts, informed by systems of “desire, capital, and power” (2016: 8). She suggests that these very concepts around Black women’s hair texture reinscribe diference and foreclose possibilities for agency. Simidele Dosekun (2016) rethinks the ways that weaves, or sew-in hair extensions, are understood in relationship to Black femininity. She addresses the assumed link between the wearing of weaves and self-hatred, while situating it specifcally in the context of her subjects as upper middle class, Nigerian, millennial women. Dosekun’s work addresses not only racialized assumptions, but binaries of “Western” versus “African” forms of expression via hair, as well. Dosekun argues that the weave is an “unhappy” (from scholar Sara Ahmed) technology of Black femininity, a way or style of doing Black femininity. The use of the weave may be built on “unhappy” histories of Black hair, but it is indeed a part of Black femininity, rather than a simple mimicking of whiteness. For Dosekun, this perspective allows us to: “admit the weave into Black femininity,” “depathologise” and “de-psychologise” the practice, and also decenter whiteness from our understandings of beauty. Dosekun states: “Understanding the weave as unhappy technology allows us to keep white supremacy frmly in view yet without reducing blackness and black subjectivity to it” (2016: 68). Scholars such as Rebecca Coleman and Mónica Moreno Figueroa ask us to take seriously the role of afect in our understandings of beauty (2010). In considering afect, we become less focused on beauty practices themselves and more on how women experience beauty. Coleman and Figueroa use Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism,” to understand beauty as an aspiration to normalcy that is simultaneously “optimistic and cruel,” “specifc and imaginary.” Questions surrounding “beauty” have held a signifcant and divisive space within both feminist and anti-racist work for many years. Far from trivial, beauty is important because it encompasses so many tensions: the individual versus the structural, how bodies are read versus the gendered ways people self-present, specifc sub-cultural understandings versus normative or “mainstream” understandings. Systems are mapped onto the body through our ideas of beauty, including nationalism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, capitalism, racism, sexism, sizeism, ableism, and colorism. Beauty culture often reifes these systems, while also providing a space to critique, interrogate, and re-negotiate these systems. Beauty addresses these tensions and contradictions in ways that feel close to so many people, because they are so “embodied” – people move around the world in their bodies all day, every day, for their entire lives. Black women, within their bodies, fnd themselves at the intersection of these systems (Shusterman 2011; Taylor 2016). Meanwhile, they have always used their bodies – and hair in particular – to self-express and to navigate these systems.

Mapping the roots of Black hair (pre-Black power movement) During Reconstruction and into the early twentieth century, Black hair care entrepreneurship and beauty shops boomed, ushering in legendary entrepreneurs such as Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C.J. Walker (Chapman 2012; Gill 2010). The buying and selling of hair goods was inherently politicized. The discourse around the selling of hair care products was linked to the “racial uplift,” an ideology often rooted in middle class respectability politics. Byrd and Tharps relatedly maintain: …It is the story of two hair-care capitalists, Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C.J. Walker, that best illustrates the way Black hair was used to make money while simultaneously helping to build up the race. The story of these two women also illuminates a 190

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theme that will be seen throughout the modern history of Black hair in America – the contradictions that seem to lie at the core of creating an industry that is pro-Black while pushing an agenda of altering or “improving” on Black features by making them appear “whiter.” (2014: 31) As Tifany M. Gill argues, Black beauty shops have been a site of activism since the early 1900s, and Black women beauticians have consistently been politically active for decades. From 1900 to 1930, “Black beauticians fostered the social, economic, and political networks that bridged the discourses of the black business community, the black women’s club movement, as well as the New Woman and New Negro movements” (2010: 5). For Gill, throughout US history, Black women beauticians have been in a prime position to do this kind of political work: they have had physical space to gather and organize, they have remained economically autonomous within the Black community, and they have held spaces for Black social life. Black people’s responses to beauty culture norms have always been varied and complex, as this boom in Black women’s haircare entrepreneurship sometimes seemed to sit in ideological opposition with the politics of racial uplift ideology, Black nationalism and Garveyism, despite that these constituents often worked together. For example, in 1920s, Pan-Africanists in urban spaces (followers of Garvey) publicly denounced hair straightening, while praising “kinky” hair and other “African” physical features as a political rejection of white centered standards of beauty. However, even these moments were layered, as Byrd and Tharps note: Marcus Garvey, who fercely denounced straight hair, owned and operated a newspaper, Negro World, that devoted approximately two-thirds of its advertising to hair products, including straighteners. And Garvey’s Negro World was not the only Black newspaper that flled its pages with text that condemned straightening yet carried advertising for straightening products. (2014: 39) Indeed, Black hair during the frst half of the twentieth century ofered layered questions at the intersection of political ideology, Black entrepreneurship, and standards of beauty that still inform the ways we think about hair today. Black women found themselves at the center of these debates, while continuing to innovate and create new ways to style, groom, and maintain their hair.

“Black is Beautiful” and Black power Prior to the 1960s, it was extremely unusual for a Black woman to be seen out in public without straightened hair or a wig. However, as Black politicization and activism spread over the years, more Black people began wearing their hair natural. Some of the frst women to ever wear their hair natural in critical numbers were young women on historically Black college campuses, such as Howard University (Craig 2002; Ford 2015). Women in SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) began wearing their hair natural, and soon they began to have a certain “look” that usually included natural hair. Stokely Carmichael’s “Black is beautiful” speech took place in 1966, and by 1968 the phrase “Black is beautiful” was a popular slogan. During the late 1960s, the Afro became 191

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one physical marker of a politically conscious, “Black and proud” person. Aesthetically, within these circles, a space was opened up where unstraightened hair could be seen as beautiful. The Afro became a symbol of Black authenticity and political commitment during the movement. Here, the Afro as an aesthetic choice helped unite people within the movement, standing in for or masking real ideological divides. Afrocentric thinker Maulana Karenga endorsed the Afro hairstyle at the time, as he suggested that love for and recognition of Black women’s “natural” beauty could be a test of a man’s “real” Black consciousness. Similarly, the Nation of Islam politicized natural hair, though often women in the Nation covered their hair. However, like previously in history with the Garveyites, the Nation of Islam’s relationship to natural hair was rife with contradictions. The Nation denounced straightened hair, yet they featured it in its ads. They advocated Black-owned businesses, but were ambivalent regarding the lucrative nature of Black-owned salons (Craig 2002). Indeed, while the 1960s are often romanticized as a time of widespread love of natural hair and Blackness, the time period was complex in terms of hair politics. Through the voices of Black women who were there at the time, Craig draws out some of the layered feelings Black women felt as they were wearing their Afros. Craig’s text also reveals the varied reasons that women went natural in the frst place during the time. Some women went natural because of their newfound political consciousness, but others did it for other reasons: all of their friends were doing it, they thought “conscious” men would fnd them more physically attractive, or they just wanted to pick a fght with their mothers. My purpose here is not to undermine the radical political shifts that were happening at the time, or to downplay the prevalence and impact of Afros and the “Black is beautiful” movement. My aim is to humanize and complicate how Black women actually experienced this time period, giving reverence to the complex and contradictory nature of Black women’s embodied experiences. For me, one way to do this work is to continue to complicate the idea that there was something inherently liberatory about “going natural.” Black feminist foremother Michele Wallace spells out some of these tensions she felt during the period in her brilliant essay “Anger in Isolation: A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood” (Wallace 1996). In part, the essay discusses how women were objectifed and minimized within many organizational spaces during the Black power movement, and how these experiences helped lead her to Black feminism. Wallace went natural within the context of the movement, but felt objectifed, policed, and aesthetically inadequate, even among the “conscious” crowd. She notes: So I was again obsessed with my appearance, worried about the rain again – the black woman’s nightmare – for fear that my huge, full afro would shrivel up to my head (Despite blackness, black men still didn’t like short hair.) […] The message of the black movement was that I was being watched, on probation as a black woman. (1996: 222) Her words underscore a number of important points regarding this time period and natural hair. One, the decision to go natural was a loaded one, and it was expected of most “conscious” “proud Black women.” Also, the passage reveals the ways these decisions were uniquely gendered, wrapped up in ideals of femininity and beauty – and long hair as an indicator of both. Her words also speak to the ways that some Black women felt they were policed, “watched,” and “on probation” in terms of their bodies. Finally, the passage suggests 192

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that Wallace – and perhaps other women like her – found herself grappling with standards of beauty even in the context of a larger, ostensibly “pro-Black beauty” natural hair movement. How a Black woman chose to wear her hair was (and remains) a “public” matter. Even writer, scholar, and activist Angela Davis, a woman whom many consider Queen of the Afro, has written about the ambivalence she eventually held toward being associated with a large Afro. She states, “It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a generation following the events which constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo” (2001: 201).She calls it ironic that she is remembered as “the Afro,” when she was simply copying “the Afro” from other women at the time. Kobena Mercer interrogates the very assumptions that “the Afro as subversive” concept rests on, noting, “It should be clear that what we [are/were] dealing with are New World creations of black people’s culture” and that there has been “no preexisting referent” for the Afro hairstyle in any “actually existing’ African cultures” (1994:114). He also asks, The historical importance of Afro and Dreadlocks hairstyles cannot be underestimated as marking a liberating rupture, or “epistemological break,” with the dominance of white bias. But were they really that “radical” as solutions to the ideological problematization of black people’s hair? (104) Mercer responds to his own question by discussing how each of these styles “became rapidly depoliticized and, with varying degrees of resistance, both were incorporated into mainstream fashion within the dominant culture” (105).

1970s and beyond Indeed, by the mid-1970s, the Afro was much more associated with trendiness, disco, and being “hip” than radical politics. Afro wigs became popular nationwide across races, and sex symbols of the mid-1970s such as Blaxploitation flm star Pam Grier and the character Thelma from the sitcom Good Times allowed the Afro to be viewed as sexy (Craig 2002; Ford 2015). Eventually, the Afro was subsumed by the mainstream, and decimated by the growing conservatism of the 1980s. Byrd and Tharps note: For some Blacks the reason for getting rid of the Afro was less dramatic and more pragmatic. Many brothers and sisters of the revolution had to get a job. With drastic cutbacks in state and federal aid to cities and social programs, many jobs available to people who had stayed on the fringe of the mainstream were now shutting down. (2014: 66) Instead, during the 1980s, the jheri curl became popular, and many women wanted “big” hairstyles, a la then popular talk show host Oprah Winfrey’s hair. The 1980s brought about a crackdown on natural hair, as several court cases involving employment discrimination related to hair took place. For example, the 1981 case of Rogers vs. American Airlines involved the rights of employees to wear braids in the workplace (Caldwell 1991). In this case and many like it, Black women were told to unbraid their hair, disguise their braids by wearing a bun, or cover them with a wig. Of cases like these, Paulette M. Caldwell says, “The forcible covering up of a black woman’s hair – connotes a demeaning servitude that persists even in the face of changes…” (Caldwell 1991: 390). The 193

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policing of Black women’s hairstyles in accordance with standards of beauty and notions of “professionalism” and “polish” has been consistent throughout history. The 2019 CROWN Act has attempted to legislate away these forms of workplace discrimination.

Building a new natural During the 1990s, there were many options available for Black hairstyles. Indeed, Black people were choosing from a number of hairstyles, and hoping their employers did not complain. Weaves, perms, wigs, locs, fat ironed hair were all possibilities to choose from. Braided extensions also found popularity, as recording artist Brandy and superstar Janet Jackson (in the hit 1993 flm Poetic Justice) both wore long box braids. Meanwhile, as technology improved, weaves and hair extensions became less expensive and more easily available. The weave market exploded into the early 2000s.

Natural hair in media and cultural representations: 1990s – early 2000s The late 1990s into the early 2000s brought about a trend in rhythm and blues music often called “neo soul.” The sub-genre found its roots in soul music, while also incorporating jazz, funk, hip-hop, pop, fusion, and African music. Music critics have noted its traditional R&B infuences, conscious-driven lyrics, and the strong presence of women as defning characteristics. Most pertinently, artists of the neo-soul genre were often associated with a more “natural” or “Afrocentric” look, which of course included their hairstyles. Grammy-award winning artist Lauryn Hill was known for her long, thick dreadlocks, while the legendary Erykah Badu wrapped her hair in colorful, tall scarves. India.Arie, whose debut album Acoustic Soul was released in 2001, was also associated with these kinds of hair scarves and a “natural” aesthetic. Other debut albums from this moment by natural haired women included: Alicia Keys with her cornrows debuting Song in A Minor in 2001, Jill Scott and her Afro debuting Who is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds Vol. 1 in 2000, and Angie Stone and her Afro on the cover of her solo debut album Black Diamond in 1999. The neo-soul moment was an important pre-cursor for what we now know as the natural movement, as many women during this time did go natural, or at least had more space for imagining they could. The moment expanded the representations of successful Black women artists and their conceptualizing of beauty and self-presentation. As the neo-soul trend phased out and the 2000s were in full swing, the business of weave extensions continued to boom, supported by weave-loving superstars like Beyoncé Knowles (Byrd and Tharps 2014). However, little moments of representation continued to shake things up regarding Black women and hair. For example, the protagonist of the hit UPN sitcom Girlfriends, attorney Joan Clayton, wore her natural hair throughout the series. Clayton was played by Black bi-racial actress Tracee Ellis Ross, today an icon and “hair inspiration” in many natural hair internet-based circles (Rowe 2019). Chris Rock’s 2009 documentary Good Hair, while at times problematic, also shook up the conversations around hair politics. A constellation of factors has allowed room for a critical mass of Black women to go against conventional beauty standards, decades of habit, and their own forms of self-presentation in order to begin to wear their hair natural during the early 2000s – the period now known as the contemporary natural hair movement. However, as this history demonstrates, Black women have always been negotiating this landscape. They have never been a monolithic group of passive consumers who conform to a singular, overpowering, Eurocentric standard of beauty. Therefore, many Black women had been wearing their hair natural before the late 194

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2000s. Many other Black women wanted to, or at least would have been comfortable with, wearing their hair natural pre-late 2000s, but simply did not have the tools, available hair products, or knowledge base to do so. The natural hair movement fourished in its flling of this gap in availability of necessary knowledge, products, and tools.

#TEAMNATURAL: the twenty-frst-century movement for natural hair Along with media moments and economic shifts, the 2000s also brought about another potentially important factor to the natural hair movement – a broader interest in organic products and an interest in environmentalism and “going green.” As Byrd and Tharps point to, the 2000s brought required recycling to neighborhoods, Al Gore’s global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, more environmentally friendly (“green”) versions of familiar household products, and practices such as re-useable bags at the grocery store. Byrd and Tharps capture this moment, stating: Soon enough everybody was doing it [going green]. And haircare was right in the mix. For many black women, going green initially meant buying shampoos and conditioners that didn’t contain harmful ingredients like sodium lauryl sulfate and parabens. […] So, of course it came to pass that these same women began to question their hair-care practices, particularly those who straightened their hair with chemical relaxers. (2014: 179) The frst natural hair and beauty expo, called the “Annual World Natural Hair & Healthy Lifestyle Event” took place in Atlanta, Georgia in 2006. Hosted by Black natural hair product brand Taliah Waajid, the annual expo features tutorials, product sales, demonstrations, and social events. This World Natural Hair Health and Beauty Show, which occurs every year in Atlanta, went from drawing about 8,000 visitors in 2006 in its frst year to about 50,000 in 2011 – nearly fve times the number of visitors (Bey 2011). Because Atlanta is known for its large and diverse Black population, it was likely among the frst and most thriving natural hair scenes in the nation Popular natural hair blogger, psychotherapist, and infuencer Nikki Walton recalls “going natural” in 2006, with the help of one of the frst natural hair websites as we understand them today: NaturallyCurly.com. In 2008, she began her own website CurlyNikki.com. Today, Walton has published two books, appeared on the television show Dr. Oz, and still manages CurlyNikki.com. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the proliferation and fourishing of social media, message boards were a major way that like-minded people communicated about topics online. According to Patrice Yursick, creator of the natural hair website Afrobella, the frst natural hair message board was launched in 2002 (Rocque 2019). It was called Nappturality, and it was the natural hair internet hub at the time. Yursick recalls, We shared a lot of information there. It was the frst time that people were able to share their voice and to share what was working for them and get that, “Yes, girl!” validation that you weren’t able to get in your day to day life. (Rocque 2019) Yursick recalls that at this time, wearing natural hair was much less popular and accepted, so the message boards also provided a space for natural-haired women to vent about experiences such as family and bosses who were unaccepting of their hair. Still, Yursick wanted 195

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a natural hair space that was more like a magazine – covering Black culture and lifestyle along with hair talk. So, she launched Afrobella in 2006 (Rocque 2019). Yursick recalls the true take of of the natural hair movement as the year 2010. Indeed, many dates and statistics chart the origins of the contemporary natural hair movement somewhere between 2007 and 2010. Around this time, a critical mass of Black women stopped chemically relaxing their hair (“relaxing” meaning chemically straightening) and began wearing natural hairstyles (Byrd and Tharps 2014; Muther 2014; Saro-Wiwa 2012; Yawson 2014). From 2008 to 2013, chemical hair relaxer sales decreased from $206 million to $152 million, and from 2008 to 2013, there was a steady growth in all Black hair care products except chemical relaxers (Muther 2014). The movement has not been conceptualized as overtly political, but more about selflove, self-acceptance, and a creation of safe spaces that center Black women. Journalist Zina Saro-Wiwa notes: It is not an angry movement. Women aren’t saying their motivation is to combat Eurocentric ideals of beauty. Rather this movement is characterized by self discovery and health. But black hair and the black body generally have long been a site of political contest in American history and in the American imagination. Against this backdrop, the transition movement has a political dimension – whether transitioners themselves believe it or not. Demonstrating this level of self-acceptance represents a powerful evolution in black political expression. (Saro-Wiwa 2012) Saro-Wiwa’s use of “transition movement” and “transitioners” to describe the natural hair movement speaks to intentionality. Many Black women had been wearing their hair without chemical straightening, in “natural” hairstyles, well before what we know as the current natural hair movement. However, the natural hair movement speaks to the large number of Black women who have intentionally chose to “transition” from chemically relaxing or straightening their hair to wearing it natural. Celebrities and the media have played a major part in the development of the natural hair movement, particularly throughout 2012. In February of 2012, then 47-year-old actress Viola Davis caused a buzz online when she wore her own natural, very short, and golden-brown Afro on the red carpet of the Essence Black Women in Hollywood celebratory Oscars luncheon. Also, in 2012, hugely successful talk show host, producer, and owner of the television network OWN, Oprah Winfrey, wore her own natural hair on the cover of her own O magazine’s September issue. After spending decades of episodes on her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show wearing wigs, straightened hair, and curling iron enabled curls, Oprah’s natural debut in print was surprising and significant. Observers took notice, as Hufngton Post writer Julee Wilson said: “Looks like Oprah is the newest passenger on the natural hair bandwagon! The Queen of All Media decided to grace the September 2012 cover of O magazine in all her au naturale glory” (Wilson 2012). It is difcult to think about the proliferation of the natural hair movement in the United States without also thinking about Solange Knowles – particularly Solange’s 2012 hair. Knowles is a visual and recording artist, and the sister of pop superstar Beyoncé KnowlesCarter. In 2009, Solange told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that she would no longer spend as much money and time manipulating her natural hair. She said after cutting her hair of and going natural she felt “free” (Lau 2012). By 2012, she was wearing her natural Afro and serving as the spokesperson for Carol’s Daughter natural haircare line – a position from which she eventually stepped down. In May 2012, Solange did an interview with popular 196

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Black woman’s magazine Essence about her hair and the change. “I honestly was just tired of the energy surrounding my hair,” she said, “So when I cut it, I didn’t think about what anyone else would think” (Corbett 2012). In the interview, Solange notes that she was pleasantly surprised by the number of Black women who said that her natural haircut has inspired them. She states, “I think many people, especially from other cultures, just don’t understand the role hair plays in Black women’s lives. I can now transform the energy surrounding my hair into something way more productive” (Corbett 2012). Later, in June of 2012, Solange responded on Twitter to critics of her natural hair. Critics called Knowles’ hair “dry as heck” and “unkempt,” suggesting that it needed more defnition and styling. Solange responded to the insults with a series of tweets defending her hair. She admonished these online critics, whom she viewed as having nothing better to do than complain about her hair. “My hair is not very important to me… so I don’t encourage it to be important to you” Knowles tweeted (Lau 2012). Like Solange, some Black women do not want their decision to discontinue using a relaxer and going natural to be politicized. They do not wish for their choice to stop relaxing their hair to position them within a larger concept called the natural hair movement. Accordingly, Solange tweeted in June 2012: “I have never painted myself as the Team Natural Vice President,” adding, “I don’t know the lingo” (Lau 2012). Hufngton Post writer Contessa Gayles takes a similar position, noting that in general she pushes back against “categories,” particularly those pertaining to “ethnic identity,” due to the “limiting stereotypes and preconceived notions that never seem to ft [her] diverse heritage and upbringing, and preference for self-determination” (Gayles 2012). While it appears Gayles is afrmative about her own autonomous decision to go natural, she is also reluctant to identify with the natural hair movement label. She maintains she is reluctant to be placed in a box, particularly a racialized one. Positions like Contessa Gayles’ complicate the contours, defnitions, and boundaries of who to include in the natural hair movement. This movement has largely spread via the Internet. Many Black women have created and utilized blogs, YouTube channels, Instagram pages, and Twitter pages to trade pictures, suggestions, product reviews, and tutorials regarding natural hair. Byrd and Tharps describe this movement by its hashtag #TeamNatural, a common hashtag used on Twitter and Instagram to connect and share web links, tutorials, articles, and pictures related to natural hair. The culture gave way to natural hair meet ups, Happy to Be Nappy parties, and even hair cruises. Predictably, the natural hair movement has been commodifed and commercialized. The overall sale of organic hair and body products has been predicted to surpass $13 billion. In 2007, the brand Jane Carter Solutions alone made $1.7 million (Byrd & Tharps 2014: 209). The natural and organic products that Black women were mixing, sharing, and using on their own hair ( jojoba oil, shea butter, argan oil, coconut oil, for example) are now used as points of marketing for larger corporations. Procter and Gamble developed a line called Relaxed and Natural, and accordingly switched their packaging for these products from white to brown (Byrd & Tharps 2014: 208). It has perhaps never made better business sense to “go natural.” The natural hair movement has changed the landscape of how Black women’s hair is being discussed, cared for, and marketed to. Essence now has a reoccurring “natural” hair column, which features products, personal narratives, and lifestyle advice. Superstar Black actresses such as Tamara Mowry and Sanaa Lathan have also used social media as a platform to share their own natural hair journey with their thousands of followers. Nikki Walton’s book Better than Good Hair: The Curly Girl Guide to Healthy, Gorgeous Natural Hair has sold thousands of copies, and was nominated in June 2014 for the 45th NAACP Image Awards 197

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for “Outstanding Literary Work – Debut Author.” It appears that natural hair is here to stay and has made a major imprint on business, media, and culture both within and outside of Black communities.

Commodifcation, hair hierarchies, and the rise of the “Curls” Having considered both the politics of beauty and the natural hair movement in its commodifed form, we can now begin to understand potential relationships between the two. The spreading and commodifcation of the natural hair movement has allowed it to expand to include many non-Black women who have curly hair. Many blog names and product names now function under the unifying, trans-racial banner of “curly” hair (Byrd and Tharps 2014; Lemieux 2014; Yawson 2014). Texturemedia Inc. (TMI), a social platform that engages a multicultural community on hair care, released its fourth annual report, “Texture Trends,” in December 2014. TMI did not release the report to the public, but they did publish a few insights. The survey involved 6,000 participants with “textured” hair via Naturallycurly.com and CurlyNikki.com on topics regarding hair care (Cyk 2014). According to the survey, about 92% of Black participants described their hair as “coily curly,” while 6% said “curly” and only 1% said “wavy.” Meanwhile, about 44% of multi-racial participants called their hair curly, and about 77% of the white participants. Additionally, “curly” haired consumers were more likely to purchase products with “curl” in the title, while women with more “coily” hair were most likely to buy products that said “natural.” These numbers suggest that the opening of the natural hair movement to women with curly hair also equated to an opening of the natural hair movement to multi-racial and non-Black women. Product brands like Curls and Curls Unleashed market to all women with curly hair. Brands such as Mixed Chicks and Miss Jessie’s were some of the frst natural hair products on mainstream shelves and were also designed by and for bi-racial women (Byrd & Tharps 2014). The expanding of the natural hair movement to non-Black women allows more room for the domination of curly textures. Writer Ama Yawson notes, “The curl hegemony makes me fear that one day the natural hair movement will be synonymous with curly hair and kinky textures will be completely eliminated” (2014). Let us again revisit the notion of a hierarchal relationship between “good” and “bad” hair, now mapped onto the natural hair movement. Hair hierarchies within the natural hair movement may feel a bit unexpected and ironic to some, given the association of “the natural” with Black pride and self-love. Byrd and Tharps cite vlogger Naskesha Smith, who they state, Became an online hit for pointing out that a good/bad hair mentality exists in one of the most unexpected areas: the natural hair movement. In 2010, Smith released a video on her popular YouTube channel called “You Natural Hair Girls Make Me Sick!” which claims that there are not enough women with “real African, textured hair” present on many natural hair sites. (Byrd & Tharps 2014: 190) Popular YouTube vlogger Jouelzy posted a video in April 2014 called “So Over the Natural Hair Community & Texture Discrimination.” This video attracted over 126, 382 views, and prompted several video responses that engage Jouelzy’s assertions. The video, which has since been removed from YouTube by Jouelzy herself, discussed the ways in which she 198

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felt she had been overlooked and marginalized by advertisers, sponsors, and some viewers because she has self-described “nappy” hair. As her video stated, she was so deeply afected by what she perceived as unfair treatment within the natural hair community that she now predominantly blogs about pop culture, Black history, and politics, rather than natural hair. Consider the proliferation of “hair typing” within the natural hair movement. The natural hair typing system was frst printed in a 1998 book called Andre Talks Hair by Oprah Winfrey’s hair stylist Andre Walker. Byrd and Tharps describe hair typing as, The numerical system [that] goes from one through four with A, B, and C variations. The straighter the hair, the lower the letter and number. Most Black women fall somewhere between 3B and 4C, though there are many, like Smith, who argue that a substantial amount of natural hair sites spend a lot of time focused on the threes. (Byrd & Tharps 2014: 190) Curlier textures are “3s”; more kinky textures are “4s.” The “kinkiest hair” is often classifed as “4C.” These designations can have pragmatic use, as they can help members of the natural hair community fnd others with similar hair textures. However, Yaba Blay argues, “It is no diferent than talking about ‘grades’ of hair. When we talk about the politics of beauty, it is aligned with and refective of white power and white supremacy. And this exists in the natural hair community” (Byrd & Tharps 2014: 191). It is also important to note that Walker’s initial hair typing system did not include the kinkiest hair textures, that is, the “4C.” It is assumed that at some point within the discourse of the natural hair community, 4C was created and added to chart illustrations (Kenneth 2019). Walker himself has made controversial statements about kinky hair in the past, including his stating: “I always recommend embracing your natural texture. Kinky hair can have limited styling options; that’s the only hair type that I suggest altering with professional relaxing” (Kenneth 2019). As hair texture socio-historically named as “good,” the coveted “3” hair types are often associated with bi-racial or multi-racial people. Lemieux maintains, “there has been too much representation of sisters who have what has been described as ‘multicultural hair’,” and she adds that the natural hair movement is “most powerful” when it encourages the celebration of “all […] biologically-determined hair textures, not just the ones seen in rap videos” (Lemieux 2014). Byrd and Tharps mention bi-racial actress and daughter of Diana Ross, Tracee Ellis Ross, and how many Black women participating in the natural hair movement

Figure 19.1

An illustrated example of a hair typing chart featured on CURLS.biz

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have coveted her hair. They note, “What was rarely discussed was that Ross has a white father, meaning that part of the secret behind her big, bouncy curls was not what she found in a bottle but what was in her gene pool” (Byrd & Tharps 2014: 191).

New directions and future work Much of the scholarship that has been completed on the natural hair movement is most interested in the movement as an Internet-based movement – the mechanisms of social networking, the digital sphere, and the role of media in constructing Black identities (Ellington 2015; Phelps-War & Laura 2016). Tifany Gill (2015) outlines the contours and characteristics of the natural hair movement, and maintains that the space is useful and subversive in its allowing room for self-representation and self-afrmation for women with natural hair. However, Gill also points out limits of the movement in what she argues is a certain policing that happens regarding who or what is actually “natural.” In my own work, I aim to think about the movement as a space that Black women have autonomously created, which has opened up a safe(r) space for them to critique, (re)present, articulate, and negotiate these standards of beauty as Black women. Additionally, I am putting the natural hair movement as an Internet-based space in conversation with other art and pop cultural representations of Black women. Whether online via social and new media, or within more longstanding art and media spaces, Black women are crafting new narratives that refect the multiplicity of the ways they experience, negotiate, and critique normative understandings of beauty and bodies. Today, conferences, books, articles, activism (such as #SayHerName), studies, and mantras (#BlackGirlsAreMagic, #BlackGirlsRock, and #CarefreeBlackGirls) are fourishing – all of which celebrate, investigate, analyze, and advocate for Black girlhood. Books such as Aimee M. Cox’s 2015 Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship highlight young Black women’s experiences. Meanwhile, the new and fourishing feld of “hip-hop feminist pedagogy” works to center young black girls’ worldviews and experiences (Durham et al. 2013). My own work on Black women, standards of beauty, and articulations of natural hair has revealed to me the relevance of Black girlhood in how women understand their hair, their bodies, and beauty today. In 2019 global fast fashion giant H&M came under fre online for its depiction of one Black girl model’s hair. Some argued the online photo featured a careless, racially insensitive portrayal of a young, dark-skinned Black girl’s hair in a “messy” hairstyle (Fasenella 2019). Others argued that the girl’s hair styling was simply a representation of a Black girl with naturally tightly coiled hair texture, and we as the public should be more accepting of Black hair that is not “perfectly” polished (Reese 2019). I am less interested in who is “right” or “wrong,” and more about what discourse like this teaches Black girls about how to understand their hair and bodies. Conversations on social media platforms speak to the ways that Black girls’ hair is hyper-scrutinized. Moving across the globe and to 2016, conficts around dress codes, racism, and Black girls’ hair came to a head at Pretoria High School for Girls in Pretoria, South Africa. The school was founded in 1902, while South Africa was under European colonial rule, and from 1948 to 1990, apartheid previously only allowed white students to enroll in the school. Since 1990, the school has been open to all races. The dress code in the school’s code of conduct banned cornrows, braids, and locs that are more than a centimeter in diameter. Afros were required to be pushed back and tied up. Many students recall being told that they needed to “fx” their hair (Mahr 2016). During fall 2016, over 100 girls at Pretoria High for Girls began protesting the restrictions placed on their natural hair. 200

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The protests spread throughout the country. An online petition against the hair policies garnered over 10,000 signatures (Nicholson 2016), and the hashtag #StopRacismatPretoriaGirlsHigh began trending, calling international attention. In an August 30, 2016 statement, the Gauteng Department of Education, which oversees the Pretoria High School for Girls, said “the mocking of learners’ hairstyles must cease,” and committed to reviewing the school’s code of conduct (Gauteng 2016). The Pretoria protest reminded us all of the global implications of anti-Black racism and colonialism, as well as the diasporic connections we can potentially forge worldwide. For these girls, the protests were about so much more than hair – they were about carving out space to exist in a school, a country, and a system that rarely values them or their bodies. Behind the headlines what does it look like for Black girls to internalize, negotiate, critique, and resist normative beauty standards? Where does their learning around these constructions occur, and how do they think through them? These kinds of questions demonstrate the potentiality at the intersection of Black feminism, beauty studies, and Black girls’ studies. Surely some Black girls love their springy, thick curls. Of course, other Black girls look in the mirror and wish to have totally diferent hair. Still others – perhaps most – may oscillate through these two extremes from day to day, moment to moment. And still others are often completely ambivalent, and they do not care about their hair at all. Exploring the diversity and multiplicity of young Black girls’ experiences may very well reveal the future(s) of Black womanhood and beauty. Alongside questions around transnationality and Black girlhood, future studies of Black women’s hair require us to expand our understandings of gender identity, gender expression, and queerness. Across time and space, Black queer people – and Black queer femmes in particular – have forced us to question, grapple with, and subvert our understandings of what it means to be feminine. How have Black queer and trans femmes sought to build and remake alternative understandings of what femininity is and can look like? If we accept that the current standards of femininity and beauty often exclude Black women (while also profting from their likeness), what might it look like to build something new? The exploration of the intersections of hair and beauty politics, queerness, and transness could take us at least three important places: For one, we must consider how trans women and femmes have been integral to the shaping of beauty practices that we know today. The wigs, styles of make-up, and terms such as “tea” and “shade” that all circulate within beauty culture spaces were all proliferated by trans women and femmes. How do they grapple with and remake understandings of beauty and femininity? As famed trans activist and actress Amiyah Scott (@KingAmiyahScott) tweeted in part on June 25, 2020: “(I say this humbly) my HAIR & makeup assisted in the IG [Instagram] baddie aesthetic that we know today and I think it’s a huge part of my story that should be mentioned.” Indeed, trans women of color like Scott arguably proliferated many of the beauty practices such as lacefront wigs, highly contoured cheekbones, heavily lined lips, and the like that shape social media based standards of beauty today. For two, Black trans women have specifc relationships to beauty and femininity that exist within a larger cisnormative society. Black Hawaiian trans actress, writer, journalist, and activist Janet Mock has been vocal about the ways her own “pretty privilege,” as it intersects with her ability to “pass” as cis, has impacted her life. She states: I am a black and native Hawaiian trans woman (who is often perceived as cis) with brown skin, curly hair, an hourglass size-8 shape. I have symmetrical facial features; a 201

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smooth, even complexion; and a white, straight, wide smile. For me, pretty privilege operates in a myriad of ways depending on the spaces I enter, who is in that space, and whether people already know that I am trans. (Mock 2019) Black trans actress and activist Angelica Ross details her own journey in relationship to hair, beauty, and femininity in a July 2020 interview with Interview magazine: There are so many things that we have to learn to be safe, to perform our femininity: have long hair, have a socially acceptable appearance when it comes to your expression as a woman. In the beginning, it was hard to take of my hair and still see the woman that I see in the mirror, or to take of the makeup and to just be bare bones. Back in 2010, when I quit my job at the Kit Kat Lounge as a showgirl, I had long, relaxed hair. I ended up cutting it of. I wanted to be able to see that I was beautiful, to see the woman in the mirror without everything else, that I didn’t need all of those other things. Now, I’m in a place with my womanhood where whether it’s a lace-front wig or whether it’s not, it’s all divine play to me. They’re all accessories, but none of that stuf defnes me or my womanhood. (Willis 2020) For three, Black femme queer women have always worked to carve out our own understandings of femininity and beauty, beyond a heteronormative male gaze. Where normative standards of beauty have prized long hair as feminine, Black queer femmes such as Ursula from the 1996 crime action flm Set It Of have rocked a short fade cut. As Kara Keeling notes, the Black lesbian butch-femme construction, like all “Black femmes,” has the potential to challenge constructed categories of racism, sexism, and homophobia, because she is “on the edgeline” between many things – “the thought/the unthought” and “the visible/ invisible” (Keeling 2007: 2). For Keeling, the presence of the Black femme (Ursula), points to the “radical elsewhere” that “disturb[s] the production of social life by insisting on the existence of alternatives to existing organizations of social life” (137). Pointing to these kinds of spaces of possibility is beginning to mold more current understandings of how we can understand all Black women and femmes’ relationships to hair and beauty culture in a more nuanced way.

Related topics I do not see myself as anything else than white: Black resistance to racial cosplay blackfshing

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Kristin Denise Rowe Mercer, Kobena. 1994. “Black Hair/Style Politics.” pp. 97–130 in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, edited by Kobena Mercer. New York: Routledge. Mock, Janet. 2019. “Being Pretty Is a Privilege, But We Refuse to Acknowledge It.” Allure. June 28, 2017. Accessed March 28, 2018. https://www.allure.com/story/pretty-privilege Morrison, Toni. 1993. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage. Musser, Amber Jamilla. 2016. “Black Hair and Textures of Defensiveness.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 5(1): 1–19. Muther, Christopher. “Chemical-free Black Hair Is Not Simply a Trend.” The Boston Globe. May 28, 2014. Accessed February 11, 2015. https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2014/05/28/chemicalfree-black-hair-not-simply-trend/kLVdugv5MChUejSkDXoO3J/story.html Nicholson, Greg. 2016. “South African Students Speak Out Against ‘aggressive’ Ban on Afro Hair.” The Guardian, August 31, 2016. Accessed January 20, 2017. Patton, Tracey Owens. 2006. “Hey Girl, Am I More than My Hair? African American Women and Their Struggles with Beauty, Body Image, and Hair.” NWSA Journal 18: 24–51. Phelps-Ward, Robin J. and Crystal T. Laura. 2016. “Talking Back in Cyberspace: Self-Love, Hair Care, and Counter Narratives in Black Adolescent Girls’ YouTube Vlogs.” Gender and Education 28(6): 807–20. Reese, Ashley. 2019. “Everyone Who’s Upset about This Black Girl’s Hair Is Telling on Themselves.” Jezebel, September 20, 2019. Accessed September 23, 2019. https://jezebel.com/everyonewhos-upset-about-this-black-girls-hair-is-tell-1838292958 Robinson, Cynthia L. 2011. “Hair as Race: Why ‘Good Hair’ May Be Bad for Black Females.” Howard Journal of Communications 22: 358–76. Rocque, Starrene Rhett. 2019. “What the Natural Hair Movement Looked Like Before Infuencers.” Broadly, February 27, 2019. Accessed March 28, 2019. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/ article/9kpzj7/natural-curly-hair-infuencers-message-boards Rooks, Noliwe M. 2000. Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rowe, Kristin Denise. 2019. “It’s the Feelings I Wear”: Black Women, Natural Hair, and New Media (Re) negotiations of Beauty. PhD diss (Michigan State University). ProQuest: 13902328. Saro-Wiwa, Zina. 2012. “Black Women’s Transitions to Natural Hair.” The New York Times, May 31, 2012. Shusterman, Richard. 2011. “Somatic Style.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69(2): 147–159. Tate, Shirley Anne. 2009. Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics. Farnham: Ashgate. Taylor, Paul C. 2016. Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Wallace, Michele. 1996. “Anger in Isolation: A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood.” pp. 220–227 in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: New Press. Willis, Raquel. 2020. “I Was Born for this Time: Angelica Ross Is Black, Trans, and Fearless.” Interview. Accessed July 5, 2020. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/angelica-ross-raquel-willisblack-trans-fearless-pose-pride. Wilson, Julee. 2012. “Oprah’s Natural Hair Debuts on Cover of O Magazine September 2012 Issue.” Hufngton Post, August 1, 2012. Accessed January 27, 2019. https://www.hufpost.com/entry/ oprah-natural-hair_n_1729619 Yawson, Ama. 2014. “How to Get Rid of Black Women with Kinky Hair.” The Hufngton Post, July 16, 2014. http://www.hufngtonpost.com/ama-yawson/how-to-get-rid-of-black-kinkyhair_b_5585380.html

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20 “I DO NOT SEE MYSELF AS ANYTHING ELSE THAN WHITE” Black resistance to racial cosplay blackfshing Shirley Anne Tate Introduction Instagram beauty infuencers proft by promoting cosmetics. “Racial cosplay”/“blackfshing” describes white Instagram beauty infuencers attempting to expand their reach to Black consumers by using cosmetics and other stylization to appear Black. This chapter looks at Black women’s online resistance to racial cosplay/blackfshing by two Instagram beauty infuencers, Emma Hallberg and Aga Brzostowska. White women racial cosplaying/blackfshing “ambiguous mulattoes” (Sharpley-Whiting 2007) does not change the racist aesthetic codes of the iconicity of the white body. In performatively producing Black beauty – light skin, hairstyles, small waistline, “thick” legs, big bottom – whiteness remains master signifer which they can call on as racial home and site of privilege. Racial cosplay/ blackfshing is “race transing,” translation of Black looks and transformation of the white body by a Black mask for racial deception. Masking carries the reassurance that playing/ fshing will not interrupt white supremacist privilege and that the aesthetic, political, skin, and afective value of whiteness remains an integral part of white bodies, as we see in the quote from Emma Hallberg in the title. This attempt at “transing-while-white” has met with resistance from Black women on twitter and YouTube asserting racial authenticity, critiquing racial capitalism’s (Robinson 1983) white co-optation of Black economic, cultural, and social capital (Bourdieu 1986) and questioning the white supremacist psyche attached to racial cosplay/ blackfshing. The chapter concludes by locating this as decolonizing resistance to whiteness and its avid consumption of Black women’s bodies. Let us move to looking at racial cosplay/ blackfshing and blackface within “post-race” anti-Black racism.

Racial authenticity versus blackface: white supremacy and “post-race” anti-Black racism Vlogger Annie Nova challenged white YouTubers, notcatart, itsashacat, zacharycrane, and percemakin, who were either using “blackface makeup” themselves or putting “blackface makeup” on non-Black models in 2018 to garner followers. For Nova, make-up erased white skin and was not an anti-racist act, as she illustrated by calling out makeup artist notcatart’s racism. notcatart received half a million views for his makeup with the “hate comments” 205

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receiving racist responses from the makeup artist. Nova also claimed Instagram infuencer zacharycrane was modeling racism and bigotry (https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+ annie+nova&& view=detail& mid=E250BD69487D94AFF99FE250BD69487D94AF F99F&rvsmid=386EEC4FB1006DD6CDF9386EEC4FB1006DD6CDF9&FORM=VD QVAP) accessed 20/4/2019. “Modelling racism and bigotry” for personal gain by whites aligns the cross-gender practice of racial cosplay/blackfshing to blackface. In the Black Atlantic blackface is a cross-gender white supremacist practice performed for fame and money at the expense of African descent people. Blackface minstrelsy involved cross-dressing and “race transing” when whites assumed “Black women’s” bodies in Victorian England. White women blackface minstrels in the United States also performed “racial mimicry” as Topsy for seven decades (Brown 2008: 3). In the nineteenth century in northern cities in the United States, like its Victorian cousin, white men caricatured Black women and men for proft (Lott 1993). Blackface in the United States emerged from white racial fear/ obsession with Black male bodies in which whites’ bodily investments were disavowed through racist ridicule (Lott 1993). White laughter, engendered through white parsing of Blackness, opened whites’ racist constructions of Blacks for ridicule. Blackface masks articulated racial diference for white entertainment, white proft and the instantiation of white supremacy (Tate 2015). However, blackface was not a sign of “absolute white power and control [but] of panic, anxiety, terror and pleasure” (Lott 1993: 6) and restored white supremacy when it was in danger of being unsettled like its UK cousin (De Vere Brody 1998). Reafrmation of British imperial whiteness was its raison d’etre and the white racial performance was also about cisgendered drag. White men’s versions of Black women as feminine “expose[d] the multiple contradictory readings of blackness and femininity that circulated in Victorian culture” (De Vere Brody 1998: 83). Whether performed by white women or men, blackface exhibited the dominant stereotypes of Black women performed for white consumption. This history of racist trauma is the basis of Nova’s critique of these Instagrammers’ erasure of their whiteness for proft through painting themselves Black with HD makeup, the twenty-frst century’s burnt cork. In the makeup lesson, we witness white privilege in the ironic humor of painting oneself Black without ever having to experience anti-Black racism. They have the white skin privilege integral to the Racial Contract, which instantiates a world constructed by those racialized as European whites and their descendants, skewed permanently in their favor (Mills 1997). This world is not questioned by whites or those people of color who accept the contract, as it ofers limitless possibilities because of the circulation of epistemologies of ignorance and the benefts of white supremacy (Mills 1997). We can see some of these epistemologies of ignorance when white women paint on blackness, without ever questioning their own racial position or white supremacy. Painting on blackness denies the liberation struggles which still exist in contexts in which Black people continue to be unfree. Painting on blackness is a symptom and repository of “post-race” racism. “Post-race” racism denies the continuing salience of race, racism, and the politics of Black authenticity grounded in collective experiences of racism and biological conceptions of race in which we are Black if we have “one drop” of Black ancestry. Dara Thurwood takes up the issue of what Black body we are being duped into believing we are seeing by Hallberg’s racial cosplay/blackfshing. For her, “it gets to a point where you [white beauty infuencers] are now trying to pass as someone mixed race and you’re not … that’s when it becomes an issue.” Being non-Black but pretending to be Black “mixed race” is socially, politically, aesthetically, afectively, and economically problematic because 206

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black people just being themselves has always been frowned upon … [there is a continuing] struggle that black women go through to be accepted as who they are… Even now in certain workspaces, black women can’t wear their natural hair out. Thy have to wear weave. They have to press their hair so that it is straight, because to wear an afro or to wear braids or locks is seen as unclean and untidy – it’s not professional. (bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-46427180 accessed 19/4/2019) Thurwood illustrates the irony of racial cosplay/blackfshing in that white women can wear any skin color or hair they like to pass as “mixed race” but no such aesthetic privilege is available to Black women who still live within racist beauty contexts of the “straight hair rule.” Reading racial cosplay/ blackfshing as contemporary blackface through the politics of racial authenticity guaranteed by descent enables us to see it as an iteration in which white appearance stereotypes of Black women also always already have a failure in the repeat (Butler 1993). This failure in the repeat produces something else. That is, an iteration of whiteness that from whatever afective angle – anger, love, hate, envy, fear, contempt, tolerance, greed – must consume Blackness (hooks 1992) by appearing to be Black in order to engage Black recognition as Black. It is Black recognition that is necessary for the blackface beauty infuencers like Hallberg to come into being as Black and to garner followers and monetary proft as a result. We could say that there is a reversal of coloniality’s misrecognition of Blackness because Black recognition exerts biopower (Foucault 1994) within the visual regimes of “race” (Seshadri-Crooks 2000) in racial cosplay/blackfshing. Racial cosplaying/ blackfshing white bodies become sites of racial subjugation in that moment of blackface self-surveillance, self-discipline and self-regulation as they paint themselves into a mimicked/mimicking Blackness in order to deceive Black followers into believing that they are Black. This consumption is at once white supremacist as much as it is an admission that something is needed, “a bit of the other” to spice up dull white life (hooks 1992) and to make money. Racial cosplay/ blackfshing could be a white reaction to a changing beauty landscape in which white beauty as iconic feels under threat because “ambiguous mulatto” (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 2007) looks might be in the ascendancy. This would not be the frst moment that this is the case if we go back to enslavement and colonialism. Then, whether “octoroon,” “mulatto,” or “quadroon,” Black/white “mixed race” women’s bodies were consumed through sexual and reproductive service. Racial cosplay/blackfshing calls up these white colonial aesthetic values in the twenty-frst century. What white racial cosplaying/ blackfshing also call up are memories of torture, “traumatic intimacies” (Sharpe 2010), necropolitical love/hate (Tate 2019) as well as ownership and consumption of Black bodies to the point of physical death. Racial cosplay/ blackfshing remind us that racialized aesthetics are part of the racial libidinal economies that we inhabit where the anti-Blackness of twenty-frst-century white supremacy is linked not only to forms of attraction, afection, and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction and the violence of lethal consumption. [Racial libidinal economies are part of ] the whole structure of psychic and emotional life […] something more than but inclusive of or traversed by […] a “structure of feeling”; it is a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, phobias capable of great mobility and tenacious fxation. (Wilderson 2010: 7) 207

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The anti-Black racism of racial cosplay/ blackfshing is the product of a particular white psyche in the performance of blackface captured in Raymond Williams’ (1977: 132) description of a structure of feeling. He sees this as “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint and tone; specifcally, afective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity.” White beauty infuencers engaged in blackface for proft can keep their white skin at a distance from their profession where it cannot be sullied and assert, as does Hallberg, “I do not see myself as anything other than white.” This practical consciousness of knowing one’s whiteness at the same time as exploiting Black bodies for proft continues the racial capitalism of enslavement and colonialism. Rather than direct use of Black bodies as labor and unit of value, we see instead the twenty-frst century’s white grasp of the value of Black bodies through the multiplier efect of Instagram’s construction of the social, cultural, and economic capitals of racial cosplay/ blackfshing.

Racial cosplay/blackfshing, racial capitalism, and the value of capitals Nicole Nero Gaines (twitter, November 19th, 2018) “White girls if you want to pass as Black how about using your platforms to address the injustices and discrimination actual black people face. Don’t just appropriate. Appreciate the people you are imitating #emmahallberg.” The charges of passing, appropriating, and imitating are made here with #emmahallberg as the example of blackfshing/racial cosplayer. These white women passing as Black, appropriating Black looks and imitating Black women without paying attention to the politics of racial inequality that their racial cosplay/ blackfshing engages, is important if one places this within the operation of racial capitalism. In his path-breaking work, Cedric Robinson (1983: 2) speaks about the pervasiveness of racism from the very beginnings of capitalism’s development within Europe itself Racism, I maintain, was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the “internal” relations of European peoples… The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term “racial capitalism” to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure as a historical agency. Within this historical agency embedded in the grammar of social life including the church we see the emergence of anti-Black racism. This was embedded within the satanic “blacke moore” and “Ethiope” lodged deep within the white European psyche. These were supplemented centuries later by the white European idea of Africans as “a diferent sort of beast; dumb, animal labor, the benighted recipient of the benefts of slavery. Thus, the ‘Negro’ was conceived” (Robinson 1983: 4). Racial capitalism’s construction of “the Negro” in the Global North and South West also had within it notions of ugliness attached to darker African descent skin alongside the beauty of lighter “mixed race” and white skin tones (Nuttall 2006; Tate 2009; Tate 2015). Aesthetics was integral in racial capitalism’s skin trade. 208

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White women involved in racial cosplay/ blackfshing do not attend to this legacy of racism or the part it plays in continuing twenty-frst-century “post-race” anti-Black racism. Anti-Black racism here relates to the cross over monetary value of lighter skinned, loosely curled hair aesthetics within a global aesthetic market in “exotic (but not too dark) looks” (Tate 2015). For example, in April 2019, Naomi Campbell who is of Black and Chinese Jamaican ancestry complained that she was refused work in Asia because she was too dark (https://www. bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-africa-47989838/naomi-campbell-hit-by-fashion-racism-in-asiancountry accessed 21/4/2019). Women must be “racially ambiguous” (Sharpley-Whiting 2007) to have cross-racial, global marketable bodies to be followed as Instagram beauty infuencers. As Wanna Thompson says, “[Instagram is] a breeding ground for white women who wish to capitalise of of impersonating racially ambiguous black women for monetary and social gain” (https://www.theweek.co.uk/98291/what-is-blackfshing accessed 21/4/2019). The critique that white women on Instagram are impersonating racially ambiguous women for monetary and social gain reminds us of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) “capital.” Cultural capital is knowledge and aesthetics, which may be embodied. Social capital emerges from networks of followers, which are convertible into economic capital through institutionalization on Instagram/ Twitter/YouTube as venues for white racial cosplay/blackfshing. These women establish ownership of, and proft from, Black bodies and aesthetics, especially if they dupe Black followers into thinking that they are “Black mixed race.” The critiques of these women’s blackface are critiques of their simulation of the embodied state of the cultural capital of Blackness that comes through descent but also social, personal, and political cost. This simulation does not concentrate on the possessors of this capital but on whiteness itself, so that Blackness is kept at a distance. White racial cosplay/ blackfshing is a racial distancing strategy, which establishes white beauty infuencers as authorities, with legitimate competences because they are “Black mixed race.” Through this misrecognition, they establish distinction that secures material and symbolic proft. Even when they are outed as white through Black women’s critique, their value increases both symbolically and economically because of the fact of their “race” deception and their ability to appeal to a cross-racial market. “Following” beauty infuencers on Instagram and YouTube creates social capital that is reinforced and maintained in exchanges. Even negative comments and dislikes enable the development of racial cosplay/blackfshing social capital because it is the number of followers that matter. This “multiplier efect” (Bourdieu 1986) of Instagram/ YouTube/ Twitter leads to material profts as recognition/misrecognition/negation is afrmed and reafrmed online in terms of the white beauty infuencers’ acquisition, maintenance, and performance of blackness through the surfaces produced by stylization practices. This is how whiteness continues to beneft from the ownership of Black bodies in the twenty-frst century produced by masking whiteness. Annie Nova’s YouTube video about blackfshing agrees with Thompson’s critique of white women’s monetary gain from appropriating Blackness. Nova states that there is a Black aesthetic that many are attempting to capitalize [on]. An aesthetic which many dark-skinned people are still shunned for having all on their own. This takes away the job of promoting brands marketed at Black and “mixed race” women from Black creators, for example, “natural curly hair products”, which are sent to white infuencers. (https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=annie+nova+you+tube+blackfshing&view= detail&mid=1D6FF3CF81D8051E40AB1D6FF3CF81D8051E40AB& FORM=VIRE accessed 19/4/2019) 209

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Nova is herself “mixed race” and identifes as Black. As is the case for the other critiques above, Nova’s critique places racial cosplay/blackfshing as relevant for the labor market in beauty infuencers and their livelihoods in aesthetic product marketing. Since “darker-skinned people are still shunned for having [these features] all on their own,” we should begin to look at how it is that “a bit of the other” read as racial ambiguity, makes Blackness palatable for audiences globally and for those companies that market their goods to these audiences. “A bit of the other” and white women passing as “mixed race” brings into views a dissection of Black women’s bodies for a global audience. The body is broken down into segments in order to be imitable. This is about a Fanonian (1986) racial dissection focused on what the white gaze sees as Black skin tone, lips, “mixed race hair” stylization and texture, along with the small waist, fat stomach and bigger bottom and legs popularized by hip hop culture (Sharpley-Whiting 2007). The white women’s desired stereotype is recreated through HD makeup as the face is colored in, tanning, hairstyles, clothing and accessory choices, lip fllers and other surgical procedures on the white body. In the white visualization regime of racial cosplay/blackfshing, whiteness dictates what blackness is and can become on the white body that has never lost sight of its own whiteness. This translation of white stereotype of blackness to white bodies, of course, reminds us of blackface minstrelsy and what Walter Benjamin (1970: 78) asserts about translation itself Fragments of a vessel which are glued together must match one another in the smallest details although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original mode of signifcation, thus making the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. The white women imitating and appropriating blackness/“mixed race” racial ambiguity draw on the language of “race” and its racialization of Black women’s body parts. Benjamin’s “fragments” is the Manichean diferences set up by the three master signifers Black/“mixed race”/white through discourses of “race” and mixedness that have become “North Atlantic universals” (Trouillot 1995). I would extend that to global universals because of the spread of knowledge on the racialized other through white European settler colonialism and its markets in fesh, dispossession, genocide, and subjugation. The bodies created by racial cosplay/ blackfshing are recognized globally through the pervasiveness of this knowledge. Racial cosplay/blackfshing is part of continuing twenty-frst-century coloniality where blackness is a mask worn by whites without being touched by any of the lived experiences of racism. Whenever it becomes unproftable or stops garnering positive or negative attention the mask is removed. All the women need to do is stop tanning, stop wearing makeup, and change their stylization to assume white privilege. White privilege remains in their ability to transform into what they know they are not and do not identify with. White privilege remains in them feeling that they are not doing anything that is suspect because it is about appropriation and not a platform for righting white uses and abuses of Black women’s bodies but for recreating them anew and through diferent media like Instagram and YouTube. The critiques above highlight a reading of a white psyche where racial ambiguity is all about looks and surfaces that sell because of the visualization regimes of “race.” This whiteness continues the colonial psyche where it is universally dominant and able to impersonate with impunity for monetary and social gain in a global aesthetic market in Blackness shorn of the politics of Black liberation. 210

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Te white colonial psyche of racial cosplay/blackfshing I do not see myself as anything else than white. I get a deep tan naturally from the sun. (Emma Hallberg) [my skin] is naturally not pale. With things like tanning, I don’t think I’ve done anything in a malicious way. So I don’t feel like I need to stop doing something because… why would I stop doing something that’s beneftting me or that I enjoy doing? (Aga Brzostowska) Skin is the focus of both Hallberg and Brzostowska much as it was for early blackface minstrels who used burnt cork instead of tanning and makeup. Lott (1991: 232) claims, that as an institution lasting for centuries, blackface minstrelsy can “be proftably understood as a major efort of corporeal containment which is also to say that it necessarily trained a rather constant regard on that body.” The gaze of white women and its dissection of Black women’s bodies were discussed above as a cannibalization of body parts to add “a bit of the other” to whiteness. This cannibalization produces corporeal containment of Black women through stereotypical white renderings of the Black woman’s body that erases Black women’s multiplicity. The function of the blackface “minstrel mask ofered the experience of ‘blackness’ even as they absented it … in the hegemonic misrecognition of black people” (Lott 1991: 236–237). This is the case for the twenty-frst-century blackface of racial cosplay/ blackfshing. Historical and contemporary blackface on Instagram and YouTube is a tool of white supremacist domination as it chains Black body, psyche, culture, and humanity to racial capitalism in which Black labor, racial injustice, Black social/physical death and white supremacy are erased through racial cosplay/ blackfshing. Racial capitalism instantiated through racial cosplay/blackfshing refuses full recognition to Blackness within the twenty-frst-century “post-race” racism where white people can be anything/anyone but blackness remains just that, fxed, essential, immobile, white stereotype. This occurs because In capitalist societies, the body is a potentially subversive site because to recognize it fully is to recognize the exploitative organization of labor that structures their economies. Cultural strategies must be devised to occlude such a recognition: reducing the [Black] body purely to sexuality is one strategy; colonizing it with a medical discourse in which the [Black] body is dispersed into discrete parts or organs is another. Shackling the [Black] body to a discourse of racial biology is still another. (Lott 1991: 231) Racial cosplay/ blackfshing is yet another that continues to disperse the Black woman’s body into discrete parts. The critiques of Hallberg and Brzostowska’s skin, hair, and stylization and their own comments make us notice whiteness’s need to “shackle the body to a discourse of racial biology” to maintain what they reproduce at a distance from themselves. Keeping racial otherness at a distance while profting from it fnancially and socially brings to mind colonial, enslavement, and indenture regimes of racial diferencing where white purity was necessary to ensure white dominance and whiteness as the only way to be in the world (Gordon 1995). “I do not see myself as anything else than white. I get a deep tan naturally from the sun” and [my skin] is naturally not pale. With things like tanning, I don’t think I’ve done anything in a malicious way. So I don’t feel like I need to stop doing something because… why would I stop doing something that’s beneftting me or that I enjoy doing? 211

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become alibis for preventing white fragility in the face of Black resistance to their racial cosplay/blackfshing. To place dark skin as theirs naturally or to say that they get a deep tan naturally already sets in motion a dissimulation about their bodies if not their ancestry. This dissimulation functions to ameliorate the (dis)ease of white fragility because White people in North America [and Europe] live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium. (Di Angelo 2011: 54) Their claim to naturally dark skin or skin that tans easily in the sun is argumentation to protect themselves from the accusations of appropriation and because they “don’t feel like they have done anything malicious” and they know they are white, they can continue with racial cosplay/blackfshing. White racial equilibrium is reinstated through the claims made about white skin’s ability to become dark, to become like Black skin only through tanning. Tanning itself is quite innocuous as it is a practice engaged in by a large percentage of the white population in Europe on their annual holidays or in parks and gardens during the summer. Tanning is also not a practice just reserved for white people because Black people also tan (Tate 2009). White women who engage in racial cosplay/blackfshing for material and social gain know that they are not Black or “mixed race.” The critique that it has garnered from Black women helps us to pinpoint the issue as the intention behind “fshing” and “play.” Fishing stakes a false claim to Blackness while playing denies the existence of racism and racial inequality and makes Blackness into only a convincing performance. They erase the necessity for Black politics highlighted in the critiques above, because of their consumption of Black bodies enabled by contemporary “post-race” “racial formations” (Omi and Winant 2014). In these racial formations the racist neoliberal project constructs Black people as racist too, Black bodies become commodities for white consumption and Black culture becomes an accessory to whiteness endowing it with social, political, aesthetic, and cultural capital. Read from Black women’s critiques, Hallberg’s and Brzostowska’s racial cosplay/blackfshing becomes white racial disidentifcation with Black people and Black politics through contemptuous consumption. In such contemptuous consumption the aestheticization of Black bodies which leads to their translation in white masks is accompanied by a studied indiference to Black politics and Black women, a “complacency, [born] of never doubting your superiority or rank” (Ngai 2005: 336). Black women are rendered too “weak or insignifcant to pose any sort of danger [to whiteness], the object of contempt [and contemptuous consumption] is perceived as inferior in a manner that allows it to be dismissed or ignored” (Ngai 2005: 336). Racial cosplay/blackfshing is not about a project of white change instantiated by “desire [for the racialized other] associated with images of fuidity, slippage and semantic multiplicity […and] transgression of the symbolic [racial] status quo” (Ngai 2005: 337–338). Contemptuous consumption ensures white women remain “sutured” (Hall 1996) 212

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to whiteness. Indeed, the Racial Contract itself both depends on and requires this suturing which the white beauty infuencers illustrate when they claim whiteness as iconic and, thus valuable, racial, political, economic, and social position.

Conclusion Black women’s resistance to racial cosplay/blackfshing brings into view the continuing necessity to instantiate a politics of Black liberation within twenty-frst-century “post-race” coloniality. Resistance to “post-race” coloniality is a politics of Black liberation that has roots in the twentieth century. The women’s critiques above read as resistance engages a decolonial turn that consists of the shift from the acceptance of inferiority and the conditions of slavery [and Black subjugation] to the assumption of the position of a questioner. It is a position that entails not only a scepticism of the a priori superiority of Europe [and white people], but also a radical doubt about the lack of full humanity of the colonized. As a result of this turn, the colonized subject emerges not only as a questioner but also an embodied being who seeks to become an agent. (Maldonado Torres 2017: 112) Black women’s resistance asserts the impossibility of “race-transing” through the decolonial agency of Black anti-racist aesthetics critique. This was necessary because playing and fshing reproduce Black women and men as dupes and negate Black vulnerability. These critiques assert that white supremacy constructed “race” through biology and “white” is itself a “race,” impossible to erase irrespective of attempts to make whiteness an invisible norm.

Related topics Rooted: on black women, beauty, hair and embodiment

References Benjamin, Walter. 1970. “The task of the translator” in W. Benjamin (ed) Illuminations. London: Jonathan Cape. pp. 69–82. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “The forms of capital” in J. Richardson (ed) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood. pp. 241–258. Brown, Jayna. 2008. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge. De Vere Brody, Jennifer. 1998. Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Di Angelo, Robin. 2011. “White fragility.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3(3): 54–70. Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto. Foucault, Michel. 1994. “The birth of biopolitics” in Robert Hurley et al. (trans.) Paul Rabinow (ed) Michel Foucault Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol 1. London: Penguin. pp. 73–81. Gordon, Lewis R. 1995. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. London/ New York: Routledge. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “Introduction: Who needs identity?” in S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage. pp. 1–17. hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.

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Shirley Anne Tate Lott, Eric. 1991. “‘The seeming counterfeit’: Racial politics and early blackface minstrelsy.” American Quarterly 43(2): 223–254. ———. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2017. “On the coloniality of human rights.” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 114: 112–136. Mills, Charles. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nuttall, Sarah. 2006. “Introduction: Rethinking beauty” in S. Nuttall (ed.) Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics. London/Durham: Duke University Press. Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 2014. Racial Formation in the United States. New York/London: Routledge. Robinson, Cedric. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed. Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. 2000. Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis. London and New York: Routledge. Sharpe, Christina. 2010. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press. Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy. D. 1999. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. Pimps Up Hos Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women. New York/London: New York University Press. Tate, Shirley. A. 2009. Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics. Farnham: Ashgate. ———. 2015. Black Women’s Bodies and the Nation: Race, Gender and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave. ———. 2019. Decolonizing sambo: Transculturation, Fungibility and Black/People of Colour Futurity. Bingley: Emerald. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Wilderson III, Frank. 2010. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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21 THE BEAUTIFUL BODY IN THE AGE OF #METOO Bernadette Wegenstein

Introduction When I scroll through the Instagram pages of Kylie Jenner, the youngest Kardashian, and “a woman of superlatives” (Cusumano 2018), it would seem as if the #MeToo movement – or any feminist movement of the last century that rejects the sexual objectifcation and consumption of the female body – had never occurred. With monikers like “lovestruck lip trio” or “you’re so money baby,” Kylie Jenner’s cosmetic line sold to the beauty giant Coty for 1.2 billion dollars, even if her actual net worth has been the subject of hot-under-thecollar discussion (Berg & Peterson-Withorn 2020). But what gets lost in the buzz around the dollar values of a beauty icon’s company is how that wealth, vast by any reasonable measure, is ultimately generated by and hence depends on an implicit prescription of how a female face should look and how it could be enhanced according to cultural standards. More than the cosmetic products themselves, which are in chemical terms largely interchangeable with other products, what is at stake here is an entire social media universe under the brand “Kylie Jenner,” which is itself camoufaged as “lived experience,” and something to “follow,” “like,” or the like. Naturally, as may be already clear even to “Kylie virgins” from the monikers above, much of this lived experience is explicitly staged as bodies that should be desired, and desired by cis-hetero males specifcally. Which leads us to the crux of the problem of the beautiful body in the age of #MeToo: the current ethos, that women’s bodies are women’s bodies and ANYTHING women do with them is only for women to decide, does not seamlessly overlap with a critical feminist gaze that understands the degree to which how women learn to want to show their bodies is informed by male standards of desire and hence already objectifed. Hence #MeToo activism comes starkly into contrast with the more uncompromising views of legal scholar and anti-porn activist Katherine MacKinnon, for whom the very display of women’s bodies for male consumption itself represents a kind of rape. Against this hard-hitting critique, the naïve “capitalist feminist” defense would say that if a Kardashian wants to exploit her body on the internet for money, pleasure, or whatever, the fact that the resulting images are noxious from another feminist’s perspective is simply none of that feminist’s business, and that such a line of reasoning comes dangerously close to victim blaming, in that it threatens to link women’s choices to their efects on men’s desires – as in, by dressing that way she was “asking for it.” 215

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In what follows I stake a position that in some ways sublates and transcends each of these positions. For it is my contention that the very standards of self-expression that #MeToo supposedly supports and makes room for are in a sense already subject to a kind of “internal harassment.” Sadly, in some cases the logic of #MeToo holds strong similarities to the nature of abuse itself, in that men’s sexual harassment and rape of women can at times turn their victims into even more vulnerable people who, just like in a therapy situation, have to defend and expose and retrigger themselves by coming out in context of the #MeToo movement. They may even have to think themselves as objects of their abusers in order to defend themselves and reveal the truth about what happened to them. In other words, far from arguing that #MeToo is failing to be “realistic” about the efect on men’s desires, my critique is that #MeToo in some cases already implicitly incorporates men’s desires in the very modes of dress and being that women are “liberated” to adopt and express. Of course the Jenners and Kardashians can reveal what they want, and of course women can do the same and more, and all without ever being told they are “guilty” of inciting or inviting harassment! The problem is that this obvious critique doesn’t go far enough – because the implicit limitations of the beauty ideal many women enjoy adhering to is already the enactment of hetero-cis-male fantasy. Hence what is needed is neither less freedom for women to express how they feel beautiful, nor simply ever-more intense and explicit versions of already objectifed models of beauty, but rather and most urgently more room for forms of expression that problematize, comment on, and ultimately expand beyond that model.

Selfes or belfes Kylie Jenner’s style of self-presentation, for instance on her personalized Instagram account – merged universe with several of her kyliejennercosmetics accounts – has been replicated by beauty icons and infuencers around the world, who strive to present a similar look and narrative in connection with their own sense of self. Such female beauty icons/infuencers, such as Lisa Weinberger from Austria or Jenny Frankhauser from Greece/Germany, appear straight dark hair while foregrounding their bottoms in what have come to be known as “belfes,” while positioning themselves in a “natural setting.” As if answering a “call” from behind, and giving us a glimpse of their “belfe,” they turn their heads toward the camera-eye, responding to the call of an invisible interlocutor that in an Althusserian reading could be called the “interpellator of beauty” (Althusser 1971). In this reading, the “ideological apparatus of Instagram” inscribes an act of submission to the eye of the beholder and anyone who looks at the picture, and thus the moment of beauty becomes the moment of objectifcation, just as in Althusser’s original essay the moment of subjectifcation is the moment at which one answers to the call of authority, and hence is subjected to it. Indeed, in these images, the female Instagram subject seems to be saying: “take me!”; Kylie Jenner’s dreamlike look seems to be saying, “I want you”; Lisa Weinberger’s pose says “I am unaware”; and Jenny Frankenberger seems to be saying, “come on, I dare you!” What is remarkable here is not only that all three infuencers, to diferent degrees, resemble each other’s body types and poses, but they all invite the interlocutor to “consume” their bodies, and buy the beauty they wear. They ask, in other words, for action. While the Althusserian model is suggestive here, Judith Butler’s complexifcation of it is perhaps more ftting. Yes, the women in the images turn to look at the viewer, and in that moment are interpellated as subjects, their self-assertion becomes the assertion of an objectifed identity. But as Butler notes, referencing the Foucauldian notion of subjectifcation 216

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(assujetissement) the very act of becoming a subject always involves “passionate attachments” to objectifed models, and hence the (ultimately male) ideal of a perfectly autonomous subject is nothing other than the ahistorical patriarchal fantasy par excellence (Butler 1997, 2020). We are always built of multiple layers of materialized gender practices, all of which are in fact performing something for someone, and hence the response should not be to pretend to aim for total autonomy, but to reveal those practices for what they are in the hopes of liberating an ever-widening variety of competing bodily modes. As Tania Modleski points out, “our ways of thinking and feeling about mass culture are intricately bound up with notions of the feminine” (Modleski 1986: 38). One of the outcomes of this imbrication between mass culture and implicit notions and expectations of femininity is that even discourses and forms of expression that apparently challenge male dominance may simultaneously reproduce their enabling tropes. She thus notes that, while discourses that suggest a perception of feminine power within mass culture can be “seductive,” they may also merely “masquerade as theories of liberation” (Modleski 1986: 52).

Self-expression of self-ploitation This brings me to the exact point where this difcult argument is headed: are these women infuencers using their beauty to sell their bodies, to sell products, to sell themselves, or are they simply “doing a job”? And if they are simply doing a job, what harm could it be? To answer this delicate question of “self-ploitation” I now turn to the excellent recent documentary flm, The Disappearance of My Mother (2019), by the Italian director Beniamino Barrese, which tells the life story of his mother, Benedetta, an iconic fashion model in Milan of the 1960s. But at the same time as being a fashion model and exploited by the gaze of beauty consumption, Benedetta was also a radical feminist. In the documentary she tells the viewer over and over again how in her career as a model she rebelled against the idea that people were consuming her image and her body. In response she separated herself from her body image, making every efort to communicate that what people were looking at was not her. The flm examines the contradictory relationship that the model Benedetta has with her own body, a body she claims is merely a shell of an “inside” or a “person” who will never be revealed in any photograph. At the same time as she rejects the cult of beauty and refuses to be interpellated by beauty, she lives the business and exposes herself over and over again. It almost seems as if she undergoes a kind of auto-harassment. It also becomes clear through Benedetta’s life story that beauty cults are a form of addiction, or at least enhance already addictive behavior. In her later years, Benedetta returns on the runway to show her face, but not her self, one more time. Here are some of the contradictory but ever so revealing quotes that accompany this, her last dance with beauty culture: La bellezza non è un merito. Ma per niente. [Beauty is no merit. Not at all.] Ho sempre avuto l’impressione che nessuno m’abbia mai fotografata. Perché la mia faccia non è in vendita. [I always felt that nobody ever took a photograph of me. Because my face is not for sale.] La mia persona non è fotografabile. [You cannot take a picture of me personally.] The drama of Benedetta’s beauty that her son is laying out for us to understand and feel asks a simple question: who “owns” her image? While Benedetta is deemed to sell her beauty she claims her self hood to herself and says, “I am not for sale.” 217

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Figure 21.1 Three stills from Beniamino Barrese’s flm The Disappearance of My Mother (2019) depicting his mother, former model Benedetta Barzini, and her “disappearance” from society. https://www.kinolorber.com/flm/view/id/3610 Permission by the flmmaker

This radical claim to self-ownership can, paradoxically, come in the form of performances that mimic or stray close to more traditional forms of exploitation. Take the Austrian performance artist Valie Export, whose actions in the 1960s often relied on exposing her body to the male gaze and even, in her famous Touch Cinema, to being touched. In the case of this action Export moved through crowds and allowed participants to reach into the box she wore around her torso and feel her naked breasts. As Liesbeth Den Besten writes, in contrast with her fellow male actionists, Export “confronted passers-by in a more intimate – but no less intimidating – way, framing the female body as subject of violence, sexual harassment, and desire” (Den Besten 2016). Bringing Valie Export into the discussion allows us to make a bridge from this “intimate but no less intimidating” use of the body to a more public realm. Whereas Benedetta’s only escape from being consumed is to distance herself from her image, Export actively owns that image (or feel) by activating it, confronting it, and yes, even making it intimidating. The clear result of Valie Export’s performance is that she reveals the engagement with her “public breasts” as a hetero-cis-male fantasy. When we see Kylie and her followers using the tropes of seduction and self-ploitation to great proft, it’s hard not to raise the more fundamental and quotidian question of firtation in an age where interpersonal and inter-gender roles and expectations have been complicated by the behaviors exposed by #MeToo. As Bartlet et al. argue, the relationship between feminism and firting has always been a troubled one, and has been characterized by a shifting confict zone between protectionist or “sex-negative positions,” and liberationist or “sex-positive” ones (Bartlet et al. 2019: 3). In this light they cite Carol Vance’s observation that 218

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Figure 21.2

Valie export. © Valie export, Bildrecht Wien, 2020, Foto © Werner Schulz. Courtesy Valie export

TAPP und TASTKINO 1968. s/w – Fotografe

Sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency. To focus only on pleasure and gratifcation ignores the patriarchal structure in which women act, yet to speak only of sexual violence and oppression ignores women’s experience with sexual agency and choice and unwittingly increases the sexual terror and despair in which women live. (cited in Bartlet et al. 2019: 4) Indeed in a now famous response to what many French citizens considered the new puritanism of the #MeToo movement, an open letter published in Le Monde and signed by Catherine Deneuve stated, We believe that the freedom to say “no” to a sexual proposition cannot exist without the freedom to bother (by which they mean harass, or other forms of explicit sexual propositions). And we consider that one must know how to respond to this freedom to bother in ways other than by closing ourselves of in the role of the prey. (Safronova 2018; Tribune 2018) Again and again we see the debate caught up in the same paradoxical outcome, where feminine self-expression, sexuality, desire, seems inevitably to come into confict with the need to protect women from abuse, harassment, and violence. This is the zone of confict that Catherine MacKinnon’s work has targeted, as she approaches the issue from the legalistic framework of rights to free expression. To do this she opened up the thorny question of when speech can be limited because it is not “only words” but sexual harassment. As she pointed out in 1993, “For ffteen years courts have shown real comprehension that what 219

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might be called speech, if forced into an abstract First Amendment mold, are in fact acts of inequality, hence actionable as discrimination” (MacKinnon 1993: 49). Where MacKinnon fnds legal footing to build a distinction between legally protected self-expression and illegal harassment is in the question of the numbers of victims involved. Namely, “injury to one person is legally actionable, but the same injury to thousands of people is protected speech” (MacKinnon 1993: 51–52). Here it should be obvious that, especially in legal terms, the rights of any woman to engage tropes of self-ploitation are as inviolate or more inviolate than those of men to use sexist language against women as a whole. In both cases, however, the philosophical point remains: speech is never “just words,” but always also action. And actions, as I argued with Althusser and Butler, are the building blocks of the very identities we seek to express and/or protect from harm. In this light, what is needed is not a discourse of prohibition, but a critical discourse that recognizes and reveals, without shaming, where and when acts of self-ploitation reinforce male supremacy. Also and perhaps even more importantly, however, we need to invite and expand those instances of feminine and other-gendered exploration and expression that blow up, expand on, and show us new and undiscovered models of beauty.

Other beauties One of the benefts of exploding the possibilities of self-expression is that, in addition to getting us out of the double bind of sex-positive versus sex-negative feminism, it is also helpful in deconstructing the kind of essentialist positions that have led prominent feminists to distance themselves from transgender people. Indeed, if we see not a divide between nefarious and liberational strategies of exposure, but a fuid spectrum of self-determinations of beauty, a trans-woman’s choice to exhibit her body or a gender nonconforming person’s self-expression should be seen and embraced as positive contributions to an ever-widening sphere of models of beauty. As feminist writer Laurie Penny has put it commenting on her own developing feminist views, Today, I’m a feminist and a writer, but I no longer valorize Germaine Greer so blindly. For one thing, Greer is one of many feminists, some of them well-respected, who believe transgender people are dangerous to the movement. Their argument is pretty simple. It boils down to the idea that trans people reinforce binary thinking about gender when they choose to join the other team instead of challenging what it means to be a man or a woman. Greer has called trans women a “ghastly parody” of femaleness. Greer’s comments about trans women exemplify the generational strife between second-wave feminists who sought to expand the defnition of “woman” and the younger feminists who are looking for new gender categories altogether. This tension has been cruel to trans women, who have been cast as men trying to infltrate women’s spaces. But it’s alienating to all corners of the LGBT community. (Pennie 2015) We should see in Pennie’s move something analogous to our refusal to condemn or judge any form of feminine expression, even while acknowledging critically the sources of the tropes, speech acts, and behaviors that materialize the identities we express and feel the need to protect. As RuPaul has famously said, echoing in popular terms Judith Butler’s philosophical insights, we are born naked and the rest is drag. But by saying this we are not and cannot 220

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be minimizing the fundamental impact of that “drag” to our very being, our very soul. Just because gender roles are performed, and all of them are, does not mean they aren’t written into our fesh and bones. And just because gender is performed, as Butler has also emphasized, that does not mean it is subject to the whims of a voluntaristic ego. Our various identities are written into our fesh and bones like our cultures are, like our class is, like poverty and privilege are. Beauty, then, becomes an act of recognition and valorization. “This is beautiful because I see myself in it, and because I claim it as such.” For this very reason some of the most riveting and radical statements of beauty I know come from artists of color like Deana Lawson, the African American photographer whose work tells intimate stories of being Black and poor in America. For me as a viewer and critic, the honesty of her images communicates a dignity and beauty that is breathtaking. At the very same time it’s essential to note that such beauty works precisely because it transcends the kinds of categories that trap us into neat frameworks and perpetuate our objectifcation. As the artist Kandis Williams has said, I’m blown away by how easy it is for people to objectify me based on three words about how I look: tall, black, woman. I literally don’t even know what people are looking at when they look at me. I feel like they must be like blurry-eyed, goggle visions of Beyoncé to King Kong. (Burlison 2019: 17) In the Latin American context the Peruvian rapper Renata Flores released a single called Tijeras,” or “Scissors,” which became a #MeToo-era rallying cry. “My scream,” she raps, “maybe if I sing it nicely, people will listen” (Turkewitz 2020). Key to understanding both her appeal and her political force is the fact that not only does Flores not rap in English, she doesn’t even rap in Spanish. Rather, her language is that of her indigenous people, of her grandmother: Quechua. Flores’ song and video are set in the Andes, and tell both her grandmother’s story and that of the girls in present-day rural Peru whose education requires them to spend hours walking back and forth just to get to school, at times subjected to abuse along the way. Flores’ response is to turn that experience into art, art whose verses tell not only her story and its pain, but also refect on the very inability to speak and be heard that is always-already part of the violation in the frst place. As she raps in Quechua (and some Spanish) with her rap group ft. Kayfex (2018), Manan pipas qawanchu manan imatapas [No one sees anything] Atinichu ruwayta, rimayta munani [I can’t speak, I want to speak] Qhaparispanmi, tukuy runa [with lots of noise, people] Manan uyarikunchu rimasqayta [no one listens to what I say] Qinaspa nini: qhaparisaqmi [so I say: I will shout] Icha qapariyta sumaqta takisaq [maybe I will sing my shout beautifully] Chaynatan uyarinqaku runakuna [and that way the people will listen] Llakisqa qawani aswan nanayta [I look with sadness, with so much pain] Llulla runakuna [lying people] Manan allinta ruaspa [don’t do well] Ñuqanchiq quykunchik atiy ruasqayninta [we gave them power] Waytata rantispa? [buying fowers?] Uyariy nisqayki [listen and I will tell you] Uyariy nisqayki [listen and I will tell you]

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Figure 21.3

Images from Renata Flores’ 2018 Quechua song Tijeras. Permission by the artist

Manchakuychu rimayta [don’t be afraid to speak] Manchakuychu rimayta [don’t be afraid to speak] Mírame, ahora soy más fuerte [look at me, now I am stronger] Mírame, ya no tengo miedo [look at me, now I am not afraid] Ahora sí, tengo esperanza [now, yes, I have hope] Warmikuna quñusqa kasun [women, let’s unite]

So diferent from a seduction, from an invitation to consume, Flores’ act of beauty is an act of empowerment. It claims, demands to be seen, and to be seen in power, not in fear, not in possession, but “united for justice” as the banner says the women are holding. It comes as no surprise that the entire video does not feature any men in this rap for Quechua freedom. As the novelist Carmen María Machado has put it in a piece that came out in advance of her memoir, In the Dream House (2019), women’s bodies and how they are treated is a continual theme in her work. Themes, however, aren’t symbolic tricks that authors intentionally insert in their work and then hide there to be found, she says. Rather, “I’m interested in women’s bodies because I am a woman and I have a body, and I live in a world where women’s bodies are devalued and treated really badly, and so it’s something that’s on my mind.” In other words, a theme like sexual abuse or the objectifcation of women’s bodies isn’t merely something placed in a larger context; it is “an idea or a question that runs like a vein through whatever the thing is. It invites interrogation, it invites this engagement” (Machado 2019). I think it is precisely in this sense of theme that we can situate the question of the beautiful body in the age of #MeToo. It’s not accidental. It’s not a cause or an explanation. It’s not something to be blamed or targeted, excused or defended. Beauty is a theme. It runs through the movement like a vein. It invites interrogation and engagement. Beauty is attractive, of course, because it is a “promise of happiness and success” (Wegenstein 2012: 64). But it’s also, more fundamentally, expressive of self, of diference, of those multiple, endless even, sedimentations of pain and experience that create the identities we then express and protect. 222

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As Laurie Pennie puts it in concluding her powerful essay, I am a woman, politically, because that’s how people see me and that’s how the state treats me. And sometimes I’m also a boy. Gender is something I perform, when I put on my binder or paint my nails. When I walk down the street. When I talk to my boss. When I kiss my partner in their makeup and high heels. I don’t want to see a world without gender. I want to see a world where gender is not oppressive or enforced, where there are as many ways to express and perform and relate to your own identity as there are people on Earth. I want a world where gender is not painful but joyful. But until then, we’ve got this one. And for as long as we all have to navigate a gender binary that’s fundamentally broken and a sex class system that seeks to break us, I’m happy to be a gender traitor. I’m a genderqueer woman – and a feminist. My preferred pronouns are “she” or “they.” I believe we’re on our way to a better world. And you can call me Laurie. (Pennie 2015) It’s hard to think of a better statement of principles around the notion of the beautiful body in the age of #MeToo. For if beauty runs through the movement’s pain, beauty is equally the theme of the movement’s goal. Liberation from fear, from serving the desires of someone whose desire I don’t want to have anything to do with. Liberation from the need to change oneself, become something other than what we are. As I engage in Instagram beauty infuencer culture during our global pandemic, wondering why all the women have straightened or braided hair and it is hard to fnd a “wild” or even “Afro-hair” look among them, I receive an email with the monthly newsletter from the founders of the #MeToo movement. Dear Friend, April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and we’re taking steps to understand what this moment means for survivors. […] We’ve created a toolkit for survivors to help articulate some things you might be feeling, ground you, and give you the tools you need to help take care of yourself while you navigate the efects of this pandemic. You can view the toolkit here. We will get through this together. Sincerely, – Tarana, Dani, Denise, Khadijah, Luann, Rebecca, and the whole “me too” team. When I click on the toolkit, I see survival tips, encouragement, and yes, the theme of beauty: “We all have the capacity for personal growth, healing, and change work. Choosing to proactively do that work in partnership with someone else is brave, bold, and beautiful.” The movement is persistent. It talks to me, whether I want to hear it or not. It reaches me in the isolation the current pandemic has foisted on us, an imprisonment battering so many women with even more threats of abuse then before they became enclosed, perhaps, horrifcally, with their abusers. Even there, in that space of healing, the beautiful female body as imagined and fantasized in the hetero-cis-male world order is an ever so present theme. But beauty isn’t defned by the male gaze, that’s the point. We need to fnd and liberate new models of beauty, not ones that trigger and retrench, but that reach out to us in our isolation, a kind of ladder from the darkness, leading to the self we always knew we were. 223

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Figure 21.4 TT the artist: Three images from the series “Black Pop Art: Hip Hop Divas” portraying Cardi B, Aunt Jemima, and TT herself in front of the series. Permission by the artist

I want to conclude with some invigorating and colorful images from TT the artist, who is bringing questions of Black female empowerment and Black positiveness into an art practice that includes painting, fashion, music, and flm. Her series of black pop art (@blackpopart), Hip Hop divas, for instance, can be read as a form of counter-interpellation striving to decolonize the Black female body from its exploitative consumptive gaze by white supremacy. TT the artist recounts that she created these Hip Hop divas because she wanted to honor her own music and fashion icons from her upbringing, but she also wanted to give them an agency they never had: “during the times when pop art was developing in America, black people didn’t really get represented in their truth as beautiful” (Interview with the author 2019). Essential to this intervention is her humor. In the below painting she presents beauty icon Kim Kardashian with a revealing “belfe.” Similar to Kylie Jenner and her infuencerfollowers around the social media globe, Kim is presented with an inviting grin on her face, but by exposing her actual buttocks she is simultaneously removing any doubt about what the belfe pose really entails: sex. Once this truth is out, the ofense isn’t that palpable. In fact, in TT’s hands it feels comforting. 224

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Figure 21.5 TT the artist: Painting of Kim Kardashian’s famous “Break The Internet” pose. Permission by the artist.

References Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in ed. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review, 127–187. Barrese, Beniamino. 2019. The Disappearance of My Mother (Nanof and Ryot Films). Bartlett, Alison et al. 2019. Flirting in the Era of #MeToo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-155087_1, last accessed 8/30/2020. Berg, Madeline, and Chase Peterson-Withorn. 2018. “Kylie Jenner’s Web of Lies, and Why She’s No Longer a Billionaire,” Forbes Magazine, August 31, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ chasewithorn/2020/05/29/inside-kylie-jennerss-web-of-lies-and-why-shes-no-longer-abillionaire/#1ea3ce4325f 7, last accessed 8/30/2020. Burlison, Dani (2019). “On Anger and the Black Female Body: An Interview with Artist Kandis Williams,” in ed. Dani Burlison, Michelle Cruz Gonzales, et al. All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body. Toronto, ON: PM Press, 5–122. Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (2020). The Force of Nonviolence. London: Verso. Cusumano, Katherine. 2018. “Kylie Jenner, the Youngest Kardashian, Has Undergone the Most Complete Style Transformation,” W Magazine, https://www.wmagazine.com/gallery/kylie-jennerstyle-transformation/ last accessed 8/30/2020. Den Besten, Liesbeth. 2016. “Boxed Nakedness: Export Versus Bakker,” Art Jewelry Forum, https:// artjewelryforum.org/boxed-nakedness-export-versus-bakker, last accessed 8/30/2020.

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Bernadette Wegenstein Flores, Renata. 2018. Tijeras ft. Kayfex, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQUrV_v7OK8 Machado, Carmen-María. 2019. “Carmen María Machado on Theme,” in We Present: New Rules of Storytelling, https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/new-rules-of-storytelling/, last accessed 8/30/2020. MacKinnon, Catherine 1993. Just Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Modleski, Tania. 1986. “Femininity as Mas(s)querade: A Feminist Approach to Mass Culture,” in ed. Colin MacCabe, High Theory, Low Culture. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 27–52. Pennie, Laurie. 2015. “How to Be a Genderqueer Feminist,” Buzzfeed, https://www.buzzfeednews. com/article/lauriepenny/how-to-be-a-genderqueer-feminist, last accessed 8/30/2020. Safronova, Valeriya. 2018. “Catherine Deneuve and Others Denounce the #MeToo Movement.” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/movies/catherine-deneuve-and-othersdenounce-the-metoo-movement.html, last accessed 8/30/2020. Tribune. 2018. “Nous défendons une liberté d’importuner, indispensable à la liberté sexuelle,” https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2018/01/09/nous-defendons-une-liberte-d-importunerindispensable-a-la-liberte-sexuelle_5239134_3232.html, last accessed 8/30/2020. TT the artist. 2019. Interview with Bernadette Wegenstein. @tttheartist Turkewitz, Julie. 2020. “Peru’s Queen of Quechua Rap Wants to Rescue Indigenous Culture With Her Music,”New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/world/americas/peru-indigenousrap-renata-fores.html, last accessed 8/30/2020. Wegenstein, Bernadette. 2012. The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modifcation and the Construction of Beauty. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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PART FOUR

Body work

22 GENITAL AESTHETICS Eric Plemons

Today, online pornography is the largest and most accessible source of information that many people have about how genitals look and what they do. Data released by Google in 2016 found that Pornhub was the 23rd most visited site on the internet globally, drawing more than 1 billion visits per month (Marciano 2016). According to some scholars, people who formulate ideas about genital aesthetics through viewing porn have been altering their bodies in order to better ft the norm of desirable genitalia represented there. Porn consumption has been linked to growing numbers of young women removing most or all of their pubic hair (Schick et al. 2011; Stone et al. 2017) and undergoing cosmetic surgery to alter their inner and outer labia (Braun 2005). It has been argued that men are more likely to experience genital inadequacy after viewing pornography (Brennan 2018; Johnston et al. 2014; Morrison et al. 2007; Veale et al. 2014; Wylie & Eardly 2007), and are more likely to attempt to increase their penis size, including through surgical means (Vardi et al. 2008).1 The practice of cultivating desirable genital aesthetics cannot be simply attributed to media representation, and is not a recent phenomenon. Throughout time and across geographies, humans have cultivated particular genital aesthetics to show group belonging, adhere to religious doctrine, demonstrate sexual maturity, express personal desires, and promote good health. The creation of “good” genitals has included invasive and sometimes permanent alterations like cutting, piercing, scarring, stretching, and suturing, and other less permanent things like shaving, douching, perfuming, powdering, and decorating. Often imagined as intimate and “private parts,” these many strategies make clear just how public the genitals are. Whether seen by many – as in large circumcision rituals – or just a few – as in a coupled sexual exchange – genital aesthetics are often personally and culturally important. This chapter reviews some signifcant ongoing debates about the politics of genital aesthetics. Rather than attempting a broad survey of practices, I’ve organized this chapter around three problematics, or sets of conficts that characterize contemporary debates about genital aesthetics. For each problematic, I use examples to explore how and for whom particular genital practices are contentious, and how broader social, historical, and political forces are implicated in that contention. In this review, I aim to show genital cultivation – like all forms of bodily cultivation – as entangled with broader discourses of politics and power. The problematics I explore are those of bodily autonomy, cultural imperialism, and health discourse. The separation of these problematics is a heuristic tool, as the themes and arguments 229

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they engage are inextricably bound together. Most examples marshalled to explore any one problematic could be analyzed as an instance of another; I encourage readers to reconfgure example cases as a way to understand their mutual dependence.

Bodily autonomy The most frequently voiced critique of genital alteration rests on the problematic of bodily autonomy. While the claim to bodily autonomy can seem quite straight forward – that each person should be free to choose for themselves what can and cannot be done to and with their body – the problematic complicates the concept of “individual choice” at the heart of this claim. Given that deeply held cultural values and norms shape our understandings of the world, to what extent can we consider our decisions freely and individually made? Further, what logics and values are at work in focusing on individual versus collective meanings of the body? Supporters of bodily autonomy often critique practices in which the person whose body is altered is considered incapable of giving afrmative consent for the procedure. These include infants whose foreskin are removed (circumcised) (Denniston et al. 2006; Silverman 2004), intersex children who undergo reconstructive surgery on their internal reproductive anatomies or external genitalia (Grabham 2012; Newbould 2016; Preves 2002), and adolescents whose vulvas and/or clitorises are altered in puberty rites (Leonard 2000). For these critics, procedures performed without consent are, by defnition, coercive, and violate infants’ and young people’s bodily autonomy (Coene & Saharso 2019; Earp 2015; Geisheker 2006). Those who defend altering the genitals of infants and children emphasize the value of group belonging above the potential future wish of the individual. From this perspective, intervening in the genital aesthetics of children is a form of parental care for the child’s health (Adler et al. 2001) or sexual future (Oh et al. 2002). Such interventions can also secure group membership through religious ritual – as in faith-based circumcision (Şahin et al. 2003), or increase the body’s future social value (Figueroa & Cooper 2010; Morris et al. 2019). Making the young body holy, healthy, and desirable are acts of care performed for the beneft of those not yet capable of understanding their collective importance, such supporters argue, not coercion or abuse of an innocent. Debates about the autonomy of “choice” are not limited to cases of contested consent. In our contemporary neoliberal era, “it’s my choice” is a common refrain used to justify all manner of behaviors and desires. A focus on the individual obscures the role of social pressures in shaping what each of us sees as good and valuable bodies. Scholars have asked how choices to have labial reduction surgeries, for example, can be considered “free” and “individual,” when the vulvas created by those procedures reproduce a very narrow ideal of the desirable female body (Braun 2009; Chibnall et al. 2020). Or, similarly, how to contend with rhetorics of “free choice” in hymen replacement procedures given the social, economic, and family pressures of marriageable virginity that these procedures help to secure (Ayuandini 2017, Hawkey et al. 2018; Kaivanara 2016). Are those with micropenis (Hatipoğlu & Kurtoğlu 2013) freely choosing to undertake eforts to increase the length and girth of their penis in social contexts in which penis size is equated to masculinity and sexual potency, and in which the majority of those seeking penis enhancements already have normal size penises that they nonetheless feel are inadequate (Marra et al. 2020)? Concepts of free and autonomous choice are strained when considering the power-laden social realities within which such interventions emerge as desirable (Dekkers et al. 2005). The stakes of desirability are high, especially when genitals are the focused sites of anxieties about marriage, kinship, intimacy, belonging, and more. 230

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Cultural imperialism Cultural imperialism is the process wherein a powerful group imposes its cultural norms and values – including ideals of bodily aesthetics and comportment – upon groups with less power. The asymmetry in such imposition is often seen as oppressive and violent, but the dynamic it creates is far more complicated. At the heart of the problematic of genital aesthetics and cultural imperialism are questions about how, and by whose standards, bodily forms and practices can be evaluated. What makes a good body? Are there right and wrong ways to alter a body and its parts? A widely debated instance of this problematic is over the status of “human rights” as they relate to bodily norms. For some, the idea of “human rights” is powerful because it describes a set of universal human values. Others argue that there is no single set of values that apply to all human groups. As such, the discourse of “human rights” is itself a form of cultural imperialism because it portrays what are in fact a specifc set of Western-derived values as applicable to all people everywhere (Hadjor 1998). A prominent instance of this debate has been over female genital cutting (FGC), mostly in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa (Oba 2008; Shell-Duncan 2008; Wade 2012). Spread over a vast territory and practiced by groups with signifcant diferences in history and culture, international opposition to the practice often collapses such variations into the general category of “female genital cutting.” Others demonstrate outrage and objection to any surgical alteration of the female genitalia by calling it “genital mutilation” instead. Local opponents and feminist groups approach the practice diferently than do international commentators (Gruenbaum 1996; Hodzic 2016; Mescoli 2018). Scholars have observed the ways that FGC has been treated as an exception or limit case to a commonly held value for cultural relativism, a stance in which the bodily norms endemic to distinct groups are construed within the norms of that group, not in relation to outsiders’ standards of “right action” (Bell 2005; Oba 2008). Some have provocatively compared male and female genital cutting in order to contend with contradictions in belief and practice among the procedures (Shweder 2013). Why, for example, is cutting the genitals of non-consenting infant boys deemed normal, healthy, and desirable (think neo-natal circumcision), while cutting the genitals of young girls or intersex infants is seen as abusive, mutilating, and cruel? Such comparative analyses push past reactionary responses to tease out how particular bodies matter and appear diferently in political discourses of power and control (Svoboda 2013). The practice of genital cutting is sometimes used to signify the “backwardness” or “otherness” of the groups who practice it. This is especially the case when such groups arrive as immigrants into communities where this kind of genital alteration is condemned (Duivenbode & Padela 2019). In Australia, for example, white Australians who undergo labia reduction cosmetic surgery are seen as sophisticated consumers of beautifying surgery, while African and Middle Eastern immigrants to Australia who choose to cut the clitoral hoods of their daughters are portrayed as monstrous and dangerous (Kelly & Foster 2012). Pushing at the contradictions in these attitudes, some scholars have argued that it is not genital cutting that is the problem, per se, but rather racism and anti-immigrant sentiment that seize on the symbol of genital cutting as a way to justify xenophobic and frequently anti-Muslim sentiment (Sullivan 2007). In this way, genital aesthetics become the metonym by which other deeply held beliefs about good and bad cultures and peoples are expressed. On the other hand, sometimes less powerful groups adopt the values of the powerful with great enthusiasm. Male circumcision was rare in South Korea before the United States 231

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occupation of the country between 1945 and 1948. Associating circumcision with sophistication, prosperity, and medical progress, 50 years later South Korea had one of the highest rates of circumcision in the world (Pang & Kim 2002). Interestingly, in recent decades, the practice has begun to decline sharply due to the ways that increased access to information about the practice globally has shifted attitudes about its value (Kim et al. 2012). These trends show the ways that cultural imperialism shapes local ideas about bodily value and which kinds of genital forms are desirable – not only sexually, but in relation to shared understandings of progress, knowledge, citizenship, and belonging.

Health discourse Another powerful problematic that shapes sentiments about genital aesthetics is that of health discourse. I treat “health discourse” as a problematic because ideas about what is “healthy” for the body are extraordinarily powerful, but also hotly contested. This is especially the case when “healthy” genitals are implicated in sexual morality and desirability as well as the forms of belonging and cultural value discussed above. Like many contemporary health discourses, purported value for the “natural” body exists in tension with its constant alteration. We might say that we value “natural” beauty, for example, and then observe that cosmetic surgeons market their practice precisely on their ability to artifcially create natural-looking bodies (Weiss & Kukla 2009). In the same vein, we might say that we value natural genitals, but then observe the many ways they’re altered through surgery, pubic hair shaping and/or removal (Terry et al. 2018), and decorations including piercing (Caliendo et al. 2005), tattooing (Nelius et al. 2014), scenting, and scouring. A simple answer to the question what are healthy genitals? is that they are genitals free of injury and disease. Such a defnition would miss the ways that cultivating particular genital aesthetics in the name of good hygiene is often folded into understandings of “good health.” In many cases, demands to attend to genital hygiene are informed by an understanding of the genitals as fundamentally dirty. This characterization confates physiological processes and products – such as smegma, vaginal secretions, semen, and menstrual blood – with moral fault, making the genitalia both dirty and dirty. Care for them in the name of health and hygiene is therefore both a physical and moral demand, and confates, as health discourses frequently do, physical wellness with ethical goodness. The equation of circumcised penises with good moral hygiene was a signifcant driver of secular circumcision’s popularization in the United States beginning at the end of the nineteenth century (Gollaher 1994). Contemporary eforts to increase circumcision rates in African countries with high prevalence of HIV often confate moral and physical hygiene in their marketing tactics, and contend with its existing complexity in the communities they aim to treat (Bridges et al. 2012; Katisi & Daniel 2015; Mbonye et al. 2016). Local ideas about masculinity, potency, and sexual desirability as themselves defnitions of healthy manhood contrast with biomedical rationales for circumcision (Fleming et al. 2017). And the biomedical evidence is disputed among experts as well. Prominent researchers argue on behalf of the medical benefts of circumcision, including that it reduces the likelihood of acquiring HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, as well as reduces incidence of urinary tract infections, meatitis, and viral sexually transmitted infections (STIs) (Tobian and Gray 2011). Others dispute these claims, arguing instead that investing in circumcision to address all of these issues takes resources away from more efective and less invasive alternatives. For these researchers, an outsized focus on circumcision will likely increase rather than decrease HIV and other infections (Van Howe & Storms 2011). A recent review of literature on male 232

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circumcision found that there were “considerable gaps” in the literature, emphasizing just how unsettled ideas of “health” are in relation to this ancient and widely but unevenly engaged practice (Bossio et al. 2014). Less invasive ways of managing the “health” of the genitals are common. It takes only a short walk through the “feminine hygiene” section of your local pharmacy to see the many ways that female genitals are construed as in need of special and constant care. From menstrual products to deodorants, wipes, and douches, vaginal hygiene is portrayed as “healthy” and responsible personal management. In the late 1990s, nearly a third of American women between 15 and 45 years old reported regularly using vaginal douches, despite the fact that there is no medical indication for the practice and a growing body of evidence that shows it may be harmful to reproductive health. Many reported the desire to avoid what they saw as the natural but shamefully unpleasant and therefore unhygienic odor of their vaginas (Gazmararian 2001). Practiced in many world regions, vaginal douching is often undertaken in the name of good hygiene, but its use is also entwined with practitioners’ race, religious beliefs, reproductive choices, and ethnicity (Foch et al. 2001; Kukulu 2006). Perhaps the most dangerous health discourses surrounding genital aesthetics and management are the ones that make some bodies completely disappear from view: the claims that healthy human genitalia come in only one of two forms, male or female, and that the only real genitals are the ones that a person is born with. Together, these claims render intersex and transgender bodies impossible, unreal, and unhealthy. The pervasive exclusion of intersex and trans bodies has rippled across clinical and social science research such that the majority of literature and problematics I’ve discussed above do not mention the existence of any bodies other than those with binarily conceived (though never fully defned) male or female genitalia. This absence in the literature has largely been reproduced by my review, and I acknowledge this shortcoming while sharing readers’ frustration with the pervasive lack of research. Early clinical work on intersex bodies construed genital diference as pathological and frequently sought to reconstruct genitals into normal and desirable forms, although deciding what was normal and desirable was often left up to individual practitioners (Karkazis 2010; Kessler 1997). Questions about how those subject to reconstructive surgery felt about their bodies were infrequently asked, though have begun to emerge in the last decade (Tourchi & Hoebeke 2013). Intersex activists have pushed back against the pathologization of their bodies, advocating for understandings of their diferences as natural variations, rather than medical and “social emergencies” in need of intervention (Davis 2015; Preves 2002; Roen 2004). By contrast, those transgender people who seek out genital reconstructive procedures do so against a pervasive view that surgically reconstructed genitalia are “not real” (van Anders et al. 2014.) Contending with a lack of provider consensus about what genitals look like and do, trans surgical patients often struggle to fnd experienced and qualifed surgeons who can provide their care (Plemons 2015, 2019). It is often not the procedure itself but the social responses to the surgical outcome that determine whether the neo-genitalia “look natural” (Plemons 2014). Such experiences demonstrate just how important genital aesthetics are in solidifying gendered and sexed embodiment and belonging in the world. This chapter has aimed to show the complex ways that genital aesthetics are intertwined with politics and power. Like all forms of bodily cultivation, genital forms are the products of social forces and individual desires. An examination of how genital forms are valued and evaluated makes clear that these “private parts” are both personally intimate and publicly 233

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meaningful. Each of the problematics discussed here shows ways that the very stuf of our bodies is made and remade in the forms that we fnd valuable, healthy, and good – whatever they may be.

Related topics Body hair removal: constructing the “baseline” for the normative gendered body in the contemporary Anglophone West

Note 1 I have not been able to locate studies that examine how genital representation impacts the selfperceptions of those with trans or intersex bodies. This is a signifcant gap in current research, especially given the ways these images have been argued to impact the norming and disciplining of sexual desirability.

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Genital aesthetics Figueroa, J. Peter and Jones Cooper, C. 2010. Attitudes towards male circumcision among attendees at a sexually transmitted infection clinic in Kingston, Jamaica. West Indian Medical Journal 59(4): 351–355. Fleming, Paul J., Clare Barrington, Lisa D. Pearce, Leonel Lerebours, Yeycy Donastorg, and Maximo O. Brito. 2017. “I feel like more of a man”: a mixed methods study of masculinity, sexual performance, and circumcision for HIV prevention. The Journal of Sex Research 54(1): 42–54. Foch, Bertrand J., Nola D. McDaniel, and Marian R. Chacko. 2001. Racial diferences in vaginal douching knowledge, attitude, and practices among sexually active adolescents. Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology 14(1): 29–33. Gazmararian, Julie A., F. Carol Bruce, Juliette S. Kendrick, Clare C. Grace, and Sylvia Wynn. 2001. Why do women douche? Results from a qualitative study. Maternal and Child Health Journal 5(3): 153–160. Geisheker, John. 2006. Towards regulation of non-therapeutic genital surgeries upon minors. In Bodily Integrity and the Politics of Circumcision. Editors: George C. Denniston, Pia Grassivaro Gallo, Frederick M. Hodges, Marilyn Fayre Milos, Franco Viviani. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 203–217. Gollaher, David L. 1994. From ritual to science: the medical transformation of circumcision in America. Journal of Social History 28(1): 5–36. Grabham, Emily. 2012. Bodily integrity and the surgical management of intersex. Body & Society 18(2): 1–26. Gruenbaum, Ellen. 1996. The cultural debate over female circumcision: the Sudanese are arguing this one out for themselves. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 10(4): 455–475. Hadjor, Kof Buenor. 1998. Whose human rights? Journal of Asian and African Studies 33(4): 359–368. Hatipoğlu, Nihal and Selim Kurtoğlu. 2013. Micropenis: etiology, diagnosis and treatment approaches. Journal of Clinical Research in Pediatric Endocrinology 5(4): 217–223. Hawkey, Alexandra J., Jane M. Ussher, and Janette Perz. 2018. Regulation and resistance: negotiation of premarital sexuality in the context of migrant and refugee women. The Journal of Sex Research 55(9): 1116–1133. Hodzic, Saida. 2016. The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs. Berkeley: University of California Press. Johnston, Lucy, Tracey McLellan, & Audrey McKinlay. 2014. (Perceived) size really does matter: male dissatisfaction with penis size. Psychology of Men & Masculinity 15(2): 225–228. Kaivanara, Marzieh. 2016. Virginity dilemma: re-creating virginity through hymenoplasty in Iran. Culture, Health & Sexuality 18(1): 71–83. Karkazis, Katrina. 2010. Looking at and talking about genitalia: understanding where physicians and patients get their ideas about what’s normal and what isn’t. Medical Humanities 36(2): 68–69. Katisi, Masego and Marguerite Daniel. 2015. Safe Male Circumcision in Botswana: tensions between traditional practices and biomedical marketing. Global Public Health 10(5–6): 739–756. Kelly, Brenda and Charles Foster. 2012. Should female genital cosmetic surgery and genital piercing be regarded ethically and legally as female genital mutilation? BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology 119(4): 389–392. Kessler, Suzanne. 1997. Creating good-looking genitals in the service of gender. In A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Martin Duberman, ed. New York: New York University Press, pp. 153–173. Kim, DaiSik, Sung-Ae Koo, and Myung-Geol Pang. 2012. Decline in male circumcision in South Korea. BMC Public Health 12(1): 1067–1073. Kukulu, Kamile. 2006. Vaginal douching practices and beliefs in Turkey. Culture, Health & Sexuality 8(4): 371–378. Leonard, Lori. 2000. Interpreting female genital cutting: Moving beyond the impasse. Annual Review of Sex Research 11(1): 158–190. Marciano, Jonathon. 2016. “Top 300 biggest websites.” The Market Intelligence Blog, SimilarWeb. June 4, 2019. https//www.similarweb.com/blog/new-website-ranking. Marra, Giancarlo, Andrew Drury, Lisa Tran, David Veale, and Gordon H. Muir. 2020. Systematic review of surgical and nonsurgical interventions in normal men complaining of small penis size. Sexual Medicine Reviews 8(1): 151–180. Mbonye, Martin, Monica Kuteesa, Janet Seeley, Jonathan Levin, Helen Weiss, and Anatoli Kamali. 2016. Voluntary medical male circumcision for HIV prevention in fshing communities in Uganda: the infuence of local beliefs and practice. African Journal of AIDS Research 15(3): 211–218.

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Eric Plemons Mescoli, Elsa. 2018. NGOs and female circumcision in Egypt. Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia 3(1): 13–35. Morris, Brian J., Catherine A. Hankins, Eugenie R. Lumbers, Adrian Mindel, Jefrey D. Klausner, John N. Krieger, and Guy Cox. 2019. Sex and male circumcision: women’s preferences across different cultures and countries: a systematic review. Sexual Medicine 7(2): 145–161. Morrison, Todd G., Shannon R. Ellis, Melanie A. Morrison, Anomi Bearden, & Rebecca L. Harriman. 2007. Exposure to sexually explicit material and variations in body esteem, genital attitudes, and sexual esteem among a sample of Canadian men. The Journal of Men’s Studies 14(2): 209–222. Neluis, Thomas, Myrna L. Armstrong, Cathy Young, Alden E. Roberts, LaMicha Hogan, and Katherine Rinard. 2014. Prevalence and implications of genital tattoos: a site not forgotten. British Journal of Medical Practitioners 7(4): a732. Newbould, Melanie. 2016. When parents choose gender: intersex, children, and the law. Medical Law Review 24(4): 474–496. Oba, Abdulmumini A. 2008. Female circumcision as female genital mutilation: human rights or cultural imperialism? Global Jurist 8(3): 1–38. Oh, S.J., Kim, K.D., Kim, K.M., Kim, K.S., Kim, K.K., Kim, J.S., Kim, H.G., Woo, Y.N., Yoon, Y.L., Lee, S.D. and Han, S.W. 2002. Knowledge and attitudes of Korean parents towards their son’s circumcision: a nationwide questionnaire study. BJU International 89(4): 426–432. Pang, Myung-Geol and Dai-Sik Kim. 2002. Extraordinarily high rates of male circumcision in South Korea: history and underlying causes. BJU International 89: 48–54. Plemons, Eric. 2014. It is as it does: genital form and function in sex reassignment surgery. Journal of Medical Humanities 35(1): 37–55. ———. 2015. Anatomical authorities: on the epistemological exclusion of trans- surgical patients. Medical Anthropology 34(5): 425–441. ———. 2019. A capable surgeon and a willing electrologist: challenges to the expansion of transgender surgical care in the United States. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 33(2): 282–301. Preves, Sharon E. 2002. Sexing the intersexed: an analysis of sociocultural responses to intersexuality. Signs: Journal of women in Culture and Society 27(2): 523–556. Roen, Katrina. 2004. Intersex embodiment: when health care means maintaining binary sexes. Sexual Health 1: 127–130. Şahin, Figen, Ufuk Beyazova, and Aktürk, A. 2003. Attitudes and practices regarding circumcision in Turkey. Child: Care, Health and Development 29(4): 275–280. Schick, Vanessa R., Brandi N. Rima, & Sarah K. Calabrese. 2011. Evulvalution: the portrayal of women’s external genitalia and physique across time and the current Barbie doll ideals. Journal of Sex Research 48(1): 74–81. Shell-Duncan, Bettina. 2008. From health to human rights: female genital cutting and the politics of intervention. American Anthropologist 110(2): 225–236. Shweder, Richard A. 2013. The goose and the gander: the genital wars. Global Discourse 3(2): 348–366. Silverman, Eric K. 2004. Anthropology and circumcision. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 419–445. Stone, Nicole, Cynthia A. Graham, & Inci Baysal. 2017. Women’s engagement in pubic hair removal: motivations and associated factors. International Journal of Sexual Health 29(1): 89–96. Sullivan, Nikki. 2007. “The price to pay for our common good”: genital modifcation and the somatechnologies of cultural (in)diference. Social Semiotics 17(3): 395–409. Svoboda, J. Steven. 2013. Promoting genital autonomy by exploring commonalities between male, female, intersex, and cosmetic female genital cutting. Global Discourse 3(2): 237–255. Terry, Gareth, Virginia Braun, Shanuki Jayamaha, and Helen Madden. 2018. Negotiating the hairless ideal in Āotearoa/New Zealand: choice, awareness, complicity, and resistance in younger women’s accounts of body hair removal. Feminism & Psychology 28(2): 272–291. Tobian, Aaron A.R. and Ronald H. Gray. 2011. The medical benefts of male circumcision. JAMA 306(13): 1479–1480. Tourchi, Ali and Piet Hoebeke. 2013. Long-term outcome of male genital reconstruction in childhood. Journal of Pediatric Urology 9(6): 980–989. Van Anders, Sari M., Nicholas L. Caverly, and Michelle Marie Johns. 2014. Newborn bio/logics and US legal requirements for changing gender/sex designations on state identity documents. Feminism & Psychology 24(2): 172–192.

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23 BODY HAIR REMOVAL Constructing the “baseline” for the normative gendered body in the contemporary Anglophone West Melisa Trujillo Introduction Having hairless legs, face, and underarms is not only the norm for post-pubescent girls and women in the contemporary Anglophone West, but the baseline for an acceptable female body: a charged signifer of racialized, classed femininity that takes as its idealized epitome the hairless, blonde, slender, white woman (Herzig 2015; Trujillo 2016). Indeed, women’s body hair removal practices are “so socially normative as to go unquestioned” (Tiggemann & Kenyon 1998: 874), both by casual observers and by most scholars, that to study this topic is often seen as frivolous. Although men’s body hair removal practices are relatively newer and not compulsory in the same way, they are becoming more prominent and seem to be bound up in similar dynamics. There are compelling reasons to care about this topic, however, and consider it seriously as a scholar. First, when a practice is so normalized, we must ask: What underlying ideas about the world are created, expressed, and reinforced through these practices? How do they help to construct our social world, identities, and relationships? And what “truths” and ideologies do we threaten when we seek to change or abandon these practices? I hope to show that body hair removal practices, both men’s and women’s, are heavily implicated in our hierarchical systems of gender, race, and class; and that their privileged position as everyday, routinized embodied practices serves both to render these systems invisible and to inscribe them on the body in ways that feel natural and immutable to many individuals. Second, the time, efort, expense, and pain women must often expend to maintain an appropriately hairless body is neither inconsequential nor frivolous. Women’s substantial investment of material, emotional, and intellectual resources into their gendered bodily practices is a key part of how normative femininity is constructed, maintained, and policed. Third, hair removal practices provide a key opportunity to explore issues of choice, agency, and femininity. As multiple studies, including my own, have demonstrated, the price for non-adherence to the hairlessness norm is not inconsequential for women, and can incite confusion, shock, revulsion, judgment, anger, or aggression, from both men and women (Fahs 2011a, b, 2013a, b; Trujillo 2016). While women’s body hair removal practices are indeed highly socially normative, and may feel immutable, like many embodied practices they are nevertheless still open to change, resistance, or rebellion. 238

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This chapter will be organized as follows: frst, a short section on the prevalence of body hair removal practices. Second, a longer section on women’s “mundane” hair removal practices (hair removal from all parts of the feminine/feminized body that are socially mandated to be hairless, including the face, but excluding the pubic area, which operates under slightly diferent dynamics). Then, short sections on men’s depilation and pubic hair removal. Finally, a note on medical literature: there is a substantial body of literature on various medical aspects of body hair and its removal: hirsutism; hair removal prior to surgery and its safety; incidence of injury resulting from hair removal; pubic hair removal and associated sexual health behaviors, etc. I will not discuss this literature in detail, but will refer to it occasionally.

Prevalence of body hair removal: women Tiggemann and Kenyon (1998) found that 92% of their sample of 266 Australian female high school and undergraduate students regularly removed all of their leg and/or underarm hair. In the United Kingdom, Toerien, Wilkinson, and Choi, in their community-based survey of 678 women aged 16–71, reported that “over 90% of participants reported having removed hair from their underarms and legs, and over 80% from their pubic area and eyebrows” (2005: 403). In Āotearoa/New Zealand, Terry and Braun reported that the 278 women in their sample currently removed hair from, most commonly, “the lower leg (93%), armpit (91%) and pubic area (69%)” (2013: 601).

Prevalence of body hair removal: men In their US university student sample of 118 men, Boroughs, Cafri, and Thompson found that “The primary sites for depilation were the groin (74.7%), chest (56%), and abdomen (46.7%)” (2005: 639). Participants described mostly removing hair through shaving. More recent US research by Boroughs and Thompson found that 72.8% of their sample of 364 men depilated pubic hair, 44.5% abdomen hair, and 40.7% chest hair (2014: 221).

Pubic hair removal Pubic hair removal seems to be increasing: in 2002, emergency departments in the United States saw 346 cases of genitourinary injuries resulting from women’s pubic hair removal and grooming – in 2010 that number was 1,765 (Glass et al. 2012: 1188–1189). Gaither et al. found that 50.5% of their representative community sample of 4,198 US men regularly groomed their pubic hair (2017: 622). In Canada, an exploratory study of 660 women found that 50% of participants removed hair from the bikini line, while 30% removed all pubic hair (Riddell, Varto & Hodgson 2010). Rowen et al. (2016) conducted a nationally representative survey, and found that, of 3,316 US women, 83.8% reported grooming their pubic hair. Note that in these studies, “grooming” refers to both removal and reduction of pubic hair.

Women’s “mundane” body hair removal practices The literature on women’s body hair removal practices is sparse compared to other topics in the study of feminine embodiment, such as the thin ideal or cosmetic surgery. Following a few early articles on body hair removal (e.g. Hope 1982; Lewis 1987; Synnott 1987), empirical research into these practices was largely sparked by Susan Basow’s study, “The 239

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hairless ideal: women and their body hair” (1991). The research on women’s body hair removal practices can be roughly divided into several clusters: frst, non-empirical accounts engaged with the sociological and historical context of these practices (Fernandez et al. 2013; Herzig 1999, 2000, 2015; Hope 1982; Lesnik-Oberstein 2006; Synnott 1987; Toerien  & Wilkinson 2003). Second, in the 1990s, three highly infuential empirical studies (Basow 1991; Basow  & Braman 1998; Tiggemann & Kenyon 1998) set the tone for a series of studies that further investigated attitudes towards women’s body hair removal, and increasingly examined multiple hair removal body sites (Tiggemann & Lewis 2004; Toerien & Wilkinson 2004; Toerien, Wilkinson & Choi 2005), followed by more qualitative research on hair removal (Fahs 2011a, b, 2013a, b; Terry et al. 2018; Trujillo 2016), including a series of studies on the hairlessness norm in Āotearoa/New Zealand ( Jennings, Braun & Clarke 2019; Terry & Braun, 2013; Terry et al. 2018). There is also research investigating women’s experiences with facial hair, sometimes in relation to Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) (Lipton et al. 2006; Snyder 2006).

Historical accounts Historical accounts of hair removal attempt to understand how this norm emerged and how it has been afected by cultural and technological changes (Herzig 1999, 2000, 2015; Hope 1982), how it was normatively constructed (Toerien & Wilkinson 2003), and attempt to chart the history of hair removal methods (Fernandez et al. 2013). Toerien and Wilkinson (2003) addressed historical, sociological, biological and mythological associations with women’s body hair in the West. They argued that body hair is a key issue in constructing femininity, primarily through the emphasis on masculinity and femininity as opposing dichotomies; femininity is defned in opposition to a concept of masculinity associated with strength and virility; the idea of “tameness,” both in the sense of docility (subject to social control) and childishness (prepubescent children are “naturally” body hair free); and classed and race-based assumptions about femininity based on white, middle-class femininity as “successful” femininity. Rebecca Herzig conducted the most indepth historical analysis of hair removal practices, focusing on the US context (1999, 2000, 2015). She traced the history of body hair removal from the colonial era to current trends for pubic hair depilation, and considered future directions of hair removal (2015). Herzig argued that “only in the late nineteenth century did non-Native Americans, primarily white women, begin to express persistent concern about their own body hair, and not until the 1920s did large numbers begin routinely removing hair below the neck” (2015: 11–12), partly due to the rising popularity of shorter skirts, from the 1920s onward (see also Hope 1982). By mid-twentieth century “the revolution was nearly complete: […] Cold War—era commentators blithely described visible body hair on women as evidence of a flthy, ‘foreign’ lack of hygiene” (2015: 12). Herzig traces this history through examining the intersections of technological innovation and cultural change, for example through the evolution of dangerous, disfguring chemical depilatories during the industrial revolution, to the equally dangerous x-ray depilation of the early twentieth century (see also Herzig 1999).

Foundational empirical studies Basow (1991) was the frst of several studies asking women about the reasons they started, then continued, to remove hair. She identifed two clusters of reasons: “feminine/attractiveness reasons” (such as “I like the soft silky feeling”) and “social/normative reasons” (such 240

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as “People would look at me funny if I didn’t”). Participants identifed social/normative reasons as most signifcant for why they started shaving, but said they continued to remove hair for feminine/attractiveness reasons. Notably, participants who did not remove leg or underarm hair were much more likely to self-identify as feminist or lesbian. Several studies then went on to use Basow’s feminine/attractiveness versus social/normative reasons framework (Tiggemann & Hodgson 2008; Tiggemann & Kenyon 1998; Tiggemann & Lewis 2004). Key fndings from Tiggemann and Kenyon (1998) and Tiggemann and Lewis (2004) indicated that participants were more likely to ascribe social/normative reasons for hair removal to others than themselves, while they reported removing hair themselves for personal, aesthetic reasons. Tiggemann and Kenyon suggested this may refect participants’ desire to protect their own sense of agency and autonomy while engaging in hair removal. Basow and Braman examined university students’ perceptions of body hair on women by showing male and female participants “a video of a white woman either with or without visible leg and underarm hair,” and collecting their reactions (1998: 637). The version of the woman with body hair was perceived as “less sexually and interpersonally attractive than the same woman without body hair… less sociable, intelligent, happy, and positive,” but also more “aggressive, active and strong,” traits more often associated with masculinity (637). Observing that the descriptors of the woman with body hair was similar to common, negative descriptions of feminists, Basow and Willis (2001) conducted a follow-up study, telling participants either that the woman with body hair was a feminist, or that she had a medical condition that impeded her from removing leg and underarm hair. The participants attributed the same personal and interpersonal traits to the woman with body hair as they had in the previous study, regardless of which story they believed about the woman.

Building on the foundations Toerien and Wilkinson argued that their data, based on a qualitative survey of 678 diverse women, “ofer powerful evidence of shared systems for making sense of what it means to be a hairless or hairy woman in the UK today” (2004: 89, original emphasis). Hairlessness was typifed by all positive qualities: “attractive, smooth, clean and tidy, and feminine,” while hairiness was associated with negative qualities: “unattractive, stubbly, unclean and untidy, and masculine” (85). They found commonly reported “interactional sanctions” for failing to depilate: “suggestions, injunctions and pressure; complaints, criticisms and comments; jokes, teases and nicknames; looks, stares and ‘noticings’” (85). Breanne Fahs’ qualitative research (2011a, b, 2013a) likewise highlights themes of femininity construction and heteronormative policing. She created an extra-credit assignment for students in her Women’s Studies classes, who could opt in, if they were women, to leave their body hair to grow, or to remove their body hair if they were men, over a period of 10–12 weeks. Fahs (2011b) investigated the homophobia and heterosexism which 34 women participants experienced during one experiment. She pointed to a number of “drivers” of the hairlessness norm: family- and partner-based policing regarding the woman’s perceived loss of femininity and heterosexual desirability, and explicit criticisms of women’s capacity to make independent choices about their own bodies. Fahs and Delgado (2011) analyzed the role of class and race during one of Fahs’ classroom experiments. They found that heteronormative patrolling was particularly severe for women of color (primarily Latinx), who made up 35% of their sample of 19 women (see also Herzig 2015; Trujillo 2016, for more on race and class in constructing the hairlessness norm). Participants were told that they looked like feminists or lesbians; that their body hair was dirty, disgusting and contaminating to others; 241

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and that they would repel men. Participants also reported fearing their body hair would feed into classist and racist stereotypes about poor women and women of color being “unkempt or dirty,” especially because some women of color’s hair grew coarser, thicker, or darker than many white women’s (2011: 19). In my own research, I sought to examine whether identifying as a feminist impacts women’s engagement with the hairlessness norm (and by extension other normative feminine bodily practices) (Trujillo 2016). I conducted qualitative interviews with 40 self-identifed feminist women about their hair removal practices and feminisms. Participants’ hair removal practices broadly divided into three categories: frst, 14 participants who were afectively and politically committed to hair removal and had no intention of stopping, fnding joy and satisfaction in a normative feminine presentation. Second, 10 ambivalent participants felt deeply conficted about doing hair removal, whether they were actively trying to stop removing hair, or not. Third, 10 participants had stopped removing body hair and were happy that they had done so. Participants with “committed” hair removal practices had what I termed “normatively invested” feminisms, wherein they were invested in the hairlessness norm’s discursive apparatus, in particular aspects of postfeminist sensibility (Gill 2007) that emphasize choice as an individualistic, atomistic phenomenon that merely refects “personal” preferences. On the other hand, participants who no longer removed hair exhibited “normatively disinvested” feminisms, characterized by a collectivist feminist attitude concerning choice, which understood the hairlessness norm as a sexist norm that afects the ability of all women to make “free” choices about their bodies. They recognized that while their decisions to not remove body hair was indeed a choice, it was only possible for them due to various privileges (e.g. supportive romantic partners, strong social – especially feminist – bonds, white skin and pale hair).

Men’s body hair removal practices The research on men’s body hair removal has been growing, especially over the last decade. Of particular interest here are studies investigating men’s practices and reasons for depilation (Basow & O’Neil 2014; Boroughs, Cafri & Thompson 2005; Boroughs & Thompson 2002, 2014; Martins, Tiggemann & Churchett 2008; Terry & Braun 2013). This research has been prompted both by the literature on women’s hair removal practices and by the increasing focus on men in body-image research, arising from the growing commodifcation of men’s bodies, and changing masculinities (Boroughs & Thompson 2002; Tiggemann, Martins & Churchett 2008). Note that most of this literature uses the term “depilation” rather than “removal”: this is because men’s practices commonly include both hair removal and reduction or grooming (whereas women tend to remove body hair altogether, except for pubic hair). Basow and O’Neil studied 238 US college students’ views on male body hair and found that both men and women in their sample viewed mostly hairless male bodies as the most sexually desirable to both themselves, most men, and most women; however, “more women considered the moderately hairy male body to be sexually attractive than men expected,” while women expected men to prefer a hairier male body than they did (2014: 415). This suggests that the hairlessness norm is still more fexible and optional for men than it is for women; although hairlessness is increasingly preferred, it is not the only acceptable form of masculine embodiment. Terry and Braun (2013) likewise found that both removal and non-removal of male body hair was seen as acceptable by their participants, though men’s back hair was considered less acceptable. Indeed, Fahs’ (2013b) classroom experiment, in which 8 men agreed to shave their underarm, leg, and pubic hair for 12 weeks and record 242

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their observations (see also Fahs 2011a, b, 2013a), showed this double standard at work: although participants felt their heterosexuality and masculinities were questioned or threatened by the experiment, ultimately they had much more freedom than women in appropriating the hairlessness norm as empowering and masculine. One participant commented: “I know I can be manly with or without hair but women can’t be feminine with hair. It’s a double standard. I didn’t make it that way” (2013b: 571). Clarke and Braun (2019) mapped the meanings from 98 stories written by male or female undergraduates about a man named David who starts to remove body hair, and found that male hair removal was viewed by participants ambivalently: where the hair was seen as excessive and animalistic, depilation enhanced David’s masculinity (especially in regard to heterosexual capital) (see also Frank 2014; Immergut 2002; Terry & Braun 2016). However, hair removal could also be perceived as frivolous and vain (therefore feminized), and threatening to David’s presumably heterosexual masculinity. As Terry and Braun stated in their study, “The notion of ‘excess hair’ was deployed as the interpretative framework participants typically used to manage this contradiction between men’s body hair as natural, and men’s body hair as unpleasant” (2016: 20). This allowed the men in their study to remove body hair and protect their masculinities, in a context in which meanings around masculinity are shifting. Male participants in Boroughs and Thompson’s study described feeling “better” and “clean” after removing hair, and “dirty” or “self-conscious” before depilating (2002: 253), statements that are strikingly similar to those made by women in studies on feminine hair removal. As Boroughs, Cafri, and Thompson state, Given the historical emphasis on the relationship between masculinity and the presence of body hair […], such a shift has importance not only for better understanding the ever-changing ideals of attractiveness for men, but also because it sanctions behaviors that were once reserved for women. (2005: 640) These fndings imply that the hairlessness norm for men is in a transitional phase, and much of its symbolic apparatus is being established: associating hairlessness with hygiene, attractiveness and gender prowess, and acceptability, and hairiness with their opposites.

Pubic hair removal practices From 2005 onward, a large proportion of the hair removal research has been focused on pubic hair removal and grooming practices. Much of this more research comes from the medical sciences, in particular dermatology, gynecology, and emergency care (Bercaw-Pratt et al. 2012; DeMaria et al. 2014; Dendle et al. 2007; Glass et al. 2012; Hodges & Holland 2017; Luster et al. 2019; Trager 2006). The medical literature refects the fact that although pubic hair removal/grooming has grown in popularity over the last few decades, public awareness of the medical risks involved (e.g. serious bacterial infections and dermatological problems including burns and rashes) has not grown in tandem. The research on pubic hair removal also seeks to examine the reasons for participation in, and the meanings associated with, these practices (Braun, Tricklebank & Clarke 2013; DeMaria & Berenson 2013; Gaither et al. 2017; Herbenick et al. 2010; Obst, White  & Matthews 2019; Riddell, Varto & Hodgson 2010; Smolak & Murnen 2011). These include sexual attractiveness and behavior (Herbenick et al. 2013; Luster et al. 2019; Stone, Graham & Baysal 2017), fnding that more extensive and frequent hair removal is associated 243

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with youth and increased sexual activity among women; gender diferences (Braun, Tricklebank & Clarke 2013), and ideas that pubic hair removal improves cleanliness/hygiene, despite the opposite being true medically (Braun, Tricklebank & Clarke 2013; Jolly 2017). Some researchers have looked at the historical and social context for pubic hair removal, for example the emergence of the “Brazilian wax” (Peixoto Labre 2002), or the obstetric “perineal shave” during the twentieth century in contrast to the contemporary resurgence of women’s pubic hair removal ( Jolly 2017). Thus far, the research suggests that people primarily remove pubic hair for reasons of sexual attractiveness and desirability, and perceptions of increased hygiene/cleanliness.

Conclusion Research on body hair removal is still in its infancy, and often relies on convenience samples of primarily white, young undergraduate students. One crucial direction the research must follow is to focus explicitly on race, class, and sexuality as key components of the deployment of the hairlessness norm, and to recruit research participants accordingly. Nevertheless, crucial themes have been identifed in the research that merit further investigation. Hair removal has been identifed as a key practice delineating acceptable embodied femininity and masculinity, in conjunction with other aspects of embodied life, such as ideas around hygiene and cleanliness, sexual desirability, neoliberal frameworks around choice and consumption, as well as racialized and classed boundary-making. For such a seemingly innocuous, even frivolous, practice, hair removal is deeply bound up with meaning systems that shape our understanding of the world and our place in it, and should be treated as such.

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24 NEGOTIATING “ISLAMIC” BEAUTY IN TURKEY, OR CONCEPTUALIZING THE COMPLEX ENTANGLEMENTS BETWEEN BEAUTY AND RELIGION Claudia Liebelt Within Western public discourse and mass media, religious groups, ideologies, and politics are commonly seen as opposed to the global beauty sector and its products. For example, recurring protests against the Miss World competition, the biggest beauty contest globally, by religious groups have contributed to the mediated image of (some) religious factions being hostile to the global beauty and fashion industries, even though more comprehensive analyses have emphasized the deeper political and social conficts that stirred them: thus, right-wing Hindu nationalists in Bangalore, Southern India, protested the 1996 Miss World Pageant alongside feminist groups for over two months, arguing that the pageant threatened Hindu values and traditional gender roles (Ahmed-Ghosh 2003); Muslim rioters in Kaduna, Nigeria, attacked Christian churches and left more than 200 people killed in the run-up to the contest in 2002, apparently caused by a “blasphemous” article on the event by a local fashion blogger (Astill 2002); and Islamic groups in Jakarta, Indonesia, forced the event to relocate to the Hindu resort island of Bali in 2013, even after the pageant, in an attempt to appease religious concerns, had replaced the swimsuit competition with one that featured less-revealing beachwear attire (Quiano and Park 2013). In this contribution I seek to question the common assumption that modern beauty consumption is an exclusively secular or Western afair. Instead, I seek to analyze the theological and moral underpinning of “beauty” and explore in what ways engaging in beauty consumption may be a way of “doing” religion. Drawing on anthropological feld research on body aesthetics and beauty politics in Turkey, my main focus is on contemporary Muslim beauty politics and practices. Like elsewhere in the Islamic world, in Turkey, pious women are now an important target group for the beauty and fashion industries. They have to negotiate their beauty practices on the background of theological debates on body aesthetics and the consumption of beauty services that may celebrate beauty as divine on the one hand and condemn aesthetic body modifcation as “devil’s work” on the other.

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Contemporary beauty politics are embedded in a larger constellation of power: as argued by Mimi Thi Nguyen (2011), within the so-called Global War on Terrorism, beauty has become a new form of global biopower, “recruited to go to war” (ibid.: 360) as part of a “humanitarian” and allegedly civilizing imperialism against a supposedly extreme and “barbarous” Islam. According to Nguyen, this becomes obvious from North American and European fashion industry and nonproft professionals’ setting up of a Beauty Academy in war-torn Kabul and, more generally, the emergence of an ostensibly “feminist” rhetoric of lipstick and nail polish being able to “save” (Muslim) women from the “dullness” and “ugliness” of religious everyday life. As she points out (2011: 366), there is a “civilizational” and moral dimension of beauty, which draws heavily on the aesthetic theory of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant and continues to inform contemporary beauty politics. In order to grasp the complex entanglements between beauty (politics) and religion, in the following, I will frst take a closer look at the concepts of “beauty” and “religion” in an attempt to defne them and explore their interrelated and changing theological meanings. Second, I will provide an example for religious – in this case Muslim – politics of beauty against the background of critical debates on the topic in and beyond the scholarly literature.

Conceptualizing “beauty” and “religion” Concepts of both “beauty” and “religion” have emerged and shifted over an extended period of time, which renders the endeavor of providing universal and all-encompassing defnitions almost impossible. Instead, I wish to argue for a particular conceptualization of beauty and religion, which is rooted in new materialist and anthropological approaches to the body and embodiment. This contribution is concerned with beauty as an embodied and gendered condition, and hence requires a concept of the body. Recent anthropological and philosophical thinking has questioned the dichotomy between the body and the mind, as well as between the social and the biological that has long been maintained and reproduced within Western Cartesian thinking. Concepts of the body within new materialist scholarship (cf. Alaimo 2010; Barad 2003; Massumi 2014) have foregrounded the materiality of the gendered body as something that is “less an entity than a relation, [one that] cannot be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living” (Butler 2016: 19). From such a perspective, the materiality of the body is linked to the materiality of the world. Indeed, it is “of the world,” as Karen Barad (2003: 828) puts it, afecting it and being afected by it, moving it and being moved by it, modifying it and being modifed by it. Such a perspective recognizes no “natural” or “given” body, in contrast to one that has been artifcially modifed, altered, or enhanced to conform to dominant (aesthetic) ideals. Hence, the body can only be understood as malleable and in a state of becoming rather than being dependent on social relationships and embedded in particular bio-political economies. From this it follows that a beautiful appearance is not a static possession, but something that needs continually to be worked at. It is tied to collective fantasies – not to say, cosmologies – of what it means to be human, as well as of social mobility, modernity, and morality, to name but a few. Very importantly, beauty practices and the consumption of beauty services are embedded socially and may be read diferently depending on who engages in them. In his work on the Kayapo of the Brazilian Amazon, Terence Turner (2012[1980]) coined the notion of the “social skin” to emphasize the collective organization and social embeddedness of body decoration and aesthetic modifcation. For the Kayapo, beauty is a socially constructed value that is closely related to the perfection of the public performance and social refnement reserved for 248

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the elderly (Turner 2017). Ethnographic accounts more generally attest to the huge variety of embodied beauty norms across the globe, with some – for example, feminine fatness in parts of West Africa (cf. Popenoe 2004) – seemingly contrasting body images propagated by the global beauty and fashion industries. While an emerging scholarly literature describes the profound efects of the growing global beauty industry on people’s bodies and everyday lives in diferent parts of the world (see, for example, Jafar and Casanova 2013, Jha 2016, Liebelt et  al. 2018), research that focuses on the theological debates these have stirred and, more generally, on the relation between beauty (consumption) and religion is still scarce. Before going on to analyze this relationship, let me frst outline my concept of religion. In recent decades, the Anthropology of Religion underwent a major shift, away from a focus on belief, (theological) content, and meaning towards the study of materiality, embodiment, and emotion (Keane 2008). In her infuential inaugural lecture to the University of Utrecht, Birgit Meyer (2014) analyzes the long-standing focus on belief within the Anthropology of Religion as a “Protestant” legacy or bias, a “mentalistic” approach, proposing instead the study of material processes of articulation, mediation, and performance in the feld of religion. Such an approach, she writes, is concerned with the things employed by people to “do religion” and how these relate to them in a process of self-formation. From such a perspective, religion is defned as “extraordinary presence,” rooted in sensual and embodied experience (ibid.). Such an approach, I argue, has much to ofer to an analysis of beauty as likewise embodied and sensually afective. By focusing on the sensual and aesthetic underpinnings of religious experience on the one hand, and the sacred and afective, extraordinary power of beauty on the other, the deep entanglement between the two concepts comes into view. This entanglement has long been recognized in theological and philosophical debates on the relationship between beauty/ aesthetics and religion/ holiness (cf. Abou El Fadl 2006; Martin 2014; Thiessen 2004). They have fed into and continue to inform modern notions of beauty and beauty politics. Before moving on to discuss how young Turkish women “do” religion by engaging in beauty, let me briefy elaborate on its theological underpinning.

Beauty: theological perspectives The conceptualization of beauty in Western thought is deeply rooted in the classical textual corpus produced in Ancient Greece and by the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and, to a lesser extent, Islam. While scholars pointed out that the biblical texts lack a clear concept of beauty, they do refer to body aesthetics, in particular feminine aesthetics. Female heroines of the Talmudic and Biblical periods like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Esther are not only described as beautiful, but as fond of beauty practices, including bathing, the use of ointments, ornaments, cosmetics (kahal), as well as particular diets. In the Book of Isaiah, produced in the eighth century BCE, pleasant smell, well-dressed hair, and fne clothing are mentioned as important beauty ideals, for women as well as men. It is not until the rise of Athens in the ffth century BCE that a theory of beauty emerges that conceptualizes “true beauty” as an abstract, universal, and objective ideal, as opposed to the vulnerability and ephemerality of the living body (cf. Eco 2004: 42–45; Martin 2014). According to Plato, what we can see or recognize as beautiful is diferent from the true or “inner” beauty, “… now that we are imprisoned in the body, like an oyster in his shell” (Plato in Phaedrus XXX, quoted from Eco 2004: 51). For Plato and the Neoplatonians, the cosmos – creation itself – was a work of beauty created by an architect who managed to mold “the shapeless and often stubborn material in accordance with his preconceived and 249

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vitalizing ideas” (Kohler and Hirsch 1906: 615). Jewish thinkers were deeply infuenced by this notion and accordingly, the Hellenistic book Wisdom of Solomon, produced in the frst century BCE in Alexandria, describes God as the “author of beauty,” even as beauty/ the beautiful himself. In Islamic thought, God is likewise recognized as beautiful and the Muslim scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl (2006: xix) describes the search for beauty as being “the core and kernel of Islam.” An often-quoted hadith claims that “God is beautiful ( jamil) and God loves all that is beautiful” (related by al-Mu’jam al-Awsat ̣ 6902). The linkage of beauty with the divine proved to be a powerful idea that also fed into Western medieval and Enlightenment concepts of beauty. For example, in Immanuel Kant’s infuential aesthetic theory, mentioned above, beauty becomes the Sublime that renders visible the good and the true ([1790] 1987: 72). Whereas the beauty of God and more generally creation in the classical theological texts of the Abrahamic religions is commonly interpreted as a mission to search and to strive for moral beauty, physical beauty, especially feminine beauty, is rendered rather problematic. In the Book of Proverbs, a collection of texts written over a long period of time in Hebrew, King Solomon states that “[c]harm is deceptive, and beauty is feeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised” (Proverbs 31: 30, NIV). Moreover, beautiful women are described as potentially shameless and immoral (Proverbs 11: 22, NIV), as well as dangerous due to their sexual attractiveness (Proverbs 6: 25, NIV). In the Christian First Epistle to Timothy, this results in the request that “women… dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes” (1 Timothy 2: 9, NIV). Taking up the Platonian idea of inner beauty, the First Epistle to Peter (1 Peter 3: 3–4, NIV) emphasizes that beauty shows itself by what one does, rather than by what one wears or how one looks. The (neo-)Platonian and Aristotelian conceptualization of bodymind dualism becomes deeply rooted in (early) Christianity, defning “the soul,” rather than “the fesh” as the substantial form of human being. Within body-mind dualism, a preoccupation with physical beauty as a characteristic of the devalued, ephemeral body comes to be regarded as superfcial, vain, and morally reprehensible, a conceptualization that continues to inform modern Western thinking on body aesthetics and beauty consumption. Unlike Christianity, however, Islam is not grounded in a theory of the body as divided into mortal matter and immortal soul. Instead, the body and bodily comportment are seen as central for exercising belief and efecting proper Muslim conduct. Nevertheless, Muslim scholars and commentators commonly emphasize moral beauty in contrast to outer appearance. Moreover, in Sunni Islam and the Hanaf school of thought and jurisprudence, which has the largest number of followers among Sunni Muslims, changing one’s features as created by God and, following a particular hadith, shaping one’s eyebrows and tattooing are prohibited (haram). In Turkey, this interdiction has been confrmed by a number of religious commissions and individual clerics. Time and again the Turkish High Commission on Religious Afairs and other religious experts are quoted in the media as issuing warnings that aesthetic body modifcation is a “sin” (günah) for both men and women. Among the most outspoken critics of the recent beauty boom in Turkey is Ahmet Mahmut Ünlü, also known as Cübbeli Ahmet Hoca, an eccentric preacher of the conservative Ismailağa mosque in Istanbul, who in 2013 was quoted saying that cosmetic surgery was “the devil’s work” (quoted from Radikal 2013). However, even the most staunchly conservative religious experts are prepared to consider exceptions to the prohibition of aesthetic body modifcation, for example, if the treatment is predominantly a matter of health or is intended to correct bodily abnormalities. As in other situations of Islamic decision-making, the fnal decision is with the believer, who is forced to scrutinize 250

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his or her intention (niyet) to undergo a particular beauty treatment or surgery. In what follows, I will show how this plays out in the public discourse and consumption of beauty services in present-day Turkey.

Negotiating “Islamic” beauty in Turkey Like elsewhere, the beginning of the commercial beauty boom in urban Turkey dates back to the early 1980s, when the national economy was restructured in accordance with global neoliberal policies. Around the same time, the Islamic political movement gained strength, ultimately resulting in the current authoritarian regime led by the conservative pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP) and the rise of a new Islamic middle class in Turkey. Middle-class women who fashion pious forms of dress have become ever more prominent in the social and political life of urban Turkey, with the piously dressed wives of leading AKP politicians fguring as the embodiments of a new type of visibly Muslim, yet fashionable middle-class femininity. For the secular urban public, the emergence and the immediate success of conservative women’s magazines such as Âlâ, Hesna, Aysha and Noura on the Turkish market since 2011 draw attention to the existence of a signifcant faction of the middle class that is both pious and fashion-conscious. The engagement of upwardly mobile pious women in fashion and beauty disturbs the usual assumptions of the secularist elite that they are of lower class, backward, and/or lacking in taste. In the beginning of this chapter, beauty was described as a form of biopower, recruited to go to war against purported barbarism and religious extremism (Nguyen 2011: 360). In the polarized political climate in Turkey, beauty could likewise be described as being recruited to war in an urban battle between secularist women wielding their red lipsticks as symbols against what they perceive as the creeping Islamization of society and pious women appropriating hitherto secular domains and spaces of beauty consumption increasingly self-consciously. As the most visible symbol of new Islamic (elite) lifestyles and feminine subjectivities, much has been written on the role of the headscarf and other pious sartorial styles in Turkey (e.g. Çınar 2005; Gökarıksel 2012; Gökarıksel and Secor 2009, 2010; White 2002: 29–55, 212–241). As outlined by Tarlo and Moors (2013: 38), the emergence of an “Islamic” segment in the global fashion market puts into question the common assumption “that fashion is an exclusively Western or secular phenomenon.” However, pious self-fashioning consists of more than donning the veil and pious dress: it has come to imply an engagement with beauty practices and aesthetic body modifcation despite the fact that some of these treatments are problematic from a theological perspective. This has led to immense changes, especially within more popular and/or Muslim-conservative neighborhoods in Turkey’s largest city Istanbul, where I conducted anthropological feld research between 2011 and 2015. A case in point is the story of one of my interlocutors, Sibel (names of research participants have been replaced with pseudonyms throughout this chapter), a trained hairdresserbeautician, who in the year 2000 opened one of the frst female hair and beauty salons in the conservative neighborhood of Fatih, on the historical peninsula of Istanbul. Before opening her salon, Sibel solicited fetvas (legal rulings) from three well-known Islamic scholars on the permissibility of the salon and its treatments in order to satisfy her own and her prospective customers’ religious scruples. While the rulings stressed the gender-segregated nature of the salon, they did not oppose the idea of a salon in principle. Nevertheless, shortly after its opening, Sibel met ferce resistance from some of her neighbors: a group of women attacked her home, smashing windows and defacing a wall, and for months she was abused verbally by a group of covered women who followed her between her home and the beauty salon. 251

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For even longer, people called Sibel anonymously or sent her text messages attacking her for opening a beauty salon, which they regarded as sinful, a place of vanity, and the creation of sexual allure that was misplaced in this respectable neighborhood. Sibel remained steadfast, and after she sought the mediating support of an infuential Islamic scholar, the hostility subsided. Today, she counts many of her pious neighbors among her regulars. In Sibel’s salon, the emphasis was on beauty as a service devoted not only to the creation of aesthetic norms, but also to the creation of moral integrity, gendered role conformity, and, perhaps most of all, cleanliness. Cleanliness, especially that created by the specifc treatments on ofer in the salon, was commonly seen as a precondition and sometimes as the essence of feminine beauty. Beauty therapists, hairdressers, and many of their customers in Istanbul emphasized that cleanliness was a process that needed to be worked for continuously, for example by regular body hair removal or facial cleansing treatments. In Sibel’s salon and more generally in Turkey, the manufacturing of bodily cleanliness was seen as an integral part of everyday life and, indeed, as one of the central aspects of religious practice. In a situation in which neither social conventions nor religious rulings are fully worked out, young pious women were found to draw heavily on the Internet, especially online forums such as the Women’s Club (Kadınlar Kulübü) or Fatwa Center (Fetva Meclisi), to inquire about and discuss the permissibility of aesthetic body modifcation and beauty practices. Of the Fatwa Center queries on body aesthetics in 2013, most (33%) concerned the permissibility of body hair removal – including of pubic hair and eyebrows, and by laser depilation – as well as cosmetic surgery (22%). Other users wondered about the permissibility of hair extensions, permanent make-up (as a form of tattooing), nail polish, and attending beauty salons more generally. Like other religious scholars, Nureddin Yıldız, who set up the Fatwa Center in 2010 and usually responded to the queries, was concerned about cosmetic surgery changing God’s creation and warned against the use of forbidden substances such as lard oil or alcohol in cosmetics, or of foreign human matter, as in hair extensions. However, much like other religious commentators quoted in the conservative media, he encouraged women to invest in an attractive outer appearance within the confnes of a heterosexual marriage. From Yıldız’s perspective, beauty was an obligation for the married woman, with those who because of age or marital status are not legitimately or commonly regarded as sexually reproductive seen as standing outside of the realm of beauty altogether. Among the sporadic users of the Fatwa Center was Sevda, Sibel’s daughter. Sevda was in her early 20s when we frst met and had recently fnished an apprenticeship with a fashion designer. She helped out in her mother’s salon, where she usually applied make-up, operated the hair removal equipment, and taught belly-dance classes to her mother’s customers. Sevda paid great attention to even the smallest details of her looks and outer appearance and spent much time informing herself of the latest styles and fashions. As someone who self-described as Tesettür, a vigilant veiling style that developed in urban Turkey during the 1980s, Sevda usually combined fashionable waisted overcoats with silky headscarves in pastel colors, rarely leaving the house without make-up. For Sevda and her female friends, some of whom I met as regulars of her mother’s salon, there was clearly no contradiction between being Tesettür and styling up. Sevda regularly discussed the permissibility of new beauty treatments, such as the use of hair or eyelash extensions (both of which she used for special occasions such as weddings or engagement parties) with Islamic teachers whom her mother consulted during her regular Qur’an reading classes that the municipality provided for women. The ultimate goal of not drawing attention to oneself, or making “people turn their heads,” as Sevda put it, relied on a substantial amount of self-scrutiny, discipline, and daily experience in moving 252

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about public spaces in diferent kinds of styles and outfts. Not least, Sevda and her friends favored “invisible” rather than visibly “heavy” make-up, which meant avoiding “bright” colors such as pink, orange, or the highly sexualized color red and applying more “natural” colors, such as beige or rosé, for lipstick or eye shadow instead. Like other pious women I met in beauty salons and clinics, Sevda emphasized that, when she engaged in beauty practices that were debatable from a theological point of view, she did so in a minimal and disciplined rather than “exaggerated” way, always careful in her description of the treatment. For example, as in the beauty salons frequented by pious Muslim women of South Asian origin in northern Britain studied by Hester Clarke (2016), in the salon in Fatih where Sevda worked and consumed most of her own beauty treatments, eyebrows were not commonly “shaped,” but merely “cleaned.” While with a few exceptions most of the beauty treatments Sevda and her friends engaged in were congruent with those that more secular Istanbulites of the same age and social position engaged in, these were nevertheless scrutinized more carefully in their efects and motivating force by pious women. They often had to be negotiated within restrictive social environments as well as with the secularist public.

Conclusion and outlook This contribution has attempted to complicate the common notion of Islam, and more generally, “religion” and/or “the religious” as being opposed or even hostile to beauty and modern beauty consumption. Rather, it has argued that there is a moral underpinning of (bodily) beauty, which has long been recognized and conceptualized in theological, including in Islamic, thinking, and debate. Similar to what has been criticized in regard to fashion (Tarlo and Moors 2013), there is an assumed secularity of beauty, which is not only historically problematic, but belongs to an imperial mindset that divides the world into the beautiful West and the ugly rest. Instead, beauty has been analyzed as a social relation that is tied to cosmological understandings of what it means to be an embodied and gendered human being. As a major way of “doing” religion, engagement with beauty is tied to a wide range of sensual, bodily, and moral states and practices. Thus, from the perspective of the women portrayed above, a clean body is a prerequisite for and even an equivalent of gendered beauty, based on its active manufacturing through repeated bodily acts, such as the washing and more thorough cleansing of the skin and body hair removal, but also tied to moral and sensual qualities that go beyond the physical-material sphere. Research in present-day Turkey shows that pious women’s consumption of modern beauty products and services relies not only on a social redefnition of what is considered feminine, but also on their changing interpretations and ongoing negotiations of what is permissible and respectable from an overall Muslim perspective, as well as within particular social settings. Not least, pious women’s consumption of beauty services and cosmetic surgery needs to be understood against the background of far-reaching debates on the topic among Muslim scholars and within the wider public. Similar to the engagement or disengagement with fashion by Muslim women, there is a wide range of diversity of perspectives on beauty consumption among Muslims and in Muslim-majority countries. The focus of this contribution was necessarily limited by my own research focus on the (Muslim) politics of beauty in present-day Turkey. While there is much debate regarding Islamic fashion in diferent parts of the world, the scholarly literature on “Islamic” beauty, if such a thing even exists, as well as, more generally, on the role of religion in relation to the global beauty industry, is still scarce. Further research is needed on the religious politics of 253

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beauty in non-Western contexts, on the emergence of religiously motivated beauty products and markets, but also on the theological underpinnings of assumedly secular, “Western” beauty consumption. Given the fact that the global beauty industry operates with notions of beauty that are deeply embedded in theological and moral notions of beauty as the sacred and the divine, this is a major research gap.

Further reading Jha, M. R. (2016) The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism and the National Body, New York and Abingdon: Routledge (a highly readable introductory textbook on the global beauty industry, which includes an analysis of the Hindu politics of beauty in India); Martin, J. A. ([1990] 2014) Beauty and Holiness: The Dialogue between Aesthetics and Religion, Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press (provides a broad historical overview over the development of aesthetic theory in relation to religious thought, with a focus on classical and modern Western philosophy); Tarlo, E. and A. Moors, eds. (2013) Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North America, London, New York: Bloomsbury (authoritative volume on Islamic fashion, with a concise introduction by the editors and a number of notable case studies).

References Abou El Fadl, Khaled 2006. The Search for Beauty in Islam: A Conference of the Books, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld. Ahmed-Ghosh, Huma 2003. “Writing the Nation on the Beauty Queen’s Body: Implications for a ‘Hindu’ Nation,” Meridians 4 (1): 205–227. Alaimo, Stacy 2010. Bodily Natures. Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Astill, James 2002. “The Truth Behind the Miss World Riots,” The Guardian, 30 November, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/nov/30/jamesastill Barad, Karen 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–831. Butler, Judith 2016. “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” in J. Butler, Z. Gambetti, Z. and L. Sabsay (eds.) Vulnerability in Resistance, Durham, NC, London: Duke University Press, 12–27. Çınar, Alev 2005. Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places and Time, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Clarke, Hester 2016. “Shaping Eyebrows and Moral Selves: Considering Islamic Discourse, Gender, and Ethnicity within the Muslim Pakistani Community of Shefeld (UK),” Sociologus 66 (1): 53–72. Eco, Umberto ed. 2004. On Beauty, London: Secker & Warburg. Gökarıksel, Banu 2012. “The Intimate Politics of Secularism and the Headscarf: The Mall, the Neighborhood, and the Public Square in Istanbul.” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 19 (1): 1–20. Gökarıksel, Banu and Anna J. Secor 2009. “New Transnational Geographies of Islamism, Capitalism, and Subjectivity: The Veiling-Fashion Industry in Turkey,” Area 41 (1): 6–18. ———. 2010. “Between Fashion and Tesettür: Marketing and Consuming Veiling-Fashion,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6 (3): 118–48. Jafar, Afshan and Erynn Masi de Casanova, eds. 2013. Global Beauty, Local Bodies, New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jha, Meeta R. 2016. The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism and the National Body, New York, Abingdon: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel [1790] 1987. Critique of Judgment: Including the First Introduction, trans. W. S. Pluhar, Bloomington, IN: Hackett. Keane, Webb 2008. “The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14: S110–S127. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00496.x Kohler, Kaufmann and Emil G. Hirsch 1906. “Beautiful, the, in Jewish Literature,” in I. Singer (ed.), The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, New York, London: Funk and Wagner, pp. 615–19.

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Negotiating “Islamic” beauty in Turkey Liebelt, Claudia, Böllinger, Sarah and Ulf Vierke, eds. 2018. Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, James A. [1990] 2014. Beauty and Holiness: The Dialogue between Aesthetics and Religion, Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Massumi, Brian 2014. What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Durham, NC, London: Duke University Press. Meyer, Birgit 2014. “Mediation and the Genesis of Presence: Toward a Material Approach to Religion,” Religion and Society: Advances in Research 5: 205–254. doi:10.3167/arrs.2014.050114 Nguyen, Mimi T. 2011. “The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialism and Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror,” Signs 36 (2): 359–383. doi:10.1086/655914. Popenoe, Rebecca 2004. Feeding Desire: Fatness, Beauty, and Sexuality Among a Saharan People, London, New York: Routledge. Quiano, Kathy and Madison Park 2013. “Religious fury alters Miss World in Indonesia,” CNN, September 27, https://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/27/world/asia/miss-world-pageant/index.html Radikal 2013. “Cübbeli Ahmet: I Cannot Laugh about Cem Yılmaz” [Cübbeli Ahmet: Cem Yılmaz’a gülemiyorum], 20 October, http://www.radikal.com.tr/turkiye/ cubbeli-ahmet-cem-yilmazagulemiyorum-1156309/ (accessed September 20, 2017). Tarlo, Emma and Annelies Moors, eds. 2013. Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North America, London, New York: Bloomsbury. Thiessen, Gesa E., ed. 2004. Theological Aesthetics: A Reader. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Turner, Terence S. [1980] 2012. “The Social Skin,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(2): 486–504. Turner, Terence S. 2017. “Beauty and the Beast: The Fearful Symmetry of the Jaguar and Other Natural Beings in Kayapo Ritual and Myth,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(2): 51–70. White, Jenny B. 2002. Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics, Seattle, London: University of Washington Press.

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25 BOTOX AND BEAUTY POLITICS Dana Berkowitz

Botox has percolated through our cultural consciousness in meaningful ways, transforming many of our cultural expectations about beauty, bodies, gender, and aging. The most popular nonsurgical cosmetic treatment to date, Botox is considered the preeminent remedy for wrinkles on the upper part of the face. An important subject of sociological and feminist inquiry, Botox makes visible the ways that gendered cultural norms and social inequalities are mapped onto bodies (Berkowitz 2017). In this chapter, I detail why Botox is signifcant for modern beauty politics. I begin by providing a background on Botox – what it is, who uses it, and who is providing it. I then detail how Botox is aggressively marketed, increasingly to younger women. After discussing how individuals become Botox users and experience their Botoxed bodies, I consider the implications Botox has for feminist theories on beauty culture and social theories on bodies and embodiment. I conclude with suggestions for future research.

Botox: a background Botox is a naturally occurring byproduct of the microorganism that causes botulism, a severe, life-threatening illness that can cause respiratory failure and even death. An agonizingly painful experience, untreated botulism paralyzes victims’ bodies from the inside out, resulting in death by sufocation (Erbguth 2004). However, despite the fact that botulinum toxin is one of the deadliest on the planet, it also has a range of therapeutic and medical applications, and has been used to remedy crossed eyes, uncontrollable blinking, hypersalivation, excessive sweating, chronic migraines, Bell’s palsy, cerebral palsy, and a range of other facial, eyelid, and limb spasms (Devriese 1999; Lipham 2004; Ting & Freiman 2004). Botulinum toxin’s most notorious and lucrative application is cosmetic (Berkowitz 2017). What we know now as Botox Cosmetic was “discovered” in 1987 by Jean Carruthers and her husband Alastair (Carruthers & Carruthers 1992; Devriese 1999). Jean, an ophthalmologist, was using Botox (then, branded, Oculinum) to treat crossed eyes and ocular spasms. During a routine procedure, one of her patients noted how much she liked the way the injections in her brow gave her an attractive and unfustered expression (Kuczynski 2006). The next day Jean and her husband Alastair, a dermatological surgeon, decided to inject the toxin in the forehead of their assistant, Cathy Bickerton Swann, famously known as “patient 256

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zero” in the Botox trials (Kuczynski 2006). Less than a week later, they observed that the lines on Swann’s brow that used to make her look angry and tired had completely vanished (Berkowitz 2017; Kuczynski 2006; Noonan & Adler 2002). Even though the Carruthers “discovered” what we know now as Botox in 1987, it took another decade before people were convinced that injecting a toxin in facial wrinkles was a good idea. In 1991, the pharmaceutical company Allergan bought Oculinum for about $9 million, rebranding it “Botox” (Singer 2009). During the 1990s, word began to spread about Botox’s curative properties and by the time Botox was approved by the FDA for cosmetic use in 2002, it was already a beauty secret among insiders, celebrities, and socialites. Since the early 2000s, Botox use has increased almost 850%, making it the most widely used cosmetic procedure to date (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 2019). In 2018 alone, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery estimated that there were over 7 million Botox procedures (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, Statistics 2018). The way that Botox Cosmetic works is that extremely small concentrations of the toxin are injected into a user’s facial muscles. The drug prevents signals from the nerve cells from reaching muscles, causing a reduction in muscle contraction (Carruthers & Carruthers 1992). Over the next three to ten days, the toxin paralyzes the muscles that control facial movement, smoothing individuals’ dynamic wrinkles, or those facial creases that result from cumulative years of expression. Over these next few days, Botox users experience a change in their ability to make certain expressions, specifcally in their ability to scowl or furrow their brow. One of the reasons Botox is so popular is because it is essentially a cash cow for physicians and other licensed injectors. Because it is billed as a cosmetic procedure, there is no health insurance paperwork to manage. A vial can cost a licensed provider approximately $500, and that single vial can potentially generate revenue of up to $3,000 (Kuczynski 2006). Botox is also extremely time efcient, with each procedure taking approximately 15 min. There are very few other medical cosmetic procedures that are as proftable as Botox, and as a result, there are unprecedented numbers of physicians from non-specializing subfelds integrating Botox injections into their practices. A growing number of ob-gyns, family doctors, and dentists are ofering Botox, with some even opening and directing their own medical spas. Rapidly growing businesses, medical spas are a hybrid between medical clinics and day spas. There are currently over 5,000 medical spas in the United States (American Med Spa Association 2019). The rise of medical spas and the increasing numbers of non-specializing physicians providing Botox, combined with Allergan’s aggressive marketing campaign, have made it so that a supplier-induced demand currently permeates Botox, as growing numbers of medical, health, and wellness providers entice consumers with bargains on Botox and other minimally invasive procedures (Berkowitz 2017). Like most other cosmetic anti-aging products on the market, Botox is widely marketed to middle-aged women. And just as with cosmetic surgery, women comprise the overwhelming majority of Botox users. In 2018, approximately 94% of all Botox consumers were women (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Statistics 2018) and 57% of these procedures were performed on women between the ages of 40 and 54 (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Statistics 2018). This is not surprising given what we know about the gendered politics of aging and the extent to which a larger system of gender inequality governs how we think about and experience aging bodies. We have a double standard of aging whereby women grow old and men become distinguished (Sontag 1972). The appearance of aging is, thus, more problematic for women than for men, and at considerably younger ages. A wide range of scholarly research has confrmed that the double standard of 257

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aging produces signifcant social inequalities that profoundly contribute to women’s cultural and economic inequality (Barnett 2005; Duncan & Loretto 2004). Media images of aging men are far more conspicuous than those of aging women, and employment-based ageism disadvantages women more so than men (Barnett 2005; Bazzini, et al. 1997). What distinguishes Botox from other anti-aging interventions is that it is marketed as a procedure with preventive powers (Berkowitz 2017). Because of Botox’s ability to paralyze facial muscles and prohibit facial movement, it is believed by many that regular injections can prevent the appearance of dynamic wrinkles from forming. Buying into the idea that no facial movement ultimately means no facial wrinkles, a growing population of young women are using Botox prophylactically in the hopes that they won’t develop future facial creases. Consequently, not only middle-aged women use Botox, but also women in their 30s and even their 20s. In 2018, close to 1.4 million Botox procedures were performed on people aged 19–39, constituting about 20% of the total (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Statistics, 2018). This growing trend of women in their 20s and 30s using Botox as a means to prevent the appearance of aging is especially troubling given that the efects of Botox last only four to six months, and users must repeat injections two to three times a year (Berkowitz 2017). Botox is one of myriad body practices that women engage, in order for them to maintain a youthful and beautiful façade. Yet, women’s relationships with their bodies and their participation in consumer beauty culture is shaped not only by their gender but also by other intersecting social locations such as their geography, race, ethnicity, and social class. For one, the majority of Botox users reside in the West Coast, New England, Mid- and South Atlantic regions (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Statistics 2018). And second, although Botox users are overwhelmingly White, making up close to 80% of the total, racial and ethnic minorities do constitute slightly over 20% of all Botox users (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Statistics 2018). The racial and ethnic minority breakdown of Botox consumption is such that Hispanics comprise 10% of Botox users, African American and Asian-Pacifc Islander make up 5% each, and the remaining 2% are categorized as Other (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Statistics 2018). Research also indicates that the beauty ideals to which women subscribe and the resulting beauty work that follows are deeply associated with social class. This is because beauty work is about appropriating and communicating social status by cultivating the body in a particular way. For example, women of higher socioeconomic status have been found to be more dissatisfed or concerned about their physical appearance than those in lower social strata, and those with high levels of education are more likely to report dissatisfaction with their bodies (McLaren & Kuh 2004). The American Society of Plastic Surgeons does not collect ofcial statistics on social class and Botox, so we do not have data on this. However, that Botox averages approximately $300–$400 for one procedure and “needs” to be continuously topped of two to three times a year suggests that it is a relatively privileged practice (Berkowitz 2017). Finally, even though the overwhelming majority of Botox consumers are women, a small but growing number of men are beginning to go under the needle. The number of male Botox consumers in the United States has increased 380% since 2000, with approximately 450,000 male Botox users in 2018, comprising 6% of the total Botoxed population (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Statistics 2018). These statistics mirror general trends in cosmetic surgery and further expose how larger social forces such as media, medicine, the pharmaceutical lobby, and the beauty industry are increasingly regulating men’s 258

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bodies. Where once men were immune from the pressures of bodily objectifcation and self-surveillance, this no longer rings true. Big pharma and the beauty industry are beginning to realize that they are ignoring an untapped consumer base and are fnding innovative ways to market to men.

Marketing Botox Dominant cultural and medical discourses that project the normalization of Botox, its preventative powers, and the positive efects it will have on the user’s self and relationships have contributed greatly to the drug’s success (Berkowitz 2017). On television, in print, and, increasingly, through digital and social media, Botox is marketed as a normalized, routine, and casual component of beauty maintenance. Botox is situated within an ethos of anti-aging medicine and aesthetic enhancement culture, both of which are highly proftable commercial industries built on convincing consumers that they can always look younger, healthier, and more attractive. And these industries are doing quite a job on Americans. In 2018 there were over 17.7 million surgical and nonsurgical cosmetic procedures performed in America. Of these, nearly 16 million were nonsurgical minimally invasive procedures (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Statistics 2018). The growth in these cheaper, nonsurgical procedures is especially noteworthy. In less than two decades, there has been a 228% increase in the total number of minimally invasive procedures – such as injectables, skin resurfacing, and laser procedures – and nonsurgical facial rejuvenation procedures have experienced more growth than any other cosmetic procedure. Although the normalization of Botox is related to a broader trend in the mainstreaming of anti-aging medicine and aesthetic enhancement culture, the fact that Botox injections are temporary, repetitive, addictive, and marketed as preventive has made it such that “these injections are fast becoming regular body upkeep, just like teeth cleaning and haircuts” (Berkowitz 2017: 45). And as such, Botox use has surpassed all other cosmetic surgical and nonsurgical procedures by a landslide, increasing 845% in the last two decades (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Statistics 2018). Regularly situated within a broader ethos of preventive aesthetics, Botox has been marketed to prolong the appearance of not only middle age, but also youth. The phrase “preventative Botox” is widely believed, and a growing contingent of Botox consumers in their 20s and 30s are being advised that the best time to start using Botox is when their wrinkles are minimally perceptible. This is precisely why Botox procedures in the 19–34 demographic have more than doubled in the last decade, and more women between the ages of 22 and 40 use Botox than do women over 60 (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Statistics 2018). Since 2014, we have seen a 22% increase in Botox injections among 22- to 37-year olds (Bulik 2019). There is good reason to believe that this cultural trend is only increasing. This past year, Allergan launched a new ad campaign targeting millennials. In an efort to “rebrand and modernize” the drug, as “not your mama’s Botox,” Allergan committed to doubling its investment in consumer advertising, much of which will be digital and social media focused (Bulik 2018). They are also bolstering their presence on television and subscription streaming services. In their TV ad, a group of 20-somethings are shown exaggerating their expressions with no perceptible frown lines or brow creases with the caption, “Look like you, with fewer lines.” One of the goals of the campaign is to emphasize to a millennial audience that Botox delivers a natural, subtle look, so users still look like themselves. Implicit in these marketing materials is the idea that looking like yourself is no longer good enough, since now, with the advent of Botox, you need to look like you, with fewer 259

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lines. By exposing the purportedly fawed and defcient natural body, promotional materials for Botox are actively setting new standards for normalcy and beauty. Moreover, advertisements for Botox often project the message that it can potentially yield psychological, social, and economic benefts. Where some ads present Botox as a strategy for maintaining a competitive edge in today’s job market, others cast it as practice of self-care, as something a person does to make herself look and feel better, like exercise and healthy eating. Neoliberal ideologies of autonomy and personal responsibility permeate Botox’s marketing and encourage subjects to take control over their appearance through responsible and conspicuous consumption (Berkowitz 2017). Similarly, emphasizing women’s empowerment and agency, marketing messages about Botox draw upon postfeminist rhetoric, casting Botox as a pleasurable and autonomous act and as way to express and accentuate one’s femininity. Such neoliberal and postfeminist discourses have been widely critiqued by scholars for obscuring how hegemonic beauty norms, gendered constraints, and institutionalized inequality shape the choices women make about their bodies and beauty work and for narrowly limiting women’s agency to how they look and what they can buy (Fraser 2003; McRobbie 2004, 2008; Braun, 2009; Leve, Rubin, & Pusic 2012).

Becoming and being a Botox user People try Botox for the frst time for varying reasons. In my interviews with Botox users, I found that some people were motivated by the increasing normalization and mainstreaming of Botox and other aesthetic enhancements, both in their peer groups and in a broader cultural context (see also Brooks 2016). Others were driven by a desire to maintain their physical attractiveness, boost their self-confdence in social situations, improve their chances in the dating pool, and maintain their competitive edge in the workplace (Berkowitz 2017). Many Botox users are also seduced by bargain deals, which are increasingly marketed on social media channels. Some are even prompted to initiate Botox injections by accompanying a friend or family member, a trend which is becoming more common with promotional deals such as Allergan’s BFF promotion, a marketing tactic that rewards consumers for bringing in their friends with free treatments and products. The BFF campaign is a part of Allergan’s Brilliant Distinctions program. Launched in 2017, Brilliant Distinctions is a consumer loyalty program that can be used to earn savings on Botox and other select Allergan treatments and products every time they make a purchase or participate in one of their innovate marketing promotions. In my book, Botox Nation, I argued that accounts about Botox use mirror sociological research fndings on illicit drug subcultures, in the ways that users are sometimes given their frst taste for free or for a bargain and the way that social networks and peer groups infuence introduction to the drug (Berkowitz 2017). The drug metaphor is also a useful heuristic device to conceptualize the phenomenological process through which Botox users become addicted to the procedure. Because the efects of Botox are temporary, it can create a compulsion for repetitive use and the inability to stop using Botox is a common sentiment among those who use it (Berkowitz 2017). Moreover, Botox can also serve as a gateway drug into other aesthetic procedures, such as dermal fller, laser treatments, and even facial cosmetic surgery. Botox epitomizes how the cosmetic enhancement market profts from inducing suferings of personal inadequacy, creating a culture of lack that is only quenched through continuous consumption of more aesthetic products and services. Another, rather troubling reason for Botox’s appeal lays in the way it inhibits the subject’s ability to visibly express negative emotions such as annoyance and anger. I have 260

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argued that this may be particularly enticing to women, who are taught from an early age, to project a veneer of cheerfulness and to disguise unhappiness (Berkowitz 2017). Even more concerning is that Botox may also change how women feel. There is a psychological theory known as the facial feedback hypothesis that proposes that the control of facial expression produces parallel efects on subjective feelings (Hennenlotter et al. 2008). Following this line of reasoning are a proliferation of studies reporting that Botox can potentially alleviate depression (Finzi 2013; Finzi & Rosenthal 2014). In addition, there is also evidence that our facial expressions may infuence, not only our own emotions, but also the emotions of those who are reading and responding to our facial expressions because people have a propensity to mimic the facial expressions of the others with whom they are interacting (Vaughan and Lanzetta 1981; Dimberg 1982). This is why I have argued that Botox not only appeals to women, but also their intimate partners, children, and coworkers (Berkowitz 2017). The most oft-mentioned attraction of Botox is its preventative and restorative powers that it not only prohibits the face’s ability to emote in the present, but also it prevents the appearance of emotion from leaving a lasting facial impression. One way that Botox does this is by training the subject’s face not to furrow or frown. Botox works in such a way that users begin to fnd fault in expressing emotions that indicate annoyance or skepticism. Some users even report headaches during the frst few weeks of injections, especially when they try to furrow their brows. Disciplining users to monitor their facial expressions, Botox is illustrative of the ways that “modern technologies become constitutive of self-policing subjects” (Berkowitz 2017: 147). Thus, Botox conditions subjects to intervene in their own bodies, molding them to achieve a culturally valued aesthetic: an embodied process that Foucault refers to as “technologies of the self ” (Foucault 1988; Cooke 2008). Botox objectifes the body by inscribing subjects with hegemonic gendered meanings and values, and its eradication of the brow creases and frown lines that can cause women to look angry fts within a history of regulating women’s bodies to accommodate to cultural standards of feminine attractiveness. Yet, where objectifcation is an important component of theorizing Botox users’ experiences of embodiment, so too are agentic psychosocial motivations and cultural interpretations. Botox users cultivate their bodies in ways that meaningfully demonstrate their defnitions of their selves and their identities. And still, Botox users are concomitantly produced within a nexus of institutional gender inequality, cultural ageism, and structurally created demand. Thus, Botox users are both rational agents and herded conformists. Employing the plurality of a both/and approach to understanding Botox has implications for feminist theorizing on beauty culture and social theories on bodies and embodiment.

Botox and implications for feminist and social theory Botox is but one part of a larger beauty industrial complex that profts from the need for women’s bodies and faces to remain young, thin, and beautiful. Botox is unique in that it straddles a liminal space between the acceptable parts of beauty culture, like make-up, nail polish, and hair color, and the more extreme practice of cosmetic surgery, with its extreme bodily transformation. A feminist analysis of Botox thus reveals a great deal about both beauty and cosmetic surgical culture. Feminist debates that position women as either victims of internalized oppression or as active and rational agents produce an unproductive and outdated binary (See 261

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Bordo  2003; Fraser 2003; Pitts-Taylor 2007). Listening to women’s stories about Botox and taking seriously the beauty industrial complex within which these stories are constructed reveal the complexity of debates around body modifcation and the extent to which women’s bodies can be both voluntarily cultivated and culturally objectifed. Women’s experiences with Botox expose how broader sociocultural contexts permeated by neoliberal and postfeminist ideologies, consumer capitalism, and biomedical transformations profoundly infuence the choices we make about our bodies and the stories we tell about these choices. A critical analysis of Botox also has implications for social theories of bodies and embodiment. Social theorists disagree about whether to view the body as a subject or an object – where some see the body as an object regulated by social and cultural norms; others conceptualize the body as an active subject, one that is purposeful, refexive, and negotiated. Thinking about women’s and, increasingly, men’s experiences with Botox through a sociological lens resolves this subject/object tension. Such a lens exposes the ways that bodies are cultivated in ways that meaningfully construct and demonstrate individuals’ selves and social identities, and the ways that social relationships shape bodies, while at the same time, highlighting how broader structural forces – notably, the pharmaceutical lobby and the beauty industry – govern individual decisions about how to shape and present our bodies.

Future research Despite the fact that Botox is the most widespread cosmetic anti-aging procedure in America, scholars are just beginning to consider its signifcance for beauty politics. As Allergan continues to amplify its already aggressive advertising campaign, further scholarly research is needed to understand how this will infuence beauty standards for millennial women, women of color, poorer women, and even men. We need additional research that interrogates Allergan’s marketing materials that target men and more studies that interview men about their experiences with Botox. In addition, since much of what we know about Botox comes from the voices of white women, scholars should conduct studies that center the voices and experiences of women of color using Botox. As Botox is becoming more acceptable among a wider range of women, further research is needed to understand how poor and working-class women interpret and negotiate media messages about Botox and the efects these messages have on their resulting beauty work. Although Botox is fnancially out of reach for the majority of women, Allergan’s aggressive marketing, coupled with the rise in medical spas and the increasing availability of promotions and bargains on Botox injections, makes it such that more women are given the option and, thus, the responsibility to use Botox. For this reason, I speculate that in the not so distant future Botox will become even more of a cultural imperative for increasing numbers of women and men across age, class, and race lines. Setting new standards for normalcy, Botox has transformed how we think about aging, femininity, masculinity, and beauty.

Related topics The politics of looking old The incredible invisible woman: age, beauty and the specter of identity 262

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References American Med Spa Association. 2019. “Medical Spa State of the Industry Report.” https://www. americanmedspa.org/page/med-spa-statistics. Accessed July 29, 2019. American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. 2018. “Statistics, 2018.” https://www.plasticsurgery. org/news/plastic-surgery-statistics. Accessed July 29, 2019. Barnett, Rosalind. 2005. “Ageism and Sexism in the Workplace.” Generations 29: 25–30. Bazzani, Dorris G., William D. McIntosh, Stephen M Smith, Sabrina Cook, and Caleigh Harris. 1997. “The Aging Woman in Popular Film: Underrepresented, Unattractive, Unfriendly, and Unintelligent.” Sex Roles 36: 531–543. Berkowitz, Dana. 2017. Botox Nation: Changing the Face of America. New York: New York University Press. Bordo, Susan. 2003. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Braun, Virginia. 2009. “The Women Are Doing It for Themselves: The Rhetoric of Choice and Agency around Female Genital ‘Cosmetic Surgery.’” Australian Feminist Studies 24: 233–249. Brooks, A. 2016. The Ways Women Age: Using and Refusing Cosmetic Intervention. New York: New York University Press. Bulik, Beth S. September 24, 2018. Allergan Amps Aesthetic Advertising in a Bid to Keep Botox on Top. Fierce Pharma. https://www.fercepharma.com/marketing/allergan-aesthetics-ampsadvertising-bid-to-keep-fagship-botox-top-and-advance-sibling. Accessed August 1, 2019. ———. January 30, 2019. Ready for Botox, Millennials? Allergan Has Launched Its First Campaign Targeting You. Fierce Pharma. https://www.fercepharma.com/marketing/get-ready-millennialsallergan-launches-its-frst-botox-campaign-targeting-younger-20s. Accessed August 1, 2019. Carruthers, Jean, and J. Carruthers. 1992. “Treatment of Glabellar Frown Lines with C. Botulinum-A Exotoxin.” Journal of Dermatologic Surgery and Oncology 18: 17–21. Cooke, Grayson. 2008. “Efacing the Face: Botox and the Anarchivic Archive.” Body and Society 14: 23–38. Devriese, Pieter. 1999. “On the Discovery of Clostridium botulinum.” Journal of the History of Neuroscience 8: 43–50. Dimberg, Ulf. 1982. “Facial Reactions to Facial Expressions.” Psychophysiology 19: 643–647. Duncan, Colin and Wendy Loretto. 2004. “Never the Right Age? Gender and Age Based Discrimination in Employment.” Gender, Work and Organization 11: 95–115. Erbguth, Frank. J. 2004. “Historical Notes on Botulism, Clostridium Botulinum, Botulinum Toxin, and the Idea of the Therapeutic Use of the Toxin.” Movement Disorder 19: S2–S6. Finzi, Eric. 2013. The Face of Emotion: How Botox Afects Our Moods and Relationships. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Finzi, Eric and Norman E. Rosenthal. 2014. “Treatment of Depression with OnabotulinumtoxinA: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo Controlled Trial.” Journal of Psychiatric Research 52: 1–6. Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self, edited by Luther H. Martin, Patrick H. Hutton, and Huck Gutman, 16–49. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Fraser, Suzanne. 2003. “The Agent Within: Agency Repertoires in Medical Discourse on Cosmetic Surgery.” Australian Feminist Studies 18: 27–44. Hennenlotter, Andreas., Christian Dresel, Florian Castrop, Andres.O. Ceballos-Baumann, Afra.M.,Wohlschlager, and Bernhard Haslinger. 2008. “The Link between Facial Feedback and Neural Activity within Central Circuitries of Emotion – New Insights from Botulinum Toxin– Induced Denervation of Frown Muscles.” Cerebral Cortex 19: 537–542. Kuczynski, Alex. 2006. Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery. New York: Doubleday. Leve, Michelle, Lisa Rubin, and Andrea Pusic. 2012. “Cosmetic Surgery and Neoliberalisms: Managing Risk and Responsibility.” Feminism and Psychology 22: 122–141. Lipham, William J. 2004. Cosmetic and Clinical Applications of Botulinum Toxin. Thorofare, NJ: Slack Incorporated. McLaren, Lindsay and Diana Kuh. 2004. “Women’s Body Dissatisfaction, Social Class, and Social Mobility.” Social Science and Medicine 58: 1575–1584. McRobbie, Angela. 2004. “Post-feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies 4: 255–264. ———. 2008. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage.

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26 ORTHODONTICS AS EXPECTED BEAUTY WORK Maxine Leeds Craig

Right beneath our noses In the late 1960s, as part of a broader social critique of sexism and racism, feminists identifed beauty ideals, and the institutions that made physical appearance of paramount importance in women’s lives, as major sources of women’s oppression. Inspired by the challenges to beauty culture arising from feminist and anti-racist movements, historians, psychologists, sociologists, cultural critics, and others began to focus on beauty. In the ensuing decades, critical beauty scholars examined the race, gender, and class politics of skin color, weight, body shape, and hair. They explored the politics and debated the meaning of the wide range of ways people transform their bodies, from dieting to cosmetic surgery. Yet despite proliferating critiques of beauty culture, almost no one gave attention to a cosmetic practice taking place right beneath our noses. Teeth straightening attracted almost no critical attention. Smiles make infrequent appearances in social science and humanities scholarship on the body. Braces are even rarer than smiles in the literature, despite how ordinary they are in the mouths of middle-class teenagers. This chapter gathers the scattered scholarship that examines the social meanings of smiles, and the scant references to braces I have found in studies of bodies and embodiment. It begins with historical studies of dentistry, which are the sources that have given the greatest attention to teeth. These works document the intertwining of technology, economics, and popular culture that has shaped dentistry as a profession, and the character and social distribution of the care dentistry provides. A second group of studies, written in cultural studies and art history, charts the history of representations of smiles in painted and photographic portraiture. Beyond these two groups, references to teeth and braces appear as asides, or illustrative examples, in studies that address the embodiment of class, race, and gender. Writers on bodies and embodiment use braces, or the perfection or imperfection of a smile to illustrate a larger point. Smiles readily function as recognizable examples, which scholars in the humanities and social sciences assume their readers will understand. Fiction writers rely on smiles too, signifying nationality and class position with a perfect “American” smile or braces, or using irregular teeth to show a character’s poverty. For example, readers can fnd fctional class-signifying orthodontics in a Barbara Kingsolver novel (1993: 112), and the dental perfection of Americans as seen from the United Kingdom in novels by David Lodge (1995: 50) 265

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and Zadie Smith (2005: 120). That a few words about the appearance of a small number of teeth at the front of a mouth can convey so much meaning suggests that there is much more to say about teeth straightening than has been said already. After surveying the fragmented academic writing on the appearance of teeth, this chapter will conclude by considering works that do not mention smiles, teeth, or braces, but which provide useful frames for asking critical questions about how orthodontics became normative beauty work.

Histories of dentistry Richard Barnett’s richly illustrated and sometimes gruesome Smile Stealers draws on published histories to present an all-encompassing account of human work on teeth from prehistory to the present. From the emergence of the “dentiste” as a distinct profession in eighteenth-century France to the present, dentistry has had the dual aims of alleviating physical sufering and improving appearance (Barnett 2017: 25). Barnett suggests that several factors converged to increase the importance of an attractive smile for people in the United States. He notes that orthodontics began in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century at the same time as masses of people had access to a new form of entertainment via moving pictures. Filmmakers used black and white flm to shoot the early movies, producing images that heightened the visibility of a wide, bright smile (Barnett 2017: 235). While Barnett points to the motion picture smile as one of multiple factors that drew wealthy people in the United States to orthodontia, it is important to bear in mind the way in which the gleaming grin produced by cinematic conventions of flming African Americans in black and white motion pictures perpetuated racist stereotypes. The fetching smiles Barnett refers to are presumably the smiles of white actors deemed attractive in early twentieth-century flms. In 1920 the manufacturer of Listerine mouthwash medicalized bad breath as a condition of “halitosis” and widely disseminated advertisements featuring bright smiles. These images and others like them contributed to the public’s desire for a pleasing smile (Barnett 2017: 236). After the uneven prosperity of the 1920s collapsed into the Great Depression of the 1930s, a writer published a book that would inspire millions to believe that they could overcome any obstacle through techniques of self-improvement. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Infuence People appeared in 1936. One of its lessons was the importance of a broad, white smile (Barnett 2017: 236). Alyssa Picard’s social and cultural history of dentistry in the United States, Making the American Mouth, opens with a stark contrast prompted by the text of a 1999 advertisement for a luxury car. The advertisement proclaims, “Naturally, all of our children wear braces” (Picard 2009: 1). Picard notes how improbable it would have been for the advertisement to begin with the boast “Naturally, all of our wives have had breast implants” (Picard 2009: 12). The comparison is a telling one that highlights the absence of stigma regarding straightened teeth. In the second half of the twentieth century, far from provoking stigma, teeth straightening gained acceptance as necessary medical care, which responsible parents would provide for their children. Consider the advertisement’s use of “naturally.” Critiques of cosmetic intervention often rest on a defense of the inherent goodness, or perhaps the good-enoughness of the natural body, viewed in contrast to an artifcially produced transformation. A quick search of the internet pulls up sites that publish photographs of the purported surgical “work” performed on celebrities’ bodies. These sites cater to the public’s fascination with, and derision of, artifcial breasts. When the advertisement stated, “Naturally, all of our children wear braces,” natural refers not to the body, but to class behavior, or more specifcally, to what wealthy parents will naturally provide for their children. If all of the children wear 266

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braces, all must need them. There is no shame in fxing the arrangement of teeth. Though they are often natural, crooked teeth have no defenders. They are not good enough. Using professional dental literature as her sources, Picard chronicles the evolution of dentistry in the United States as an entrepreneurial medical practice built around a fee for service model. In the early twentieth century, leaders of the dental profession supported experimental campaigns to bring basic dental care to impoverished immigrant children via clinics in public schools. Later, fervently capitalist leaders of the profession turned against similar programs, which they had come to view as steps taken in the direction of socialism. Municipalities abandoned attempts to provide children with dental care, and the existence of such programs at the beginning of the twentieth century faded from public memory. Multiple factors encouraged dentists to incorporate and emphasize cosmetic work in their practices in the latter half of the twentieth century. The introduction of fuoridation to most municipal water systems in the United States reduced the incidence of dental caries nationwide, and therefore the need for dentists to fll cavities. Cosmetic dentistry provided dentists with a renewed source of income (Picard 2009: 158). Dentistry developed in the United States as a form of health care that was primarily available to those who could pay for it. In the post-World War II era, a robust economy expanded that group. Though the national leaders of dentistry continued to oppose national insurance programs, declining unemployment and the rise of unionization meant that increasing numbers of working-class families had dental insurance, and therefore had access to dental care. Many insurance policies covered at least a portion of the cost of orthodontic treatment. The steep increase in population arising from the post-war “baby boom” combined with rising prosperity for the white middle class supplied dentists with a vast pool of potential patients of the age seen as most suitable for orthodontic treatment. A generation of children born in the 1950s and 1960s wore braces. The distinct history of dentistry in the United States has produced a society in which the poor often have no dental care, while the middle and upper classes feel compelled to have dentists address the appearance as well as the health of their teeth. Mary Otto’s Teeth is an account of the devastating consequences of the organization of dental care in the United States as a free market enterprise. The untreated dental illnesses of poor children and adults lead to excruciating sufering and early deaths. Alongside the crisis of dental disease among the poor, cosmetic dentistry for those who can pay continues to grow. Like Barnett, Otto traces the fascination with the perfect smile to the early days of cinema. Although the smiles moviegoers saw were perfect, many actors arrived in Hollywood with missing or crooked teeth. Caps that were amalgams of porcelain and plastic created many of the smiles fashed by Hollywood stars (Otto 2017: 18). Throughout the twentieth century, the visual culture of flm and advertising nurtured a public desire to have bright, regular smiles, and propelled middle-class Americans to visit dentists. For most of the century, dentists abstained from directly selling their own services, and denounced as “quacks” practitioners who advertised. Eschewing marketing was important for a profession that needed to distance itself from an earlier generation of disreputable tooth-pullers and nostrum sellers. That changed dramatically following US Supreme Court decisions in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which opened the foodgates to torrents of medical and dental advertising (Otto 2017: 166). When dentists sold their services to patients, they advertised friendliness, painlessness, and the promise of beautiful smiles. Dentists expanded their practices through cosmetic dentistry, but as they moved into the business of selling beauty, the boundaries of their feld blurred. A range of non-medical practitioners began to provide teeth whitening to customers in beauty salons and kiosks in shopping malls. State dental boards sued to prevent these less elite practitioners from encroaching upon their 267

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business. They lost. The US Supreme Court ruled that dentists had overreached in trying to claim teeth bleaching as their exclusive purview (Otto 2017: 164–166). Picard and Otto demonstrate that the distinct path followed by the profession of dentistry in the United States had consequences for the social distribution of care, and the kind of services dentists would provide. While most medical doctors in the United States afliate with medical groups or hospitals, dentists are more likely to work independently. As independent entrepreneurs, many dentists expanded their practices beyond the alleviation of sufering and developed techniques that focused on appearance. Barnett, Picard, and Otto describe how dentistry and orthodontics developed amid a commercial culture that linked happiness to beauty (Barnett 2017: 236; Otto 2017: 20; Picard 2009: 159). People with sustained access to dental care not only had their teeth professionally cleaned and cavities flled, they were increasingly apt to have irregular teeth straightened and yellow teeth whitened. Discolored, irregularly arranged, and missing teeth became symbols of poverty.

Representations of the smile People have always smiled, but the smiling portrait is a relatively recent convention. Smiles became common in portraiture in the last 100 years. Fred Schroeder, a writer on popular culture, surveyed smiles in Western art and concluded that smiles were “(1) rare in the arts, and (2) usually confned to lower classes or persons who are not fully in control of themselves, such as inebriates, and children” (1998: 115). Art historians who systematically searched for smiles in paintings concluded that they are not actually rare, but arise in specifc contexts (Steinberg, 2001; Tromans 2014; Trumble 2004). The formal portraits commissioned by members of the upper class present serene, unsmiling faces, but outside of portraiture, artists have used smiles as devices to convey a wide range of character traits, emotions, and forms of social deviance, or to create a sense of realism. Unruly smiles were part of the symbolic repertoire of racist caricatures, used to ridicule Irish, Black, Chinese, and Japanese people in diferent historical periods (Bogle 1992; Schroeder 1998: 118). Schroeder identifed a “revolution” in the depiction of smiles that occurred between 1920 and 1940. In those decades, smiles displaying white, evenly aligned teeth became the norm for magazine illustration and advertising. The revolution appeared in advertising and illustration but not in formal portraits. Schroeder found a bastion of unsmiling formality in the middle-class photographic portraiture of early twentieth-century high school and college yearbooks (1998: 131). Schroeder titled his article “Say cheese!” the familiar command that prompts people assembled in front of a camera to smile. As cameras became an accessible technology, people imitated advertisements and learned to smile for the camera.

Te smile as example Historians of dentistry, and of art, in its popular and elite forms, have provided the most extensive examinations of the social signifcance of the appearance of smiles. Regular and irregular smiles appear in the work of other scholars briefy, as illustrations of broader issues, often those related to class. For example, in a study of the admissions process at an elite college, sociologist Mitchell Stevens noted that orthodontic treatment had become an expected part of an upper-middle-class childhood in the United States (2007: 99). Beneftting from access to good nutrition, secure lives, and medical care, when the students he studied arrived at the college their “[s]kin was unblemished, teeth were braces-straight, [and] bodies frm and trim” (2007: 1381). 268

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Gender Studies scholar Vivyan Adair described the stigmatization of children at the other end of a polarized economy. Poverty marked their bodies in the “(not so) hidden injuries of class” (2002: 454). Adair personally knew these injuries and recalled how her “schoolmates laughed at our ‘ugly shoes,’ our crooked and ill-serviced teeth, and the way we ‘stank’” (2002: 457). In a society in which orthodontists always straighten the crooked teeth of middle-class children, only the poor have crooked teeth. Though orthodontia typically costs thousands of dollars, it is a culturally accepted practice. There is no shame in getting the work done. Anthropologist Elizabeth Chin directly questioned the socially constructed need for orthodontics. In a study of Black youth and consumer culture, she called attention to moral panics surrounding their styles and associated patterns of consumption. Media reports express scandal regarding Black youth who buy costly name brand athletic shoes or who afx gold or silver “grills” to their teeth. Chin asked why there is no similar outrage regarding the expense of cosmetic orthodontics, which have become routine for the middle class (Chin 2000: 51). Why, she asked, do journalists who accept the white middle class need for the appearance of dental perfection, denounce the Black working class need for a socially esteemed appearance? While Chin locates the social pressure to straighten crooked teeth as specifcally white and middle class, philosopher Heather Widdows points to orthodontics as a prime example of how beauty has grown to be a broad, even global “ethical ideal” (2018: 33). Under the pressure of widespread acceptance of beauty as an ethical ideal, ugliness is not a mere surface or accidental attribute, it is the embodiment of failure. Part of the context that produces the perception of ugliness as failure is the ready availability of technologies for achieving narrowly conceived ideals of beauty. Widdows notes that dentists and oral surgeons routinely perform “risky, painful, and often surgical” procedures on children although “perfectly straight teeth are not necessary for health” (2018: 106). Orthodontics makes a conventionally pretty smile available to anyone who can aford it and is willing to undergo treatment. In a society in which beauty is an ethical ideal, crooked teeth must be straightened. Widdows argues that the social requirement to achieve, or at least strive for beauty, has increased over time. Orthodontics briefy appear as a reference point that marks this change in a study of women’s responses to aging. Sociologist Abigail Brooks interviewed women about their approaches to aging. One responded, The expectations of perfection just keep getting ratcheted up and ratcheted up. I mean, I never had braces, my husband never had braces. I think my teeth look great. All of my kids, everybody we know, the orthodontist tells them right from fourth grade, ‘well, you’re going to have to have braces on your teeth,’ and I had to question myself, since I never had to sufer it, do I really want to make my kids sufer through braces? Are their teeth good enough? Do they have to be perfect? (2017: 172) Several chapters in this book raise questions regarding the global pervasiveness or uniformity of beauty ideals. Most note that women continue to be held accountable to beauty standards much more than men, and that the beauty ideals applied to women are more exacting. Furthermore, while women face social pressures to engage in beauty culture, in heteronormative cultures, men may be stigmatized for using beauty products or being attentive to their looks. Orthodontics may be an exception to the uneven expectation that women, but not men, will engage in beauty work. However, non-normative smiles have become so stigmatized and medicalized that teeth straightening exists on the border between cosmetic 269

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and medically necessary treatment. This may be part of the reason that orthodontics, despite being such a widespread appearance-altering intervention, has received so little attention in the critical beauty literature. In a study of gender and the global spread of cosmetic surgery Ruth Holliday and Joanna Elfving-Hwang note that “Men’s procedures are still rarely mentioned in the cosmetic surgery literature, perhaps because ‘ofcial’ statistics in the UK and US continue to hide men’s treatments by excluding cosmetic dentistry and hair transplants” (2012: 64). Perhaps the concept of beauty is so feminized that male eforts to transform their appearance, no matter how invasive, are not seen as beauty work.

Conclusion Theoretical frames developed in social science writing on bodies and embodiment provide useful approaches to thinking about orthodontics. A starting point is the well-established concept of medicalization (Clarke 2003; Conrad 2007), which is the process of treating a human condition as a pathology subject to medical treatment. In orthodontics, functionality and aesthetics closely intertwine. Orthodontic treatment is a medical necessity inextricably bound to a social necessity. Undoubtedly, for many patients, orthodontic treatment is recommended because it will improve the patient’s bite. Improvement in the functional arrangement of teeth will generally also produce a more standard appearance. Therefore, while need for orthodontic treatment may arise from a problematic bite, orthodontics are as likely to be recommended by dentists, and desired by parents, because of the problem of appearing unattractive. Elizabeth Haiken’s (1999) history of cosmetic surgery provides an important model for theorizing the medicalization of unattractiveness. Haiken chronicles how cosmetic surgeons participated in the “medicalization of nonmedical conditions” (1999: 40) when they began to describe features of the appearance of aging, such as wrinkles and “double chins,” as deformities. Cosmetic surgery developed as a feld in the 1920s alongside an explosive growth in the visual culture of advertising, as well as a growing popular interest in psychology (1999: 93). Drawing on the popularized concept of inferiority complex, cosmetic surgeons and their patients viewed signs of aging and a wide range of diferences of appearance as pathologies. Any feature that distinguished a face from a narrowing defnition of attractiveness could be seen as placing a person at risk of developing an inferiority complex. A similar logic could convince parents that a child with protruding teeth needed braces. As it became common in the 1950s and 1960s for middle-class children in the United States to have their teeth straightened, perfectly aligned teeth, once an exceptional occurrence, became the norm. Orthodontic treatment became normalized and crooked teeth stigmatized. Disability studies have been at the forefront of theorizing the pathologization of human variation in what Tobin Siebers has called the “aesthetics of human disqualifcation” (2010: 22). There are two senses in which we can speak of normalization in relation to medical cosmetic interventions. First, an extraordinary process, such as the use of metal bands and tightening wires over a period of years to slowly rearrange teeth, has become routine. It has become normalized. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson uses the concept in a diferent sense when she writes “Perhaps the most virulent form of bodily disciplining in the modern world is the surgical normalization of bodies that deviate from configurations dictated by the dominant order” (2005:1579). Here a body deemed deformed is altered to appear normal. Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens (2017) traced the emergence of the power of the norm to the relatively recent post-World War II period. “It is a period of mass marketing and public surveys, of self-help and consumer culture. What was required for such a culture was the participatory subject of democratic capitalism rather than the docile body of the disciplinary 270

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institution” (2017: 351). In a nation in which health care is a proft-making enterprise, the “abnormal” teeth of the majority of middle-class children created a growth industry for orthodontists. Dana Berkowitz’s (2017) study of Botox use examines the normalization of the practice of injecting botulism toxin into healthy faces, in order to temporarily reduce the appearance of wrinkles. Botox has become a widely adopted, routine, and repeated beauty regimen for many women. Berkowitz argues that examining Botox use makes it possible to view broad social processes including normalization, homogenization of aesthetics, commoditization of medicine, and the increased importance of appearance across dimensions of life. The questions she raises about Botox use provide useful frames for understanding social transformations that created conditions for the widespread adoption of orthodontics. This chapter has surveyed the limited social science and humanities scholarship on perfect and imperfect smiles, and on braces. I have identifed concepts and theoretical approaches from studies of medicine, cosmetic surgery, and Botox use, which may be useful for future examinations of orthodontics. The social meaning of orthodontics is the focus of my most recent research. Some of the studies surveyed in this chapter addressed class, and class must be central to any examination of the normalization of orthodontics. We must ask how the widespread use of orthodontics afects the lives of people who do not straighten their teeth. It is equally important to consider questions of race. The history and practice of cosmetic surgery has had a continued entanglement with race and racism. More than one chapter in this book engages with the question of how to understand surgical procedures that alter the appearance of facial features read as racial. Representations of teeth have been part of symbolic repertoires of racism. Tobin Siebers describes how the image of a woman with “patchy coloration, overbite, frizzy hair” in Emil Nolde’s painting “The Mulatto” was denounced as degenerate art by the Nazis (Siebers 2010: 36). World War II propaganda produced in the United States usually depicted Japanese people with protruding teeth. This stereotypical image was so widely recognizable that television programs and Hollywood flms during and immediately after the war used prosthetic devices to give the appearance of protruding teeth to actors portraying Japanese characters. The racialization of teeth is one of the many reasons why it is worth asking why and how it became normal and uncontroversial to straighten imperfect teeth.

References Adair, Vivyan C. 2002. “Branded with Infamy: Inscriptions of Poverty and Class in the United States.” Signs 27: 451–471. Barnett, Richard. 2017. Smile Stealers: The Fine and Foul Art of Dentistry. London: Thames & Hudson. Berkowitz, Dana. 2017. Botox Nation: Changing the Face of America. New York: New York University Press. Bogle, Donald. 1992. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American flms. New York: Continuum. Brooks, Abigail T. 2017. The Ways Women Age: Using and Refusing Cosmetic Intervention. New York: New York University Press. Chin, Elizabeth. 2001. Purchasing Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clarke, Adele and et al. 2003. “Biomedicalization: Technoscientifc Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine.” American Sociological Review 68(2): 161–194. Conrad, Peter. 2007. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cryle, Peter, and Elizabeth Stephens. 2017. Normality: A Critical Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Maxine Leeds Craig Haiken, Elizabeth. 1999. Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Holliday, Ruth, and Joanna Elfving-Hwang. 2012. “Gender, Globalization and Aesthetic Surgery in South Korea.” Body & Society 18 (2): 58–81. Kingsolver, Barbara. 1993. Pigs in Heaven. New York: Harper Collins. Lodge, David. 1995. Therapy. New York: Penguin. Otto, Mary. 2017. Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America. New York: New Press. Picard, Alyssa. 2009. Making the American Mouth: Dentists and Public Health in the Twentieth Century. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Schroeder, Fred E. H. 1998. “Say Cheese! The Revolution in the Aesthetics of Smiles.” Journal of Popular Culture 32(2): 103–145. Siebers, Tobin. 2010. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Smith, Zadie. 2005. On Beauty. New York: Penguin. Steinberg, Leo. 2001. “Your Teeth Are Showing.” New York Review of Books (March 29). Stevens, Mitchell. 2007. Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tromans, Nicholas. 2014. “Drawing Teeth: Refections on Brown’s Mouths.” Visual Culture in Britain 15(3): 299–312. Trumble, Angus. 2004. A Brief History of the Smile. New York: Basic Books. Widdows, Heather. 2018. Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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27 THE BODY, COSMETIC SURGERY AND THE DISCOURSE OF “WESTERNIZATION OF KOREAN BODIES” Joanna Elfving-Hwang Introduction This chapter will discuss some of the key meanings attached to aesthetic surgical practice and other biomedical technologies of the body that infuence attitudes and uptake of cosmetic surgery practices in South Korea. However, rather than presenting an exhaustive set of motivations that might explain why individuals feel compelled to surgically alter their bodies, this chapter takes the body as a lens through which to illustrate some wider social and biomedical discourses that construct socio-somatic subjectivities (that is, how individuals relate to and experience their subjectivities through the body) in contemporary South Korea. In doing so, this chapter seeks to question the notion that the high uptake of cosmetic surgery can be explained in reference to nebulous concepts such as collectivism, or indeed desires for Westernizing the body, as key motivations in decision-making. In particular, and drawing on Nikolas Rose’s work on biomedicine, power, and subjectivity, I will show how individuals in Korea are positioned within broader discourses of modernity in ways that may prompt them to engage with aesthetic beauty and surgical procedures more readily than individuals in other socio-cultural contexts (such as Australia or the United Kingdom), where neoliberal discourses of investing in self may be less centered on the somatic aspects of individual subjectivity. Aside from the broad discourses of the body and society, I will also draw on Erving Gofman’s work on the presentation of self to illustrate how beauty interconnects with social status and everyday social etiquette in ways that draw on pre-industrial notions of interpersonal encounters and proper decorum (1959). This chapter therefore locates the high uptake of cosmetic procedures in the intersection of individual desire, culturally contingent social etiquette, and the growth of the aesthetic plastic surgery industries to illustrate some of the key discourses that inform individuals’ decisions about the way in which bodies are performed, managed, and experienced.

Te cosmetic surgery industry and the body as an object of consumption The rise in the number of cosmetic surgery patients in South Korea is correlated with the growth of general afuence. Moreover, the government’s reforms to health coverage in 1989 also prompted the proliferation of afordable aesthetic medical services in the 1990s. 273

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However, it took the cosmetic surgery industry quite some time to be recognized as a legitimate medical specialization, and the frst Korean surgeons who specialized in aesthetic plastic surgery in the 1970s focused on reconstructive plastic surgeries designed to correct what were considered congenital birth defects, or restorative procedures designed to restore patients’ features after an accident (DiMoia 2013:193). From the mid-1990s onward, however, the profession grew rapidly both in esteem and in proftability as the sector beneftted from a number of further government-led insurance reforms, which resulted in an expansion of the specialized healthcare industry as a whole, and one with the highest per-capita spending growth in the OECD between 2001 and 2008 (Koh 2011). DiMoia argues that the growth of cosmetic surgery in South Korea cannot therefore simply be attributed to increases in wealth since the economic liberalization of the economy in the post-Asian Financial Crisis era. Instead, the growth in private healthcare provision and expansion of practices run by individual doctors were primarily driven by profts that refected the historical relationship between the state and the medical community [which] has created an insurance scheme and regulatory climate in which doctors typically achieve the most lucrative practice in the form of surgical specialization, diagnostic tests, and the prescription of pharmaceuticals. (2013: 202) While the regulatory climate created favorable conditions for the marketization and neoliberalization of the medical industry sector as a whole, cosmetic surgery as a specialization and consumer choice became framed less as a luxury for the rich and the famous, and more as a form of biopower and an opportunity for individual improvement and investment in self. A further enabling factor for industry growth came in the form of temporary tax breaks and allowances for individual cosmetic surgery, which efectively marked the state symbolically recognizing the centrality of technologies of the body as a form of biopower available to individual citizens. This echoes Nikolas Rose’s observation of how in Western cultures human beings “are increasingly coming to understand themselves in somatic terms: corporeality has become one of the most important sites for ethical judgments and techniques” (2007: 127). The centrality of the body to contemporary citizenship was quickly seized by the South Korean cosmetic surgery industry, which was able to tap into the logic of this health-related somatic self-governmentality through emphasizing the importance of corporeality to identity. In other words, the way in which cosmetic surgery was marketed to potential patients was framed within a promise to “shape their relations with themselves in terms of a knowledge of their somatic individuality” (Rose 2007: 72) that would allow individuals to perform optimally as biological citizens. The creation of the market for cosmetic surgeries has not been unproblematic. It has required a series of sustained and aggressive media and marketing campaigns that characterize much of the Korean medical industry as a whole. Moreover, despite some unrealistic marketing campaigns which have featured airbrushed models and even cartoon characters to overplay desirable outcomes of surgeries, such images have been shown to have a significant negative impact on consumers’ perceptions of their bodies (Swami et al. 2012; Moon 2015). The most lucrative marketing campaigns have focused on presenting before-andafter images of successful surgeries on patients recruited through the so-called “free events” in which clinics ofer surgery either for free or at discounted rates in return for permission to use the patients’ before-and-after images as promotional material on their webpages. The resulting advertisements make very few references to the potential risks of cosmetic 274

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surgical procedures (Holliday and Elfving-Hwang 2012), and focus on emphasizing relatively short recovery times and spectacular results – which have often clearly been airbrushed despite the legal regulatory restrictions on such advertising in the medical sector. More recently, popular television makeover shows such as Let Me In (StoryOn 2011–2015) and Get It Beauty (OnStyle 2014–present) have also been sponsored by major clinics in Seoul and have worked to educate audiences to view their bodies as objects of alteration and self-surveillance. These televisual narratives of transformation promote the idea that new technologies of the body can be used to construct a socially acceptable appearance through pathologizing and medicalizing certain physical features as “deformities” in need of correction. These vary from surplus weight to currently undesirable facial features such as a low bridge of the nose, protruding chin, or single-fold eyelid. What is of course problematic about these narratives is the way in which they move away from presenting body work as simply a matter of consumerist choice, and construct beauty as a moral duty for every citizen. In this context cosmetic surgery and other invasive technologies of the body are posited as enabling practices for adequate performance as a biological citizen (Rose 2007; Elfving-Hwang 2013). It is this moral narrative, furnishing viewers with knowledge of possibilities for their somatic individuality that constructs them as potential patients with the presumably rational choice to have or not to have surgery. Essentially, the logic of self-improvement in these makeover programs and in the before-and-after marketing materials ofers consumers the hope to “remove the body from the realm of fate and bring it under the control of the will” (Heyes 2007: 23). The narrative logic deployed in the promotion of cosmetic surgery focuses therefore less on emphasizing vanity or extraordinary beauty as desirable outcomes of technologies of the body. Rather, the focus is on presenting cosmetic surgery as a rational choice through inviting each potential patient to accept cosmetic surgery as a logical and normalized practice for informed consumers of modern biomedicine (Elfving-Hwang 2013). The most common procedures tend to concentrate on the face, ranging from procedures such as blepharoplasties (“double eyelid surgery”), rhinoplasties (“nose augmentation”), maxillofacial surgeries ( jaw or chin contouring), liposuction and fllers, and breast augmentations. Typical advertising by clinics emphasizes the essentiality of an attractive face, and the so-called “three most important seconds” or initial impression (insang) when an individual meets someone new. Insang is an important concept to grasp in the context of understanding cosmetic cultures in South Korea, because it draws on commonly accepted physiognomic notions about the links between one’s character and the presentation of self, including facial features. In the past, insang was fxed to physiognomic notions linked to the belief that one’s fate could be read from one’s facial features. However, in the contemporary context, cosmetic surgery as a way to alter insang is positioned as a way to take control of one’s fate in order to secure employment, to stay in employment, or to simply appear more “pleasant” to others in order to ease social interactions (Elfving-Hwang 2016). However, because the clinics are geographically concentrated in relatively limited areas of Apgujeong, Gangnam, and Sinsa, the competition between them has been ferce (Sŏ 2008; DiMoia 2013), and many surgeons have responded by actively inventing new surgeries in addition to the more common ones listed above. Such surgeries have included the so-called “joker smile” in which the corners of the mouth are surgically pinned slightly upward to give an appearance of constant smiling, as well as adding fllers under the eye to give a more pufy, and “cute” appearance. Both of these procedures have turned out to be passing fads, and many patients have reportedly attempted to have their surgery reversed due to adverse reactions from those around them. 275

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It is important to note then that successive governments have been complicit in the proliferation of cosmetic surgery procedures. Despite a law forbidding unrealistic and fake marketing of any procedures, the policing of such marketing has not been efective. Moreover, the decision by the South Korean government to identify medical tourism as one of its future growth industries, with the launching of the 2009 marketing campaign, aimed particularly at the Chinese consumer market, the industry as a whole has beneftted from sustained growth. The presenting of South Korea as the destination of choice for foreign medical tourists has inadvertently served to enforce domestic consumer confdence in Korean cosmetic surgeons as global leaders in high-end cosmetic surgery procedures (Yu et al. 2011; Koh 2011; Eun 2014). Nation branding has also intersected with the promotion of South Korea as a destination for the fashioning of beautiful bodies, and the celebrity bodies of K-pop stars in advertising have been constructed as highly visual sites to showcase the possibilities that surgical procedures ofer to individuals who wish to alter their appearance. Celebrities have also been deployed efectively in marketing campaigns which seek to play down the potential risks and highlight the benefts of cosmetic surgery. The celebrity endorsements of certain clinics and surgical procedures are ofered as narratives of hope to patients who wish to actively take control and shape their lives through cosmetic surgery in the hands of celebrity surgeons.

Investment in self and the presentation of self in post-Asian Financial Crisis South Korea Given the persuasive social and economic discourses outlined above, it is no surprise that Koreans’ motivations to engage with beauty work can be, and have often been, linked to neoliberal technologies of self-management and entrepreneurial individual self-improvement, for which the returns are characterized as “obsessive pursuit of personal fulflment and the incessant calculations necessary to achieve it” (Sŏ 2010: 85). Cho (2009) frmly links the rise of cosmetic surgery practices to the “the trend of consumption for self-distinction and expression of self-identities” in the post-1997 Asian Financial Crisis era (31). For her, individuals are entirely at the mercy of market forces as they seek to respond to the ever-increasing competition to distinguish themselves from others in a highly competitive society, which demands excellence in all felds of achievement, be it education, wealth, or human relationships. Within this context, she sees cosmetic surgery and other technologies of the body such as dieting, various health regimes, and an ever-increasing number of related health services aimed at curing modern maladies (such as depression and stress) as compelling selfregulatory regimes, which aford little agency to individual actors. It is true that neoliberal corporate and labor reforms, together with a traditionally strong focus on appropriate appearances (Elfving-Hwang 2013), operate in such a way that individuals are easily afected by “lookism” that responds to failure in the harshest possible terms, such as public shaming for weight gain or cosmetic surgery disasters (Epstein & Joo 2012). An appearance that is considered unattractive by mainstream society can also lead to very real lack of opportunities to progress in the workplace or to fnd a partner. In 2014 The Korea Times reported that a cosmetic surgery clinic in Seoul signed a contract with the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF) to “improve the lives of rural sector workers” through providing them with cosmetic surgical procedures, including breast augmentations and rhinoplasty (Lee 2014). Similarly, news reports noted that some cosmetic surgeons were ofering free or heavily discounted surgeries to refugees from North Korea in order to assist them to better “ft in” and adapt to the demanding aesthetic regimes of South Korea 276

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(Kang  2013). Drawing on his interview data with North Korean refugees who strive to integrate into the South Korean society, Joowon Park suggests that cosmetic surgery is seen by many North Korean refugees as a route to “surgical belonging” through the process of erasing visual markers of past poverty (2016: 222–223). Reports such as this are problematic, because they suggest a degree of normalization of cosmetic surgery as a way of managing the self as biological citizens (Park 2016). The neoliberal body-as-an-investment discourse does present a compelling case for explaining surgery as well as a scathing critique of the consistent push to normalize beauty as a civic duty. It is difcult not to overstate the importance of appearances to individuals in South Korea, but, nevertheless, to focus entirely on the negative side of cosmetic cultures fails to take into account the afective aspects of appearance in the Korean cultural context. The somatic aspects of presentation of self are much more central to social interactions in Korea than in many Western societies, because presenting an acceptable appearance is not simply a matter of personal choice, but of social etiquette. Laura Miller (2006) has described the links between beauty work and “creating acceptable appearance” as “an expression of social manners” in Japan. Within this context, she argues that “beauty therefore is not simply a personal issue but a problem of public etiquette” (102). Similarly in Korea, appearance is utilized to mediate social relations in ways that draw less on surgery and more on other aspects of beauty work such as using clothing, make-up, and hairstyle to present an appropriate appearance. Body work (including cosmetic surgery) is therefore not simply a matter of aspiring for extraordinarily attractive appearance, but a process of considered presentation of self. Each member of society is expected to be aware and perform their social role within the aesthetic somatic constraints already set in each given social context, and the social front for the socioeconomically successful includes presenting a class and age-appropriate appearance. The less understood aspect of Korean cosmetic cultures in the West, which tends to focus on reporting on the perceived “uniformity” of all Korean beauty practices, is the highly nuanced and varied ways in which beauty cultures are utilized by diferent demographics beyond the young, urban population in Seoul. What is often overlooked in the existing literature focusing on the conundrum of cosmetic surgery as a national issue (or perhaps even an illness) (Kim 2009; Schwekendiek et al. 2013; Albrecht 2016) is the plethora of aesthetic choices that are on ofer, and the ways in which individuals engage with body work to facilitate social relations or as a practical strategy for social mobility. While beauty ideals in Korea tend to be quite narrow for the younger generations, they also follow fashions and are highly age- and class-specifc. The beauty ideals for younger consumers currently tend to focus on achieving a face that conforms to semi-scientifc principles of facial symmetry which require the upper part of the face (forehead, eyes, nose) to appear bigger than the lower half. An ideal face for a younger person typically has large (but no longer necessarily “double eyelid”) eyes, a pointy (but not upturned) nose with a higher nasal bridge, and a pointy “V-line” jawline. For young consumers, these ideals are similar for both men and women, with the focus on creating a soft appearance; albeit for men there are many attractive beauty ideals to aspire towards: hunnam (a nice-looking, hunky man), kkonminam (beautiful fower man, similar to the Japanese bishōnen aesthetic), and chims ŭngnam (hypermasculine “wild animal man” with a chiselled upper body). Notably, however, these desired aesthetics alter with age and social position, with older middle-class male patients often desiring for relatively minor treatments such as hair transplants or skin treatments (Elfving-Hwang 2020), whereas older women seek a “well-maintained” appearance (Elfving-Hwang 2016). The important point to understand is that class identities, social roles, and age play a signifcant role in guiding Koreans’ aesthetic decisions. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday 277

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Life (1959), Gofman notes that “we expect that the diferences in social statuses among the interactants will be expressed in some way by congruent diferences in the indications that are made of an expected interaction role” (35). In reference to discussing the presentation of self as a “performance” of a kind, Gofman notes that when an individual takes on an established social role, usually he [sic] fnds that a particular front has already been established for it. Whether his [sic] acquisition of the role was primarily motivated by a desire to perform the given task or by a desire to maintain the corresponding front, the actor will fnd that he must do both. (37) When discussing appearances and how they are utilized in contemporary Korea, it is therefore important to note that desired results are not necessarily centered on presenting a mindless “manga” aesthetic with large, wide eyes; a white translucent skin tone; and a pointy chin simply because individuals are unable to resist beauty ideals. As contemporary South Korea has moved from a birth-oriented to wealth-oriented class structure, the relative affordability of cosmetic surgery means that a discerning individual can potentially present all the signifers of wealth and middle-class economic status without necessarily having to achieve any other markers of status. Hypothetically then, the individual can achieve an appearance of a “gwit’i nan ŭn insang” (“an appearance that signifes upper-class status”) before achieving other markers of success – such as consumer goods, cars, and perhaps an expensive apartment. Within this context, cosmetic surgery promises to be a practice that is a democratizing one, and one that potentially afords an individual a chance to succeed socially and fnancially, in the work place and in relationships. Regardless of this, there has been a tendency to view cosmetic cultures purely in negative terms. Cho argues that “many young people believe that those with bodies in need of ‘improvements’ but refusing to utilize modern body-care service, be it the one involving serious medical surgery, are considered either poor or negligent of her or his ‘humane duties’” (2009: 31). Cho does make an important point here in relation to the limits of cosmetic cultures, particularly as South Korea now has something akin to a “cosmetic underclass” (miyonghawigyeg ŭp) consisting of those who cannot aford to “improve” their lives through surgery. Nevertheless, the fact remains that technologies of the body do seem to ofer the quickest way to get ahead in contemporary South Korea, particularly to those who are working class and have very little hope of graduating from a top university that would give them a good chance of secure employment. For individuals who wish to work in professions where appearances are considered central to their work (such as service industry roles), investing in appearances through various forms of cosmetic body modifcation can be a requirement rather than an option. Existing literature is also silent on the fact that material wealth in contemporary South Korea is expressed not simply through cosmetic surgery (which is the domain of the lower middle classes) but also the decision not to engage with it. In fact, while cosmetic surgery emerges as a sign of middle-class status or aspiration for such kwit’i, truly wealthy individuals more often than not choose to display wealth through less invasive attention to the body, and through not electing to have surgeries. What is important to understand, therefore, is that most people engaging in surgery do so as rational social subjects. For this reason reading the meanings and practices of cosmetic cultures as entirely constraining provides only a partial view of somatic subjectivities in South Korea. In particular, the actual practices and agency made visible in individualized acts and utilization of body work problematizes highly reductionist notions of “collectivist” 278

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vs “individualistic” ideas (as suggested by scholars such as Hofstede), which suggest that “ideology and language promoting individualised identity are prevalent in the West [but] rare in the East” (Hendrick 2003: 64). The ways in which central concepts for social interactions, such as insang (impressions) and yewi (social decorum and etiquette) intersect with the ways in which appearances are utilized in everyday situations suggest that individuals in Korea are more than cultural dupes, unable to resist society’s beauty ideals and blindly following painful fashions inscribed on their bodies. What most existing studies fail to recognize then is the afective use of appearance in smoothing everyday social interactions (see Miller 2006 in the context of Japan), which is a particularly important aspect of positive aging in Korea (Elfving-Hwang 2016). This is due to an almost exclusive focus on the bodies of young and early middle-aged people, which tends to fxate on underlying economic factors to explain the high uptake of cosmetic surgery and other less invasive technologies of the body in South Korea. For most Koreans, “body work” as a practice of presenting a pleasing appearance is a carefully calculated and embodied everyday practice of mediating inter-subjective social encounters in ways that are insufciently explored in existing literature on cosmetic surgery and “body work.” Successful maintenance of age- and status-specifc appearance is incorporated in processes of maintaining smooth social relations wherein the gaze fxed on the other is an afective, rather than a critical one (as assumed in much of existing Western literature). For example, foreign visitors to Korea may often be taken aback by the way in which individuals comment on each other’s appearance. This can include openly pointing out fuctuations in weight, or perhaps some undesired change in appearance. More often than not, however, such comments are not necessarily meant as criticism in the same way as might be interpreted in other cultural contexts. For Koreans, and particularly between friends, such comments can also convey a high degree of interest in and concern for the other person (Elfving-Hwang 2016). In Korea then, the body emerges as a somatic “border space” through which cultural and non-verbal messages are communicated. The downside is, however, that individuals tend to be extremely aware of their bodies and can become highly concerned about their appearance in ways that sensitize individuals to the powerful marketing strategies of the beauty industry.

“Deracializing” Korea? While it is therefore evident that contemporary South Korea is a place where beauty industries are particularly well placed to thrive, the types of surgeries that focus on the patients’ facial features and the eye region in particular have prompted Western media to interpret the signs of this conspicuous consumption of cosmetic surgery among the young in particular as a desire to “Westernize” Korean bodies. Susie Orbach, for example, in an attempt to illustrate the ease with which cosmetic surgery is being consumed in global contexts blithely notes that an estimated 50% of Korean girls are having a “Western eyelid” “inserted” [sic] as “part of the individual’s response to wanting to produce what is an acceptable body” (2009:  82). In much of the media and academic discourse the “acceptable body” has been confated with the desire to achieve a “Western” (that is, white) appearance (Woo 2004, Schwekendiek et al. 2013). There is no doubt that Western and Hollywood beauty ideals in particular have had a profound impact on Korean perceptions of physical attractiveness. Moreover, Western beauty ideals have certainly played a signifcant part in informing the nation’s aesthetic preferences, particularly as Hollywood culture has been part of the Korean popular culture scene 279

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since the 1920s. The Korean cosmetic surgery industry itself has its beginnings in Western medical science, and the frst plastic surgeries were performed by an American surgeon Dr David Ralph Millard who worked with the US Marine Corps surgical team after the Korean War (1950–1953) (DiMoia 2013: 177). The Korean Society of Plastic Surgery was established in 1966, and the early surgeons drew on training and medical exchanges with the US medical professions including cosmetic surgery. These developments were highly signifcant, and as DiMoia notes, these early contacts represent “a point of departure for much of the subsequent surgical practice of the nation, with South Korean surgeons dramatically transforming their practice during the course of their interactions with American and international colleagues” (2013: 183). While the early surgical practices were heavily driven by Western techniques, and there is a clear recognition that the types of surgeries performed on patients nodded toward “Caucasian” features with patients requesting to be made look more “Western” in the 1970s and 1980s (Glain 1993), drawing conclusions about a nation’s perceived desire to “deracialize” their bodies in the contemporary context is less straightforward. Notwithstanding medical training undertaken by Korean cosmetic surgeons in the United States and elsewhere, Korean beauty ideals in the era of rapid development did draw heavily on the American beauty aesthetics disseminated through Hollywood popular culture, and fashion magazine advertising, which have made heavy use of foreign celebrities and models (Kim 2003). However, and as Holliday and I have argued elsewhere (2012), insisting on Westernization as a motivation for a nation’s cosmetic aesthetic practices does not account for the transnational standards of beauty that fashion magazines and popular culture mediate in multiple global contexts. In reality, global beauty standards draw increasingly on aesthetic signifers which cannot be so readily associated with the white body, such as pouty lips or prominent buttocks which form the appeal of some of the most popular American pop music stars such as Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez. However, while the white body is more often than not devoid of such features and can only achieve fuller lips or backside with the help of a fller, there has been no moral panic in the Western media concerned with the deracialization of the white body (Thompson 2015). Much of the discourse around cosmetic surgery and the perceived Westernization or deracialization of Korean bodies is informed by the Western media’s uncritical solipsism about the centrality of the white body as an object of desire (Elfving-Hwang & Park 2016), rather than analyzing what whiteness actually signifes in contemporary cultural and social contexts outside the West. For example, blepharoplasty is a popular surgery both in the industrial West (albeit mostly on older patients) and in Korea, as wider eyes are often seen to signal youth, energy, and alertness (Holliday & Elfving-Hwang 2012, see also Miller 2006). However, media reporting posits surgery on white bodies as an investment in self, whereas similar procedures in Korea are read as signs of deracialization and a desire to “whiten” the Korean body in ways that suggest the Korean subject as not only a neoliberal body in need of cosmetic enhancement, but a self-hating body that has internalized racism against itself (Lee 2016; Elfving-Hwang & Park 2016). It is telling that the Westernization discourse put forth in Western media conveniently ignores leaps in biomedical and surgical technologies, which have meant that cosmetic surgeries in Korea are now designed with enhancing the specifc facial and body aesthetic of the Asian body to create a natural-looking Korean beauty (ssaeng’ŏl) (Kim 2014: S11). This crude insistence on interpreting all aesthetic cosmetic practices of the body which could be said to draw on the signifers of the white body through a racial lens (without the recognition that those signifers could as easily be associated with any number of non-white ethnicities) is quite simply tiresome and unhelpful. While the majority of K-pop stars may 280

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now sport a “double eyelid” and show signs of some cosmetic enhancement, the insistence on reading these signifers as evidence of desire to deracialize the Korean body completely ignores the ways in which such signs have been absorbed into Korean aesthetic practices and are increasingly being marketed as signs of Korean beauty which signify wealth and cosmopolitan identity: It is […] important to note that Koreans – and Asians in Asia – experience “whiteness” diferently – as consumable style rather than a simplistic choice between “authentic” or “inauthentic” racial subjectivity. While this style has an often colonialist and/or imperialist history, to a large extent, it has been softened or erased through consumption and commodifcation. To put it bluntly, if Asians in Asia have internalised western values and aesthetics, they have done so in highly mediated ways and not for the Western gaze but a cosmopolitan Asian one. (Elfving-Hwang & Park 2016: 7) What is therefore lacking in current academic discourse of cosmetic surgery is a critical analysis of how the aesthetic signifers of Westernization or the emerging “Eurasian” beauty aesthetics have become “a marker of coolness and (cultural) diversity” (Ahn 2015: 938). There is also a need to understand how technologies of the body insist on, rather than seek to avoid, cultural (but not necessarily somatic) authenticity as a desirable marker of modernity. The way in which global signifers of beauty are localized and fashioned for local consumption belies simplistic claims that individuals who are afected with beauty discourses are entirely without any control over the process and outcomes of aesthetic technologies of the body. On the contrary, the interactions between popular culture, global and transnational fows of popular beauty aesthetics, and the biomedical industry also highlight opportunities for using the body to express something more than “acceptability.”

Conclusion This chapter has outlined some key discourses of the body and somatic subjectivities in contemporary South Korea. Rather than attempting to provide an explanation for the entire nation’s motivations which tend to posit Korean consumers of beauty cultures as “cultural dupes” and entirely guided by external social forces without agency, I have attempted to show how individuals in Korea can be seen to draw, as Kathy Davis asserts, “upon their knowledge of themselves and their circumstances as they negotiate their everyday lives” (2003: 13) as rational subjects, and in ways that they see ft and most benefcial. Cosmetic surgery, along with other markers of neoliberal capitalist success such as consumer goods, fashion, cars, and place of abode, is only one of the many indicators that an individual within this system uses to project him or herself to others as a successful member of society. What is important to note, however, is that individual judgments about whether or not to engage with surgery are entangled with increasingly complicated corporeal practices of identity in contemporary Korea, and cannot be explained simply by gesturing toward vague notions of neoliberal governmentality or Westernization. These decisions are informed by individuals’ positions within cultural and social discourses of the body which impact individuals of diferent social class and age in various ways. Moreover, the ways in which individuals in South Korea are increasingly constructing knowledgeable somatic subjectivities means that they are rarely, if ever, without some form of agency over their bodies. 281

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What I have attempted to illustrate here is how insisting on Westernization as the key motivation for a nation’s aesthetic preferences obscures locally relevant meanings attached to the care of self as social practice. The efect of the Western cosmetic gaze is that under it Koreans become all body. Buying into the Western media’s uncritical solipsism about the centrality of the white body as an object of desire (Elfving-Hwang & Park 2016), rather than analyzing what whiteness actually signifes in contemporary cultural and social contexts outside the West, thus restricts understanding of what informs people’s aesthetic aspirations in non-Western contexts. While Western fashions have certainly been and often still are important markers of afuence or cosmopolitanism, those infuences are also incorporated into local contexts to signify meanings other than racial envy.

Acknowledgment This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2020-OLU- 20200039).

Related topics The racial politics of plastic surgery

References Ahn, J. 2015. “Desiring Biracial Whites: Cultural Consumption of White Mixed-Race Celebrities in South Korean Popular Media.” Media, Culture & Society 37(6): 937–947. Albrecht, E. Z. 2016. “Embodying Progress: Aesthetic Surgery and Socioeconomic Change in South Korea.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 10(1): 29–49. Cho, Joo-hyun. 2009. “Neoliberal Governmentality at Work: Post-IMF Korean Society and the Construction of Neoliberal Women.” Korea Journal 49(3): 15–43. Davis, Kathy. 2003. Dubious Equalities & Embodied Diferences. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefeld Publishers. DiMoia, John. 2013. Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation Building in South Korea since 1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Elfving-Hwang, Joanna. 2013. “Cosmetic Surgery and Embodying the Moral Self in South Korean Popular Makeover Culture.” The Asia-Pacifc Journal 11, 24(2). http://japanfocus.org/-JoannaElfving_Hwang/3956 Elfving-Hwang, Joanna. 2016. “Old, Down and Out? Appearance, Body Work and Positive Ageing among Elderly South Korean Women.” Journal of Aging Studies 38(2): 6–15. Elfving-Hwang, Joanna and Park, J. 2016. “Deracializing Asian Australia? Cosmetic Surgery and the Question of Race in Australian Television.” Continuum 30(4): 1–11. Elfving-Hwang, Joanna. 2020. “Man Made Beautiful: The Social Role of Grooming and Body Work in Performing Middle-aged Corporate Masculinity in South Korea.” Men and Masculinities. Online frst. Epstein, Stephen J. and Joo, Rachael M. 2012. “Multiple Exposures: Korean Bodies and the Transnational Imagination.” The Asia-Pacifc Journal 10(33): 1. Eun, Seok-Chan. 2014. “Stem Cell and Research in Plastic Surgery.” Journal of Korean Medical Science 29(Suppl 3): S167–S169. Glain, Steve. 1993. “Cosmetic Surgery Goes Hand in Glove with the New Korea: What Would Confucius Say about the Westernization of Eye, Nose and Breast?” Wall Street Journal. November 23. Gofman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Hendrick, Henry. 2003. Child Welfare: Historical Dimensions, Contemporary Debate. Bristol: Polity Press. Heyes, Cressida J. 2007. Self-Transformations Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Cosmetic surgery and discourse in Korea Holliday, Ruth and Joanna Elfving-Hwang. 2012. “Gender, Globalization and Aesthetic Surgery in South Korea.” Body and Society 18(2): 58–81. Jones, Meredith. 2008. Skintight: An Anatomy of Cosmetic Surgery. Oxford and New York: Berg. Kang, Hyun-kyung. 2013. “Surgeon gives lift-up to NK defectors, migrant workers.” Korea Times. July 17. Kim, Eun-shil. 2009. “The Politics of the Body in Contemporary Korea.” Korea Journal 49(3): 15–43. Kim, Jeong Tae. 2014. “Preface – Recent Wave in the Field of Korean Plastic Surgery.” Journal of Korean Medical Science 29 (Suppl 3): S166. Kim, Taeyon. 2003. “Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society.” Body & Society 9(2): 97–113. Koh, Y. 2011. “Megatrends in Korean Healthcare.” SERI Quarterly 4(3): 111–116. Lee, Jihye. 2014. “Free Plastic Surgery for Farmers.” Korea Times, September 25. http://koreatimes. co.kr/www/news/nation/2014/09/113_165210.html Lee, S. 2016. “Beauty between Empires: Global Feminism, Plastic Surgery, and the Trouble with Self-Esteem.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 37(1): 1–31. Miller, Laura. 2006. Beauty Up. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Moon, M. 2015. “Cosmetic Surgery as a Commodity for ‘Sale’ in Online News.” Asian Journal of Communication 25(1): 102–113. Orbach, Susie. 2009. Bodies. London: Profle Books. Park, J. 2016. “The Gendered Contours of North Korean Migration: Sexualized Bodies and the Violence of Phenotypical Normalization in South Korea.” Asian Ethnicity 17(2): 214–227. Rose, Nikolas S. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-frst Century: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-frst Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schwekendiek, Daniel, Minhee Yeo and Stanley Ulijaszek. 2013. “On Slimming Pills, Growth Hormones, and Plastic Surgery: The Socioeconomic Value of the Body in South Korea,” 141–153. In When Culture Impacts Health Global Lessons for Efective Health Research. Eds. Banwell, C., Ulijaszek, Stanley and Dixon, Jane. Burlington: Elsevier Science. Sŏ, Chŏnghŭ i. 2008. S ŏnghyŏng sobi munhwa [Cosmetic Consumer Culture]. Seoul: Naeha ch’ulp’ansa. Swami, V., Hwang, C., and Jung, J. 2012. “Factor Structure and Correlates of the Acceptance of Cosmetic Surgery Scale among South Korean University Students.” Aesthetic Surgery Journal the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 32(2): 220–229. Thompson, C. 2015. “Living thru Race: Althea Prince on Black Beauty, Pop Culture and Canadian Race Politics.” Herizons 29(1): 44–46. Woo, Keong Ja 2004. “The Beauty Complex and the Cosmetic Surgery Industry.” Korea Journal 44(2): 52–82. Yu, J., Lee, T. and Noh, H. 2011. “Characteristics of a Medical Tourism Industry: The Case of South Korea.” Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing 28(8): 856–872.

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28 THE RACIAL POLITICS OF PLASTIC SURGERY Alexander Edmonds and So Yeon Leem

Introduction This chapter examines the political issues raised by plastic surgeries that alter the so-called racial or ethnic features. These features are usually taken to be the nose and eyes, and in East Asia, sometimes the jaw. Some surgeries also racialize the female body, though they are not usually termed “racial surgeries,” unlike operations on the face. Racial surgeries have been critiqued as a tool of ethnic homogenization that refects and contributes to racism. The issue has become even more important in recent decades as plastic surgery has rapidly grown in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, and is performed on a rising number of patients who are not white. To evaluate the politics of racial plastic surgery it is important to inquire what race is for this medical specialty. Can facial features such as the nose or eyes even be said to “have” a race? Cosmetic surgeons generally believe they do. Their knowledge of race draws on other medical and scientifc felds, but importantly diverges from some biological views of race today. In the post-World War II period new genetics research led some biologists to declare that the race concept was “biologically meaningless” (e.g. Livingstone and Dobzhansky 1962: 279). The clinal model in genetics held that diferences in human morphology occur on a continuum and cannot be used to sort individuals into groups with hard boundaries. However, in the twenty-frst century the race category has re-emerged in some areas of biology and medicine, but with much dissent (Fullwiley 2007). In other felds, however, such as forensic anthropology and plastic surgery, experts never stopped seeing race (M’Charek 2020). Wider societal understandings of race are just as diverse as expert or scientifc ones (Wade 2010). For example, the US system of grouping people by hyphenated identities called “races,” such as African American or Asian American, is not universal (Yanow 2003). Thus, race has an uncertain status today and its meaning varies according to social and scientifc context. In this chapter we do not treat race as a quality of the face or body given in nature. This does not mean that race “does not exist”; after all many surgeons and patients feel confdent that they can identify the race of a face (Hartigan 2008). Rather, we approach plastic surgery’s use of the race concept as a situated “technology of vision” (Haraway 1991). Drawing on available medical, scientifc, and aesthetic techniques and knowledge (particularly anthropology and anthropometry) plastic surgery enacts facial features as operable racial traits. 284

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However, surgeons do not consider all facial features to be “racial,” raising the question of how particular features come to be problems that need correction. In one of the earliest and most infuential critiques of racial surgeries, Kaw (1993: 75) argued that North American racial prejudice “correlates” stereotyped Asian “physical features (‘small, slanty’ eyes and a ‘fat’ nose) with negative behavioural characteristics (passivity, dullness and a lack of sociability).” She argues that demand for double eyelid surgery results from the “internalization of a body image” produced by a racist society (1993: 78). Kaw’s forceful critique has led some scholars to wonder whether it depicts Asian patients as “mere victims of internalized racism” (Zane 1998: 163–164). The political discussion of racial surgeries thus echoes a long-standing dilemma in feminist scholarship on beauty about accounting both for patient choice and for the structural inequalities that constrain choice (Leem 2016a). The political aspects of racial plastic surgery have also gained new complexity as the practice began rapidly growing in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East at the end of the twentieth century. Brazil has the world’s second largest cosmetic surgery market, while South Korea has the highest per capita rate of surgeries (Heidekrueger et al. 2016). The problem of internalized racism that Kaw (1993) and others have raised in the North American context thus now has the potential to repeat itself on a global scale. But plastic surgery also raises new political questions in these regions. For example, since people of Asian ancestry are not a minority ethnic group in China, Korea, or Japan should double eyelid surgeries in these nations be seen as evidence of internalized racism or an efort to “pass” into another racial group? And in many social contexts in Latin America the boundaries between racial groups are more fuid and porous than in the United States. How does this cultural perception of diference – one which views racial identity as potentially “plastic” or malleable – afect the politics of plastic surgery? In this chapter we frst discuss the history of racial plastic surgery in the United States, followed by an analysis of this practice in two non-Western country case studies: South Korea (hereafter Korea) and Brazil. This regional focus refects the fact that the majority of racial surgeries will likely be performed in Latin America and Asia in the future, and perhaps are already. In conclusion we draw on this material to return to the political problems entailed by plastic surgery’s eforts to “improve” racial traits.

Race and the rise of plastic surgery in the United States The notion of situated vision conveys that how you see depends on the position from which you look. In the case of plastic surgery the position has often been that of the white, usually Anglo, viewer. Only surgeries performed on non-white or non-Anglo patients are termed “racial.” Race then in this medical practice is seen as diference from a white, Anglo norm, a fact which raises political problems, as we’ll see below. Vision is also situated in that diferent kinds of eyes yield diferent pictures of reality. Plastic surgery has generally seen race through a particular “eye”: the techniques and sciences of race available in Europe and North America in the period when the modern medical specialty arose at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These included anthropology, eugenics, criminology, and anthropometry. In that period plastic surgeons drew on this scientifc racism in order to enact racial traits, such as the “snub” nose of the Irish, as marks of evolutionary backwardness that could be eliminated or masked with surgery, thereby enabling patients to “pass” into white or whiter categories (Gilman 1999). The use of plastic surgery for this purpose was controversial because it provoked the social anxiety that the racial other would “vanish into the crowd” (Gilman 1999: 27). 285

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Plastic surgery, however, began to gain greater public acceptance over the twentieth century as a therapy that could boost self-esteem or enhance the patient’s social functioning. This therapeutic “optimism” was particularly strong in the United States, a region where national identity was tied to a long history of immigration. Most racial plastic surgery patients were initially from what were deemed non-white or non-Anglo “races” ( Jews, Irish, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and others), often later called “white ethnics.” But as plastic surgery was popularized in the post-World War II period, more patients with Asian, African, and Latin American ancestry also became targets of racial procedures. By the midtwentieth century, especially in the United States, racial plastic surgery had become accepted as a legitimate means of helping minorities to psychologically adjust to their environment (Haiken 1997). This therapeutic rationale was challenged by the rise of multiculturalism and ethnic and racial pride movements (Craig 2002). By the 1970s racial plastic surgery had become more problematic, a tool of ethnic homogenization that refected discrimination. The problem was perhaps particularly pronounced in the United States, partly because the “nose job” had long been routinized for Jewish and other white ethnics. Moreover, a multiculturalist “ethos of authenticity” had taken root, which stressed that ethnicity and race are important parts of identity that should not be efaced or diminished (Haiken 1997). The negative perception of racial surgeries began to afect the reputation of the medical specialty. Surgeons justifed their practice by stressing that they are simply responding to patient choice. They also adjusted their discourse about race. Some now speak of “ethnicity” instead of “race,” a term that refers to cultural identity. They also argue they no longer aim to “change” racial or ethnic appearance, though whiteness continues to be constructed as the default norm in this medical discourse (Menon 2017). Here is a typical statement of plastic surgeons’ turn in racial thinking: “Surgical philosophies have also changed, shifting from the perspective of racial transformation … toward a view of racial preservation” (SturmO’Brien et al. 2010: 69). This newer rationale of “racial preservation” seems to make a medical virtue out of a social necessity. Regardless of their underlying justifcation, racial procedures on the eyes and nose continue to aim at similar results, such as the “double eyelid” in Asians, and the narrower or more projected nose in many patients of Asian, African, and Latin American ancestry. The problem of using surgery to inscribe dominant norms on patients thus remains as pertinent as ever. We now discuss this problem in two countries with booming plastic surgery markets and many non-white patients, but with diferent understandings of race than in North America.

Te double eyelid procedure in South Korea The “Caucasian eye” has a “double eyelid” or crease above the upper eyelid. Surgeons hold that some East Asians (about half ) are born with such a crease, others are not. Plastic surgeons can create this crease in a procedure called “double eyelid” blepharoplasty. Should the surgery therefore be seen as a means to Westernize the Asian eye? It is one of the most popular cosmetic procedures in Korea, as well as in much of East Asia, and many media accounts of plastic surgery’s globalization have portrayed it as a disturbing example of Westernization. A CNN story, for example, was titled, “Plastic surgery boom as Asians seek ‘western’ look.” In addition to double eyelid surgery, other procedures seek to narrow and project the nose. As these surgeries seem to mold features to make them resemble more closely white facial features some surgeons in the past even termed them 286

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“Westernization” surgeries. But in Korea plastic surgery has rapidly grown over the past two decades, in the process becoming pervaded with desires and anxieties arising in Korean society (Leem 2017). To evaluate the ethics of this procedure it is thus important to situate it not just in a global but also a national context. As plastic surgery established itself as a legitimate medical specialty in South Korea, it was shaped by modernization processes and Cold War relationships with the West. One reason that plastic surgery may have been seen as a technique to Westernize is that the medical specialty itself had Western origins. A pioneer of the double eyelid surgery in Korea was a US plastic surgeon, David Ralph Millard (1955), who was stationed with the US Marines during the Korean War. Millard’s refections on his work underline the importance of geopolitics in the development of racial plastic surgery in Asia. One of his patients was a Korean translator who asked for “a round eye” to alleviate suspicion caused by his “slant eyes.” Other patients were Korean women whom he claimed wanted to be more attractive to the American troops (Kim 2005). The US military presence in East Asia may also have infuenced the rise of breast augmentation. Japanese sex workers catering to American servicemen injected themselves with industrial-grade liquid silicone, a technique that shows how sexual objectifcation and racial pathologization have often converged, with harmful consequences (Miller 2003). Until the 1990s, plastic surgeries on the face in Korea explicitly aimed at white aesthetic ideals. Advertisements, for example, showed images of white models (Leem 2016b, 2017). By the 1990s plastic surgery had become associated with afuence and a consumer lifestyle for younger generation of Koreans (Leem 2016b). The goal of plastic surgery became to attain a more “modern” appearance, which is not necessarily the same as a Western appearance. Some patients began to seek surgery to have the “right face,” which is deemed to create economic opportunities and higher social status (Hopkins 2008). Illustrating a view of surgery as an investment, some parents fund their children’s plastic surgeries as graduation gifts (Karupiah 2012). Changing Korean sexual and gender ideals also feed demand for double eyelid surgery. Blepharoplasty is said to create wider and rounder eyes. The “big eye,” though, was traditionally a negative symbol of female promiscuity, while positive feminine ideals valued a wide, moon face as a symbol of fertility. These symbols of femininity are now changing. Beauty techniques aim to “widen” the eyes and narrow the face (including through the high-risk “jaw shaving” procedure). This new look refects larger changes in women’s position in Korean society (Holliday and Elfving-Hwang 2012). Positive images of plastic surgery also began to permeate a celebrity-oriented pop culture. The K-pop band, Six Bomb, released a video, “Becoming prettier,” depicting a radical makeover of band members that included eye widening and face narrowing procedures. While the video was sensationalized in Western media, it was not in Korea, showing that extensive plastic surgery has been normalized in that country. As plastic surgery became localized or “Koreanized,” aesthetic ideals were defned more in Asian terms, without white reference points. By the 2000s plastic surgery media routinely pictured Korean or Asian models, all with double eyelids, and rarely included white models. Indeed, explicit emulation of a white face was deemed an exaggeration, even pathological (Leem 2016a, 2017). Most surgeons in Korea now advocate “natural looking” surgeries that claim to enhance beauty, not transform race. Plastic surgery in Korea, as in the United States, has thus tried to distance itself from fantasies of racial passing. Racial boundaries, in this new medical discourse, should be respected. However, while plastic surgery has efectively backgrounded the issue of Westernization and racial passing, it continues to racialize the face, though in new ways that stress 287

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the achievement of exceptional beauty through expert knowledge of racial anatomy (Leem 2017). Many surgeons in Korea (and other East Asian countries) claim to have a specialization in “Asian anatomy.” They use techniques such as anthropometry and computer modeling to depict racial facial features in much more detail than in the past. For example, rather than describe the double eyelid as simply present or absent in Asians, some surgeons have identifed eight sub-varieties of eyelid shape. Much of this racial knowledge, though, is used to identify race-specifc defects. Korean websites now promote techniques to address multiple aesthetic problems, which are described in clinical or lay terms (e.g. “‘angry eyes,” “sad eyes,” “man’s eyes,” and “small eyes” (Aquino 2017). Plastic surgeons in Korea are thus positioning themselves as experts who know and improve “race-specifc” traits by moving the patient’s face closer to ideal beauty. But plastic surgery continues to pathologize race-specifc traits, even if it has distanced itself from the explicit aesthetic hierarchies of the past which ranked white above Asian beauty.

Nasal surgery in Brazil Brazil has had centuries of extensive mixture among peoples of European, African, indigenous, and Asian ancestry due to the experience of colonialism, slavery, and ongoing immigration. This history has afected how Brazilians perceive phenotypic diferences between people and the complex power dynamics around race. The legacy of mixture and color hierarchies that pervade Brazilian society have also shaped beauty ideals. Plastic surgery has racialized the body in ways that refect this history of the body (Edmonds 2007, 2010). The most common plastic surgery procedure in Brazil that is explicitly considered racial is rhinoplasty. Many patients request to have their nose afnado (thinned but also “refned”) or to have the tip of their nose extended by inserting cartilage, often from their own ear. The technique is sometimes referred to as “correction of the Negroid nose” in Brazil and other parts of Latin America (Vidal and Vigil 2010), underlining that the racial feature is itself considered a pathology. One diference between the Brazilian and US versions of this operation is that in Brazil it is sometimes performed on some patients who do not identify as Black. In fact, some patients requesting this surgery identify as white, or as moreno, a popular “color” term that means “brown,” and can refer to people of European ancestry and dark hair, as well as people of some African ancestry (Sansone 2004). Vilmar (interviewed by Edmonds 2010) was one example of a “brown” patient requesting rhinoplasty. During her examination the surgeon described her medical indication as “Negroid nose.” Vilmar said she had one Black grandparent and one Italian one (and wasn’t sure of the origins of other grandparents). What kind of racial politics are at stake in this surgery, performed on a patient who wanted to “improve” what surgeons called a “Negroid nose,” but who was not considered to be Black in her society? Brazil is said to have a folk taxonomy of appearance that recognizes gradations along a spectrum of color. It contrasts with a North American classifcation of appearance, which creates hard boundaries among racial groups based on ancestry. While racial identities also exist in Brazil and are preferred by a Black pride social movement, many Brazilians still describe themselves and others with color terms, such as moreno, which leave ancestry unspecifed (Hordge-Freeman 2013; Sansone 2004). Brazil’s classifcation of phenotypic traits is rooted in Brazil’s history of race-based inequalities. Infuenced by European anthropology and eugenics, Brazilian elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries feared that a history of mixing on slave plantations had doomed the population to poor physical and “moral” health (Skidmore 1974). However, beginning in the 1920s, 288

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Brazilian scholars, artists, and eventually the state reassessed racial mixture, celebrating it as a symbol of national identity. Brazilian historian Gilberto Freyre (1956, 1986) played a key role in this afrmation of mixture (Vianna 1999). His vision of a vibrant, mixed Brazil became a central, often eroticized, aspect of national identity in the twentieth century (Bocayuva 2001). Freyre’s work helped establish a vision of the population as what he called a “meta-race” that defed racial categorization. But the discourse afrming mixture also stigmatizes Blackness as “excess” (Freyre 1986). It is also a gendered gaze that makes the mixed-race woman a symbol of Brazilian sensuality, and has been critiqued by Black social movements as sexual objectifcation. Black and brown Brazilians continue to face social and aesthetic prejudice and marginalization (Telles 2004). Freyre’s ideas about race and beauty underline central contradictions in Brazilian plastic surgery practice. Color is a provisional classifcation in Brazil, subject to adjustment – hence the saying “Money lightens.” Because color terms are relatively fuid a change in the appearance of a facial feature can potentially nudge the patient in the direction of a more valued color category, without “changing race,” which both patients and surgeons agree would be an inappropriate use of plastic surgery. This situation illustrates enduring color hierarchies and is refected in the old Brazilian proverb: “The whiter, the better.” In this national context plastic surgeons have promoted racial surgeries through the rhetoric of “harmonizing” facial features or body parts. Surgeons claim that mixture creates areas of disharmony that need “correction.” As the former president of the Brazilian Society of Plastic Surgery put it: “Due to the mix and match of diferent races…the nose sometimes doesn’t match the mouth or the buttocks don’t match the legs” (Gilman 1999: 225). Surgeons also racialize not just facial features, as in Korea, but often women’s bodies (and very rarely men’s bodies). Surgeons argue that African-European racial mixing has “blessed women with small waists,” an aesthetic ideal they try to achieve in the so-called “body contouring” operations that redistribute fat from the waist to the buttocks and hips (Edmonds 2010). Racial surgeries in Brazil thus refect culturally specifc aspects of the country’s racial and gender norms. But they are not therefore less politically problematic than in other countries. Surgeons laud mixture, but, recalling Freyre’s discourse on mixture, claim to remove “excessive” racial traits. As in Korea, “excess” is seen as more of an aesthetic problem in women than in men, though some male patients do request racialized rhinoplasty. In Brazil’s “intimate” style of racism the greatest anxieties stem not from crossing racial boundaries, as in the United States, but rather from “internal contamination” that manifests in the trace of Blackness in the individual’s body or in children (Segato 1998). As one surgeon said, while mixture is potentially beautiful, the patient always wants a nose that is more European than African. The existence of a fuid system of color classifcation in Brazil and the cultural afrmation of mixture thus serves to legitimate plastic surgery’s racial procedures and stigmatization of Blackness.

Concluding discussion This chapter has shown that the racial feature plastic surgery makes into an operable “defect” is not given in nature, but is enacted diferently across time and region. In North America, plastic surgery has distanced itself from its former goal of “passing” into a white or whiter group. Medical discourse currently speaks a language of “racial preservation,” refecting the rise of ethnic pride movements. However, the political issues raised by these surgeries remain as troubling and relevant as ever. 289

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Heyes (2009) points out that “all cosmetic surgery is ethnic” yet in practice whiteness is a default norm. The very terms “ethnic” or “racial” surgery in US medical discourse only refer to procedures on non-white or non-Anglo patients. Cosmetic surgery performed on patients of Northern European ancestry is by defnition not “racial” or “ethnic.” An exception would seem to be a few relatively recent procedures targeting white women, such as lip fllers or buttocks enlargement, a surgery which ostensibly emulates the body shape of Black and Latina celebrities. These surgeries implicitly posit “whiteness” as a correctable defect. However, while they also carry political concerns, such as the medical objectifcation of women, they do not inscribe wider racial inequalities on the body. In plastic surgery in North America then race is divergence from whiteness, refecting the position of non-whites and non-Anglos as minorities. The analysis of the politics of racial plastic surgery should also take into account the rapid growth of this practice beyond the West. Medical ethics has recognized the importance of “empirical ethics.” In contrast to more conventional ethical reasoning based in law or philosophy, empirical ethics is culturally situated and investigates how “ethics plays itself out on the ground.” Such an approach is particularly relevant to racial plastic surgery because the practice is so entangled with social inequalities and historically changing concepts of race. Empirical ethics does not necessitate a stance of moral relativism. But an approach to medical ethics that analyzes therapies within their context of practice can help “provincialize” Western debate and identify problems that are more pertinent to practitioners. Whether plastic surgery is seen to reinforce racism is shaped by the societal politics of diference. The United States has an ethos of authenticity, where boundaries between racial groups are emphasized. Racial plastic surgery in this national context raises the political problem that it may cause a patient to “betray” racial identity. This problem is less culturally salient, however, in both Korea and Brazil. In Korea the “big eye” is now culturally envisioned as an Asian look – one that is elaborated in a thriving consumer culture, not just in Korea, but in other Asian countries too. In Brazil, on the other hand, cultural perceptions of mixture have fed into a view of plastic surgery as a valid, even a “necessary,” tool for correcting “disharmonies.” While critiques of plastic surgery as racist may therefore seem less relevant to Korea or Brazil, other critiques of plastic surgery have arisen in these countries, which can also be brought to bear on racial procedures. In Korea, for example, plastic surgery has largely been considered anti-feminist, rather than racist, with Korean feminists highlighting the problem of medical commodifcation and objectifcation (Leem 2017). And in Brazil, despite high levels of acceptance of plastic surgery, there has been more scrutiny of unethical and “exaggerated” uses of the practice (Edmonds 2010). Racial plastic surgeries also raise concerns which cut across regional context. Perhaps the biggest political question raised by the wider practice of plastic surgery is its link to gender inequalities. Women comprise the majority of plastic surgery patients, in most countries the vast majority. Plastic surgery medicalizes normal aging and reproductive processes in women, turning them into pathologies needing correction (Edmonds 2013). Moreover, women are subjected to gendered pressures (such as workplace demands to be youthful), which augment demand for a medical service that exposes them to risks of complications, and often medical debt. These political concerns pertain to racial plastic surgery as well, and can even be compounded by this class of procedures. The racial trait in men may be seen as ugly. Yet it does not necessarily threaten masculinity. For women, on the other hand, the racial trait – the “too wide” nose or jaw or the “too small” eye – is often seen as a threat to femininity. The terms 290

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and metaphors that describe the alteration of the racial trait – such as “softening features”  – have gendered connotations. Taken to its extreme, plastic surgery makes race itself into a masculinizing feature of the face, one that beauty work can diminish. Moreover, plastic surgery racializes the female body much more so than the male body. In Brazil, surgeons fetishize some kinds of racial mixture in women’s bodies, claiming they create full hips and narrow waists, a body shape that they assert can be surgically achieved in women with the “wrong” kind of mixture. Korea and other East Asian countries did not fetishize large breasts prior to modernization. The rise of breast augmentation in those countries was fed by a view of “defciency” in the Asian female body that arose partly through military and cultural contacts with the West. Thus, race is intersectional with other qualities of the person, especially gender. While plastic surgery fragments and quantifes the body into discrete parts, the non-white, female body is most subject to these processes (Edmonds 2010). We have analyzed here the “work” (a common idiom to talk about beauty procedures) that plastic surgery does on the racial face, but also the work that the race concept does for plastic surgery. Surgeons claim a detailed knowledge of racial phenotype, one based in their clinical experience as well as medical publications that use anthropometry to describe racial traits. This expert knowledge serves surgeons well as it buttresses their claims to ofer “more natural results” or “harmony” to a growing population of non-white patients. Moreover, surgeons have adapted to current sensibilities around race and beauty, eschewing the more explicit racial passing goals of the past, and promising to achieve beauty ideals defned in a celebrity-oriented pop culture. The race that plastic surgery sees is thus unstable and shifting. It is enacted diferently according to diferent identity politics, national contexts, and the changing state of medical knowledge. Perceived defects in appearance can seem to inhere in the body’s genes, tissues, or physiological processes. But if race is “situational,” then so too is the racial defect: the race-specifc defciency or -excess is made by the “eye” that visualizes it. And what is made can be unmade potentially by a diferent politics of diference or by the rise of new aesthetic ideals in global pop culture. As plastic surgery grows beyond the West, racial surgeries will likely continue to rise as well. But there is also the possibility that new forms of resistance to a practice that pathologizes non-white features will emerge. The very conditions that have created fertile ground for the growth of plastic surgery globally – a rising consumer culture in the non-Western world – may ultimately undermine the dominance of white aesthetic ideals that make racial surgeries legitimate and desirable.

Related topics The body, cosmetic surgery, and the discourse of “Westernization of Korean Bodies”

References Aquino, Yves Saint James. 2017. “‘Big Eye’ Surgery: The Ethics of Medicalizing Asian Features.” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38(3): 213–225. Bocayuva, Helena. 2001. Erotismo a Brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond. Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I A Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edmonds, Alexander. 2007. “‘The Poor Have the Right to be Beautiful’: Cosmetic Surgery in Neoliberal Brazil.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(2): 363–381. Edmonds, Alexander. 2010. Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex and Plastic Surgery in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Alexander Edmonds and So Yeon Leem Edmonds, Alexander. 2013. “Can Medicine Be Aesthetic? Disentangling Beauty and Health in Elective Surgeries.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 27(2): 233–252. Freyre, Gilberto. 1956. The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. Translated by Samuel Putnam. New York: Knopf. Freyre, Gilberto. 1986. Modos de Homen e Modas de Mulher. Rio de Janeiro: Record. Fullwiley, Duana. 2007. “The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing Human Diference in Pharmacogenetics Practice.” Science as Culture 16(1): 1–30. Gilman, Sander. 1999. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haiken, Elizabeth. 1997. Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hartigan, John Jr. 2008. “Is Race Still Socially Constructed? The Recent Controversy over Race and Medical Genetics.” Science as Culture 17 (2): 163–193. Haraway, Donna. 1991. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In D. Haraway, ed. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 183–203. New York: Routledge. Heidekrueger, Paul I., S. Juran, D. Ehrl, T. Aung, N. Tanna & P. Niclas Broer. 2016. “Global Aesthetic Surgery Statistics: A Closer Look.” Journal of Plastic Surgery and Hand Surgery 51(4): 270–274. Heyes, Cressida. 2009. “‘All Cosmetic Surgery Is Ethnic’: Feminism, Whiteness, and the Politics of Indignation.” In Cressida J. Heyes and Meredith Jones eds. Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer, 191–207. Farnham: Ashgate. Holliday, Ruth and Joanna Elfving-Hwang. 2012. “Gender, Globalization and Aesthetic Surgery in South Korea.” Body & Society 18(2): 58–81. Hopkins, B.E. 2008. Western Cosmetics in the Gendered Development of Consumer Culture in China. Feminist Economics 13(3–4): 287–306. Hordge-Freeman, Elizabeth. 2013. “What’s Love Got to Do with It? Racial Features, Stigma and Socialization in Afro-Brazilian Families.” Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies 36(10): 1507–1523. Karupiah, P. 2012. Modifcation of the Body: A Comparative Analysis of Views of Youths in Penang, Malaysia and Seoul, South Korea. Journal of Youth Studies 16(1): 1–16. Kaw, Eugenia. 1993. “Medicalization of Racial Features: Asian American Women and Cosmetic Surgery.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 7(1): 74–89. Kim, Tayeon. 2005. “The Moving Eye: From Cold War Racial Subject to Middle Class Cosmopolitan, Korean Cosmetic Eyelid Surgery, 1955–2001.” PhD diss., Bowling Green State University. Leem, So Yeon. 2016a. “The Anxious Production of Beauty: Unruly Bodies, Surgical Anxiety, and Invisible Care.” Social Studies of Science 46(1): 34–55. Leem, So Yeon. 2016b. “The Dubious Enhancement: Making South Korea a Plastic Surgery Nation.” East Asian Science, Technology, and Society: An International Journal 10(1): 51–71. Leem, So Yeon. 2017. “Gangnam-Style Plastic Surgery: The Science of Westernized Beauty in South Korea.” Medical Anthropology 36(7): 657–671. Livingstone, Frank B. and Theodosius Dobzhansky. 1962. “On the Non-Existence of Human Races.” Current Anthropology 3(3): 279–281. M’Charek, Amade. 2020. “Tentacular Faces: Race and the Return of the Phenotype in Forensic Identifcation.” American Anthropologist. 122(2): 369–380. Menon, Alka. 2017. “Reconstructing Race in American Cosmetic Surgery.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40(4): 597–616. Millard, David Ralph. 1955. “Oriental Peregrinations.” Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 16(5): 319–336. Miller, Laura. 2003. “Mammary Mania in Japan.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11(2): 271–300. Sansone, Lívio. 2004. Negritude sem Etnicidade. Rio de Janeiro: Pallas Editora. Segato, Rita Laura. 1998. Two Ethno-Racial Paradigms: Brazil and the US. No. 233. Brasília, Brazil: Departamento de Antropologia, Universidade de Brasília. Skidmore, Thomas. 1974. Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. New York: Oxford University Press. Sturm-O’Brien, Angela K., Annette E.A. Brissett, and Anthony E. Brissett. 2010. “Ethnic Trends in Facial Plastic Surgery.” Facial Plastic Surgery 262(2): 69–74. Telles, Edward. 2004. Race in Another America: The Signifcance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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PART FIVE

Beauty and labor

29 SIZE MATTERS (IN MODELING) Amanda M. Czerniawski

An international debate erupted over the bodily size of fashion models after the deaths of two South American models, Uruguayan Luisel Ramos and Brazilian Ana Carolina Reston (“Brazil Model Who Battled Anorexia Dies” 2006). Ramos dropped dead from heart failure brought on by anorexia just minutes after stepping of the catwalk during Fashion Week in Montevideo. She was 22 years old. A few months later, Reston died from starvation-related complications at the age of 21. These two deaths spurred the thin model controversy of 2006, and debates over models’ bodies have continued to rage on ever since. Several city governments and industry organizations in major fashion capitals around the globe instituted a range of regulatory measures in the decade that followed these sudden deaths. For example, Madrid’s regional government frst took action by banning ultra-thin models from fashion week (Heckle 2007). Italy’s Chamber of Fashion instituted a licensing measure to ensure models walking the runway in Milan were at least 16 years of age and met the 18.5 body mass index minimum (Murphy et al. 2006). In New York, the Council of Fashion Designers of America launched a “health initiative” and urged designers to ensure that their runway models were over the age of 16 (Wilson 2012). Most recently, a thin model ban arose again when France adopted a bill prohibiting the use of fashion models deemed to be “excessively thin.” Models are now required to submit a doctor’s certifcate attesting to their overall physical health and that they are not excessively underweight (Friedman 2017). While politicians and cultural critics debated the use of ultra-thin, size 0 models, plussize models caught fashion’s eye and media’s ire. Velvet D’Amour made a splash in Paris with her appearances on the runway for both Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano in 2006. At 39 years of age and nearly 300 pounds, D’Amour sauntered down those catwalks with confdence and poise. At a size 26, she was both heralded as a “super-sized hero” for ordinary women ( Jones 2006) and scorned for promoting obesity (Figueroa-Jones 2007). Then, again, as France passed the “skinny model ban,” another plus-size model made headlines. While lauded by People Magazine as “the world’s frst size 22 supermodel,” others in media criticized Tess Holliday for “normalizing obesity” (Ogden 2015). The debate over bodies in fashion continued: would a “fat model ban” be next? These controversies and the juxtaposition between fat and thin bodies on the fashion runway reveal an industry’s firtation with bodily extremes and an aesthetic labor process guided by the measurement, judgment, and, ultimately, control of those bodies. 297

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Measuring models These broad attempts to regulate models’ bodies belie the everyday measures of bodily control imposed on models by industry practitioners. During anthropologist Stephanie Sadre-Orafai’s (2016) feldwork at a high-end modeling agency in New York, she found agents (also known as “bookers”) use numerical thresholds related to age and body measurements (e.g., height, bust, waist, and hip measurements) to determine a prospect’s suitability for the profession. As described in works by sociologists Amanda M. Czerniawski (2015), Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissinger (2006), and Ashley Mears (2011), these specifc height and size requirements work to exclude more bodies than select into the feld of modeling and impact more than just the physical bodies of these individuals. Typically, men must be at least 5’11” and wear a size 40 regular suit, while women must be at least 5’8” and wear a US size 0–4 for straight-size modeling or size 10–18 for plus-size modeling. The basic requirements for height and proportionate facial and bodily features are standard across all types of modeling; yet, these thresholds are not written in stone. In contrast to the rigid, objective standards implemented by governments and industry organizations in the past decade (what Sadre-Orafai refers to as regulatory number regimes), more fexible standards rule the day in the everyday practice within modeling agencies. Mears refers to these loosely constituted bodily requirements as foating norms, which serve to “stabilize a set of bodily requirements and enroll clients and models alike into the belief that (1) concrete standards exist; and (2) these standards have been met” (2011: 92). For example, the body measurements for models on the women’s board at one New York agency ranged from 31 to 36 inches in the bust, 22 to 26 inches in the waist, and 32 to 36 inches in the hips, with heights ranging from 5’6” to 5’11.5”, demonstrating the narrow but unspecifed numerical standards at play in these agencies (Mears 2008: 454). These numbers also indicate when a model has failed to live up to these standards, referred to by Mears as the “insidious function of the erroneous inch.” Czerniawski (2012, 2015) encountered this phenomenon during her ethnographic study of plus-size models. Utilizing a Foucauldian analysis, Czerniawski explains that the bodies of fashion models (whether straight or plus) are subject to the gaze of modeling agents and potential clients. The fashion industry commodifes models’ bodies, where each curve determines their economic potential. Consequently, models internalize this gaze and engage in forms of self-discipline, such as tracking their measurements, in order to remain competitive in the feld. When they fail to literally measure up, they may experience a sense of shame and insecurity. Here, Czerniawski describes her encounter with plus-size model Caroline: While a group of plus-size models and I waited in the hallway for an open call with an agency, one freelance [size sixteen] model, Caroline, anxiously asked the departing models if they had been measured by the agent during the interview. Once Caroline heard that the agent measured the other models “in over a dozen places no one would expect,” she turned to me in noticeable panic, explaining that her measurements had changed from the ones listed on her composite card—a model’s business card—since she had gained weight over the holidays. Caroline knew it was common practice for agents to measure models. The act of being measured, itself, did not trouble her. Rather, Caroline feared that the agent would chastise her for her failure to maintain her bodily measurements. Caroline believed that the agent would then perceive her as unprofessional and, therefore, refuse to work with her. (2012: 143) 298

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Models, like Caroline, experience an overt, constant pressure to maintain their fgures, since there is always someone, whether an agent or client, present with a tape measure – the industry’s technology of control that legitimizes and normalizes constant surveillance of the body. In London and New York, Entwistle and Mears (2012) observed models during castings in various stages of undress in semi-public spaces being measured, touched, and generally treated like mannequins. Clients and bookers routinely asked male models to remove their shirts for an inspection of their stomach muscles. As a consequence of working within this Foucauldian web of power relations with foating norms and constant surveillance, models become “docile” bodies disciplined to survey and continually improve upon their bodies. They are coerced into adhering to vague bodily requirements. Models may fnd themselves overwhelmed by worry that the clothes will not ft, an agent will criticize their bodies, or a client will discover a measurement discrepancy similar to Caroline’s. For straight-size models, this can lead to what Mears describes as “a perverse occupational maxim: it’s better to be skinny than to be sorry” (2011: 95), with models engaging in highly regimented and, at times, dangerous measures to make their bodies ft the bodily specifcations for the job. Infuenced by these measurements, models view their bodies as objects that must conform to clients’ specifcations. As one model revealed to Entwistle and Wissinger, “It’s hard to be as skinny as models are anyway… But if you’re going to do it, then you have to be that size” (2006: 789). In order to be “that size,” models engage in an intensive aesthetic labor process that involves a high degree of self-surveillance and corporal discipline.

Model, you better work As Entwistle and Wissinger argue in their case study of fashion modeling in New York and London, aesthetic labor is more than just a display and performance at work but is “part of the reproduction of the worker for employment . . . and involves longer-term commitments to bodily projects” (2006: 777). The fashion industry commodifes the bodies of these models as goods for market exchange, and these models must quickly learn how to develop their bodies to meet fashion’s faddish demands. This aesthetic labor process, in which models strive to harness their interpersonal energy, rein in emotions, and actively monitor and sculpt their bodies, is an ongoing production of the body and self that extends beyond the confnes of modeling work into models’ everyday lives. This continuous work of manipulating the body extends beyond the physical structure to direct aesthetic practices involving hair, make-up, and clothing, and movements of the body as it poses and walks the runway. Models spend signifcant time and attention preparing their bodies for the performance of modeling. They engage in round-the-clock self-discipline and surveillance. They tone and shape their bodies through diet and exercise or, as normalized in the case of plus-size models, resort to artifcial enhancements like shapewear and strategically placed padding. For example, in her ethnographic study of modeling industries in Europe, sociologist Sylvia Holla (2016) interviewed an editorial model named Mirthe who, in order to maintain her thin physique, exercised by walking and bicycling but avoided weight-lifting which could create unwanted muscular development. Male models, too, pay extraordinary attention to their bodies. They work out at the gym to create clear muscle defnition on their bodies or, when the aesthetic shifts towards a leaner body type, they diet and engage in more cardio to drop inches (Entwistle and Wissinger 2006). All this physical labor is aimed at preparing their bodies for clients. 299

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Plus-size models, too, engage in, at times, severe bodily management practices, such as strict calorie restriction to drop a size and even binge eating to gain a size, as well as more routine bodily manipulations, such as applying make-up and hair products, wearing shapewear, and adding body padding to make the body frame more proportional. Ultimately, if a model breaks the cardinal rule of changing her body and exceeds the threshold, it is a huge problem, whether she gains or loses weight. The act of losing weight for plus-size models is interesting, though, because by losing weight these women are conforming to a general cultural expectation for women; yet, within the modeling world, they are penalized. For example, Janice, a model working in the specialty known as ft modeling, found her career in jeopardy after a sudden and unplanned weight loss: As a newly slimmed down plus-size model, Janice experienced resistance from ft clients, who demanded that she return to her larger size. Janice struggled with the issue of having to gain weight in an unhealthy manner, something she never thought she would have to do as a plus-size model. Here, the ft clients demanded a specifc body that Janice could not provide. (Czerniawski 2015: 97) In this case, Janice worked as a ft model where there is amplifed need for bodily control. Fashion designers and clothing manufacturers hire these ft models to try on garments at various stages of production to determine the ft and appearance of the garment on a live person. It is essential to this process for the model’s measurements to remain constant, with no more than an inch variation, in order to ensure a consistency of sizing. Fit models are not hired for their perfect bodies but, rather, for their consistent bodies. This is why Janice lost work. Her body changed while on the job for a ft client. After her unintentionally lost weight, clients pressured Janice to gain the weight back quickly, so she tried her best to force-feed the pounds back on. She carried a jar of peanut butter in her bag, consuming it by the spoonful as she went about her day, and drank protein shakes. Janice’s clients never asked her how she planned to gain the weight back in a short amount of time. It didn’t matter to them. Clients want specifc types of bodies and expect models to meet these expectations without regard to how they go about it.

Classic vs edgy (or thin vs thinner) Agents use numbers and measurements as part of a larger process of commodifcation in modeling: a model’s measurements dictate not only whether an agency will represent a model but what the model will be expected to do in the feld. Agents evaluate and then place models into employment categories based on these subjective thresholds. The fashion market is segmented (e.g., women’s and men’s, straight- and plus-size, and commercial and editorial), with each market dominated by a specifc look and size specifcations. Agents sort models into divisions (or “boards” as they are called in the agency) on the basis of how well they embody either the commercial or editorial look. Once placed on a board, models, as Mears explains, will “work diferent jobs, have diferent types of looks, earn varying amounts of prestige and income, face diferent levels of risk, and appeal to different audiences” (2010: 27). Commercial and editorial models also difer in terms of size. Commercial models are those who work catalogues and commercial print advertising to sell anything from clothing to laundry detergent to the masses. These models are considered conventionally attractive with a classic, wholesome look based on normative heterosexual 300

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male and female attractiveness. As Mears summarizes based on her conversations with agents and clients, a commercial model is one that would be considered either sexually attractive to “the layperson in Kansas” or pretty to “your mom in middle America” (2010: 28). Commercial models are meant to appeal to the masses by relying on recognizable notions of beauty and entice consumers into buying whatever the model is selling. These models are further categorized into “types,” which, as Wissinger (2011) discovered in her ethnographic study of New York models, are implicitly racially defned, e.g., an “exotic” type refers to a model of color and an “All American” preppy type calls for a white, blonde, blue-eyed model. Commercial models tend to be larger than editorial models, with the women ranging in size from 2 to 6. As Mears notes, “a hip measurement of 36 inches would be unacceptable on the editorial board, but it is common on the commercial board” (2010: 32). Models of color fnd that they are held to a stricter aesthetic standard regarding their height, weight, and overall appearance due to normalized Euro/Caucasian-centric standards of beauty adopted by the fashion industry (Wissinger 2011). Nevertheless, models of color are more likely to work in commercial modeling than in other specialties. Commercial producers intentionally target a diverse demographic and will include a token model of color in advertisements (Mears 2010). Commercial men are also larger than their editorial counterparts and are described as the “hunks in trunks” (Mears 2011: 178). Holla (2016) interviewed Jim, a high-end fashion model making the switch from editorial to commercial modeling. As a consequence of this switch, he modifed his appearance to ft commercial standards. Through weight-lifting exercise, he evolved from a “heroin androgynous” look to one that was more toned and muscular but not “pumped up, bodybuilder.” Ultimately, the look of a commercial model must resonate with consumers, so slightly fuller-fgures, slightly older, and slightly more racially diverse bodies are “in” while size 0 bodies are “out.” This is in contrast to the editorial model, whose look is considered more unusual or, as they say in fashion, “edgy.” This quote from a booker in a London agency exemplifes what the editorial look entails: An editorial model generally has a more, um, strong look. . .at school she was probably considered very ugly by her classmates. And some people like, my mom or whoever, might look at a picture of her in Vogue and say, “What’s she doing modeling? She’s strange-looking.” And she is strange-looking, but she’s strange in a great way. (Mears 2010: 29) Editorial models are not for everyone. They are chosen to appeal specifcally to the highend fashion consumer and other fashion professionals. These models appear in the nonadvertising pages of a fashion magazine, on the runway, or in high-end ad campaigns to appeal to a relatively narrow market. High-end fashion “lacks an explicit commercial logic… [and] is primarily intended for feld insiders, is more experimental, and takes standards more to the extreme” (Holla 2016: 480). These models are meant to shock, which is why they are predominantly younger, whiter, and skinnier than the typical commercial model. Editorial women have narrow hips and small breasts and range in size from 0 to 4 (with ideal measurements of 34-inch bust, 24-inch waist, and 34-inch hip), with an increasing number of size 00 models strutting down fashion runways. Editorial men have narrow shoulders and chests and go down to a slim 28-inch waist and 36-inch chest (Mears 2011:178). These models are tall, skinny, and “straight,” i.e., somewhat androgynous in shape. This preference for “straight” bodies has the tendency of excluding models of color whose “curvy” bodies are highly sexualized (Mears 2010). Edginess does not mean sexiness: 301

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Editorial producers actively look for the extraordinary body, one that so radically stretches norms of slenderness that it borders on what they imagine “your mom” may register as the uncanny or the ugly. Curves and their accompanying suggestions of female sexual desire and availability are polluting images for high-end brands and high-end femininities. In other words, there’s something kind of average, a little too attainable, and too cheap about curves. (Mears 2010: 36) In editorial modeling, the physical body is perceived as potentially distracting from the real product being sold – brand identities and luxury lifestyles. Flesh is too much for fashionable elite sensibilities.

Curvy bodies but thin faces As the editorial straight-size model shrinks in size, plus-size models work to expand the defnition of beauty, but this sector of fashion, thought to be immune to size discrimination, is, indeed, plagued by elements of size bias and thin privilege. Just like in the straight-size model market, whether a plus-size model works in commercial, runway, or ft modeling, her size, dictated by her measurements, determines the quality and quantity of work she books. While a size 16 or 18 model may be desired by exclusively plus-size retailers, one that is on the smaller end of plus size at a size 10 or 12 may earn work with high-end fashion clients and more commercial print work, both in the United States and abroad. The commercial print world is dominated by a specifc image of plus-size beauty involving bodies on the smaller end of the plus-size spectrum with “thin” faces. The typical, commercial plus-size model is tall with a minimum height of 5’8’’, wears a woman’s size 10 to 16, and portrays a conservative style of appearance. Agents strongly discourage plus-size models from getting tattoos and excessive piercings. Hairstyles and manicures, too, need to be conservatively styled and polished, i.e., hair should be a medium to long length and nails should be short and polished with a discrete clear or nude color. The general aesthetic is similar to that of the straight-size commercial models. Modeling agencies that focus on commercial print work represent plus-size models who ft within this narrow range in size because there is not enough work for models larger than a size 16. As one agent claimed, “that is what advertisers want,” even plus-size ones (Czerniawski 2015: 63), echoing a circle of blame commonly expressed within the industry: agents blame designers for their model demands and designers blame agents for their supply of models (Czerniawski 2015; Mears 2011). This institutionalized tradition results in the increased visibility of models (like Robyn Lawley at a size 12, Iskra Lawrence at a size 14, and Ashley Graham at a size 16) who inhabit the small end of the plus-size spectrum. Consequently, size 18 and up models are virtually absent in print but, instead, work predominately as ft and showroom models, since 18 is a common sample size in plus size. Plus-size fashion companies produce lines of clothing that range from a size 14 to 24. These companies usually build their lines from a pattern based on a size 18 ft model. When it comes to selling these garments, however, smaller models are more often hired to appear in the print advertisements. “Larger” plus-size models work behind the scenes in fashion while the “smaller” ones are out basking in the public’s attention. Fashion has a tendency to hide bodies over a size 16 from consumers. An estimated 67% of American women are considered plus size, but plus-size bodies only appear in 2% of media imagery (Refnery29 2016); consumers notice the absence of these larger bodies. In response 302

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to customer complaints, fedgling web-based retailers have begun using “larger” plus-size models. For instance, one owner of an online boutique explained, “I’ve had complaints in the past that our models didn’t look plus-size enough. I actually used a size 22 for some pictures” (Czerniawski 2015: 147). Competing with national retailers who do not use models larger than a size 16, these independent brands do not want to risk alienating consumers. The “larger” plus-size model, shunned by certain sectors of the fashion industry, is gaining visibility in a burgeoning virtual marketplace of e-commerce. Ultimately, the distinction between “smaller” and “larger” plus sizes reveals the continuation of thin privilege and size discrimination in fashion. It is not uncommon for size 10 and 12 models to advertise plus-size clothing lines they could not actually wear. It is not that they are too big, but too small. Many of these “smaller” plus-size models use body padding to efectively size up, because clients want a curvy body but a thin face. This padding technique, which involves inserting foam pieces that are over an inch in thickness underneath hosiery, allows models like Alex, who is in-between sizes at a large 10 and a small 12, to change her dimensions for commercial print clients who want a solid size 12 or even size 14 body. “Whenever I get a call from my booker about a casting, I make sure to ask which size they [the client] want,” she confded to Czerniawski (2015: 66). The focus on a “thin” face in the plus-size sector reveals fashion’s persistent high valuation of thinness. The focus is simply shifted from the body to the face. This preference for thin faces echoes the experience of disembodiment in fat women. Plus-size models like Alex literally model “from the neck up” since their bodies are hidden by padding. Their “thin” bodies are concealed in an attempt to transform themselves into marketable “fat” bodies. These practices reafrm thin privilege by using “smaller” plus-size models and perpetuating thinness, albeit of the face, as an ideal component of beauty.

Drop the plus While conducting her research on plus-size models, Czerniawski (2015) noticed size distinctions start to erode within modeling agencies. Jag Model Agency, founded in 2013 by the former directors of Ford Models’ now-defunct plus-size division, formally began this trend. The agency represents models from size 6 to 20. And unlike other agencies, Jag eliminated boards based on size. IMG Models (the world’s top modeling agency) announced in the fall of 2013 that they, too, would no longer segregate models into diferent boards based on size. Since the distinction between straight- and plus-size models is based solely on size and the nature of the work is the same, these agencies saw little justifcation for the continuation of this division. Clothing retailers, including luxury brand Dolce & Gabbana, are also following this trend of eliminating the size divide by adopting inclusive sizing, i.e., when a brand spans both straight sizes and plus sizes. While some prominent plus-size models applaud this movement and promote the #DropThePlus social media campaign, there are those who are resistant, fearing the loss of a decades-long-fght worth of achievements made by the plus-size industry (e.g., rise in prominence of plus-size models and improvements to ft, stylings, and availability of plussize clothing). Plus-size blogger Debz Aiken explains: Until you can promise me a world that caters wholeheartedly to my body, I demand a way for me to fnd the people, the clothes, and the lifestyle that does and the best place to fnd that is under the plus size label. Rather than fghting for a harmless phrase to be removed, we should be looking at the bigger picture. Why aren’t the models who hate 303

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this phrase fghting for more size inclusive clothing? Why aren’t the brands that want rid of it using models who are at the larger end of plus size? …It’s not the word “plus size” that hurts us, but the way people let the world treat us. Fix that and you’ll fx the need [for] a separate phrase to describe us. (Marie Southard Ospina 2016) The term “plus size” is problematic because it is not measured in absolute terms and, quite simply, means diferent things to diferent people and diferent sectors of the industry. Without standardized sizing practices and the added complication of vanity sizing (i.e., size infation), a static dimensional form of plus size (or straight sizes) does not exist. Additionally, there is the inconsistency in the categorization of plus size between the modeling and retail clothing industries. In clothing retail, plus-size retailers start their merchandise at a size 14 and run through size 24. (Extended, super-size apparel begins at size 26.) On the other hand, the modeling industry considers anything over a size 8 as “plus size.” Ultimately, the term “plus size” becomes increasingly meaningless when used to categorize clothing sizes that the average woman wears; retail industry experts estimate the average American woman wears between a size 16 and 18 (Christel and Dunn 2017). The term “plus size” no longer accurately refects the nature of the bodies it supposedly describes and is loaded with huge cultural signifcance and plagued by the stigma of fat. The “plus” in plus size is pejorative, which explains the increasing movement by industry professionals to distance themselves from the term. However, reclaiming (and embracing) the term “plus size,” as Aiken has done, can be a powerful way to connect to and build a community among a marginalized identity.

Expanding beauty Beauty is a social construction, but fashion models are not the ones in charge of its construction. They are simply voiceless dolls who must conform to an image created by fashion’s tastemakers – agents and designers. Models need to ft within narrowly defned bodily parameters. If their measurements are not in perfect proportion, they must fx them by any means necessary or they will be replaced. Regulatory number regimes like those established in “skinny model bans” focus our attention on models’ bodies; however, instead of the objects in the billboards, we must shift our gaze to the designers of those billboards and hold them accountable for the power they possess in shaping hegemonic beauty standards.

Related topics Fat activism and beauty politics

References “Brazil Model Who Battled Anorexia Dies.” 2006. The Washington Post, November 16, http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/16/AR2006111601392.html. Accessed March 15, 2013. Christel, Deborah. A. & Susan C. Dunn. 2017. “Average American Women’s Clothing Size: Comparing National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys (1988–2010) to ASTM International Misses & Women’s Plus Size Clothing.” International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education 10(2): 129–136.

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Size matters (in modeling) Czerniawski, Amanda M. 2012. “Disciplining Corpulence: The Case of Plus-Size Fashion Models.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 41(2): 127–153. ———. (2015) Fashioning Fat: Inside Plus-Size Modeling, New York City: New York University Press. Entwistle, Joanne & Ashley Mears. 2012. “Gender on Display: Performativity in Fashion Modelling.” Cultural Sociology 7(3): 320–335. Entwistle, Joanne & Elizabeth Wissinger. 2006. “Keeping Up Appearances: Aesthetic Labour in the Fashion Modelling Industries of London and New York.” The Sociological Review 54(4): 774–794. Figueroa-Jones, M. 2007. “Velvet D’amour Opens Up on Her Curvy Life and Controversies.” PLUS Model Magazine, March 1, http://www.plusmodelmag.com/General/plus-model-magazine-articledetail.asp?article-id=404880624. Accessed March 15, 2013. Friedman, Vanessa. 2017. “A New Age in French – Modeling.” The New York Times, May 8, https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/fashion/france-laws-thin-models.html. Accessed July 11, 2019. Heckle, Harold. 2007. “Top Spanish Fashion Show Rejects 5 Women.” The Washington Post, February 11, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/11/AR2007021100658. html. Accessed March 15, 2013. Holla, Sylvia. 2016. “Justifying Aesthetic Labor: How Fashion Models Enact Coherent Selves.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 45(4): 474–500. Jones, M. 2006. “Skinny Models: Delving into the Weight Debate.” PLUS Model Magazine, November 1, http://www.plus-model-mag.com/2006/11/skinny-models-delving-into-the-weight-debate/. Accessed March 15, 2013. Mears, Ashley. 2008. “Discipline of the Catwalk: Gender, Power and Uncertainty in Fashion Modeling.” Ethnography 9(4): 429–456. ———. 2010. “Size Zero High-End Ethnic: Cultural Production and the Reproduction of Culture in Fashion Modeling.” Poetics 38: 21–46. ———. 2011. Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model. Berkeley: University of California Press. Murphy, R., K. Foreman, M. Karimzadeh, & L. Zargani. 2006. “New Rules for Models: Milan to Issue Licenses Verifying Age, Health.” Women’s Wear Daily, December 19, 1–10. Ogden, Jane. 2015. “Are We Normalizing Obesity?” The Independent, June, 13, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/are-we-normalising-obesity-10313776.html. Accessed July 11, 2019. Refnery29. 2016. “67 Percent Project.” https://www.refnery29.com/en-us/67-percent-project-plussize-body-image/. Accessed July 17, 2019. Sadre-Orafai, Stephanie. 2016. “Models, Measurement, and the Problem of Mediation in the New York Fashion Industry.” Visual Anthropology Review 32(2): 122–132. Southard Ospina, Marie. 2016. “15 Women on Why They Don’t Want to Drop the Plus Anytime Soon.” Bustle, March 31, https://www.bustle.com/articles/151128-15-women-on-why-they-dontwant-to-drop-the-plus-anytime-soon. Accessed July 18, 2019. Wilson, Eric. 2012. “Checking Models’ IDs at the Door.” The New York Times, February 8, http:// www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/fashion/eforts-to-stop-use-of-underage-models-during-newyork-fashion-week.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1391281234-Szx3S3XNK MDd2vt2cCf UuA. Accessed February 1, 2014. Wissinger, Elizabeth. 2011. “Managing the Semiotics of Skin Tone: Race and Aesthetic Labor in the Fashion Modeling Industry.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 33(1): 125–143.

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30 TATTOOERS AT WORK An emotional and permanent body labor Dustin Kiskaddon

We continue to know more about those who get tattoos in the United States than about those who give them (i.e. DeMello 2000; Kosut 2006b; Mifin 2001; Pitts 2003; Rush 2005; Sullivan 2001; Thomas 2014; Thomas et al 2005). There is good reason for this: the lives of wartime sailors, mid-century zoot-suiters, post-war bikers, counter-culture hippies, and body-modifying feminists make for insightful and interesting research. There continues to be plenty of data and plenty of reasons to ask why, as young people in the United States are getting nearly twice the tattoos compared to the previous generation (Pew 2010). Those who do all these tattoos have experiences that can teach us many lessons about the social world (Kosut 2014; Marato 2010; Sanders 1989; Vail 2000). They deal intimately with peoples’ bodies like manicurists (Kang 2010), dwell in the precarious service economy (Kalleberg 2000), and cooperatively produce art (Becker 1982). A turn toward the lives of tattooers in the United States can ultimately reveal new insight into what Kang (2010) calls an “historical juncture where the body meets the market” (247). Tattooers spend their working lives within this juncture in that they aesthetically change the bodies of other people for money. Their work is aesthetic in that it’s guided by local regimes of beauty and taste – tattooing is an ardently visual practice driven by artistic conventions of perspective, composition, and color theory. Scholars have revealed a split among tattooers on the basis of their relationship to these conventions, wherein some understand themselves and their work as artists/art while others do not (Barron 2017: 105–131; Kosut 2014; Sanders 1989: 20–30; Thompson 2015: 122–151). Tattooers work on bodies in exchange for their livelihoods, whether they produce art or not, and as such should be understood as doing “body labor” (see Kang 2010). They use machines to puncture and fll holes within skin, such that patterns can stay within a 2–4mm dermis layer. Early twentieth-century tattooers worked within Coney Island arcades, traveling carnivals, and underground “sponge and bucket” shops (Kosut 2006a; Thompson 2015: 21–35). Sponge and bucket refers to a bucket of water tattooers kept near the chairs, into which they dipped the same sponge used to wipe blood of all the bodies they tattooed each day (Hardy 2013: 71). Thousands of tattooers now run “street shops” or “private studios” organized around aseptic techniques. They work to control their all-too-human hands to try and produce technically sound and aesthetically pleasing work.

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I begin this short chapter by exploring tattooing as an emotionally charged form of body labor. I then suggest tattooing is an act in cultural production realized through a “world” of shared conventions. I outline changes in the historical relationship between tattooers and categories of cultural distinction related to the artisan and artist. I sketch their occupational lives and explore just one dimension of power by looking toward the experiences of women. As I could do so by charting the experiences of non-binary, queer, and people of color tattooers within the industry, a focus on women responds to their central place in extant research. I conclude by suggesting that more research may embrace insight from the sociology of emotions. This suggestion stems from ethnographic experience through which I became a working tattooer via apprenticeship in Oakland, CA. I tattooed hundreds of paying clients and helped run a humble shop which had been open for 12 years. While I began a project about an occupational struggle (see Mabry 2018), I faced the task of trying to control my shaking hand and knotting stomach in front of my real-life, bleeding, clients. This implored me to think through tattooing and emotional experience. As this experience seemed inexorable from the permanent nature of tattoos, I suggest we may better understand tattooers and the production of culture, labor, and the body by researching the social construction of “permanence.”

An emotional body labor: tattooers at work Tattooers’ work is an intimate and pain-ridden exchange that may be described as “body labor” in that tattooers participate in the “exchange of body-related services for a wage” (Kang 2010: 826). Beyond the technical and artistic demands of tattooing, tattooers must successfully work on (and within) the bodies of paying clients. The successful tattoo exchange requires the tattooer to harness a practiced set of interpersonal skills while managing emotional and physical experience. A tattooer’s client, particularly those with few tattoos, will not know much about the process of getting a tattoo. Tattooers guide them through this process with attention toward the client’s sensibility, as they often exhibit nervousness, fear, and uncertainty. Tattooers consistently educate clients and socialize them into a client-role while working to ensure the tattoo is accomplished as smoothly as possible. These eforts with clients are a form of labor in that they’re conditioned by a commercial environment. As service workers, tattooers approach the body as a site upon which a commercial exchange is to be accomplished. Akin to other forms of service, tattoo labor requires a great deal of management of feeling. Tattooers face a complex set of emotional expectations. They monitor and manage their own emotional experiences and those of the client, doing what Hochschild (1979) has called “emotional management.” Tattooers manage their emotions to maintain confdence and display competence to gain control over the tattoo process and to perform well (see Sanders 1989: 80). They expend efort to evoke or suppress emotional experience to do good tattoos – both for the client and for themselves – while earning a living. Tattooing, even at its most basic, is an incredibly hard and emotional thing to do. It demands sets of embodied knowledge and practice gained through repetitive experience. Tattooers, especially new ones, sweat with fear when beginning a challenging project, reel with disappointed in the face of a mistake, and sit with pride at the appearance of a job well done. 307

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A tattoo world and the production of culture Tattooers in the United States can be understood as agents in the production of culture. Embracing the “production of culture” approach used among sociologists allows us to understand their experiences and to explain how symbolic elements of culture – like tattoos – are shaped by the people who make them (see Becker 1982; Crane 1992; Grindstaf 2002; Mears 2011; Peterson and Anand 2004). Explaining the production of any element of culture can teach us about the culture in which that element is produced (Grindstaf 2002: 34, see Sweetman 2012: 353). This approach animates research on all sorts of cultural worlds, including fashion (Mears 2011), television (Bielby and Bielby 1996), talk shows (Grindstaf 2002), and country music (Peterson 1997), and it explains the place of the body in processes of meaning making. Grindstaf (2002), for instance, reveals talk show producers working to excite guests and thereby reinforcing the idea that “trashy” people lose rational control over their bodies. Mears (2011) reveals modeling agencies classifying a model’s “look” within culturally dominant categories of beauty, and Peterson (1997) reveals country music singers aligning their bodily presentation with public understandings of “authenticity.” Embracing the production of culture approach as a frame for understanding tattooing, as does Sanders (1989), uncovers a world of people and processes. As Kosut (2014) reminds us, this demystifes the idea that any tattooer works in isolation as some sort of “lone genius” (77). Just as contemporary painters rely on the canvas stretcher, most contemporary tattoo artists rely on machine builders, pigment mixers, internet technologies, and needle makers to do the tattoos they do.

Te tattoo world We can think about tattooing as a “world.” As Becker (1982) would have it, any art world is composed of networked people who, guided by conventions, cooperatively produce art in accordance with aesthetic taste(s) of its audience (34–5). Approaching tattooing as a world allows us to foreground the shared conventions upon which tattoo production relies, and to focus on the social organization of their labor (see Sanders 1989: 20–25). Contemporary tattooers in the United States have organized within what Sanders (1989) calls a “commercially-oriented craft structure” (19). Its commercial context and its craftorientation render the tension between money and aesthetic production – recorded among fne artists – less apparent (see Menger 1999). As a tattooer, for instance, I never felt as though money got in the way of my creative work. The structure of tattooing refects the kind of individuated entrepreneurship required by tattooers who hustle while working with and in response to a clientele who help shape the industry (Sanders 1989: 25, 29). Like any world of cultural production, the tattoo world has changed over time. Tattooers today work far removed from the Coney Island arcade of the early twentieth century. Their world has become increasingly centralized, sanitary, and artistic. Scholars track a late twentieth-century “renaissance,” wherein tattoos have become “cleaned up (literally and symbolically), authenticated, and ultimately valued by certain cultural specialists” (Kosut 2014: 143). This renaissance was aided by the production of readily available and reliable tattoo equipment, the popularity of art-school attendance among those who would become tattooers, and the development of extensive forums for tattoo education, inspiration, and advertisement. It also refects a reduction in stigma of the tattooed body, perhaps supportive of a thinning line between categories of high- and low-brow culture (see Levine 2009). While 308

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tattooing remains a rather unstructured world of production, it is nonetheless more aligned with legitimated practices and meanings than ever (DeMello 2000; Fenske 2007; Kosut 2006a, 2014; Lautman 1994; Pitts 2003; Rubin 1988).

Conventions in tattoo production People learn how to do tattoos – and perhaps to become tattooers – through a process of socialization. A novice in the best-case scenario lands a structured apprenticeship with an established tattooer, although many “scratch” at home and learn on their own. Whether through apprenticeship or not, newcomers must acquire mastery over a challenging set of technical and interpersonal demands required of their newfound position as tattooers. The techniques, aesthetic preferences, and interpersonal expectations a tattooer must learn can be thought of as “conventions.” Conventions are like “habits, customs, routines, and standard practices,” which help outline any art world and orient people toward coordinated action (Becker 1982; Biggart and Beamish 2003: 443). Tattooers rely on conventions of tattoo design when drawing up the images they hope to tattoo. Conventions of design help dictate what a “good tattoo” will be as will conventions of content, composition, color, size, and placement. Conventions of sterilization guide tattooers through aseptic practices and help others determine their degree of legitimacy. Tattooers can meet conventional standards of good work by consistently producing technically sound and aesthetically interesting tattoos within their demanding service environments. Sociologists like Becker (1982) and Sanders (1989) employ this approach and refect a dedication to the philosophical school of pragmatism – one which argues that knowledge, meaning, and culture are produced through the activity which propels people across their daily environments. It promotes an “institutionalist” approach to art in that it suggests objects as being transformed into “art” through social interaction – rather than landing as art due to the object’s inherent, aesthetic, properties.

Tattooers as artists and artisans People who do tattoos have a variable relationship with categories of “art” and “craft.” Some employ the term “artist” and align themselves with a social identity associated with fneart discourse. Others foreground their relation to the “craftsman” and emphasize technical mastery (Sanders 1989: 20–30). I suggest their shifting relation to these cultural categories may refect their relationship to historical changes in the cultural categories of “artist” and “artisan.” The term “artist” was split from “artisan” in the sixteenth century. “Artisan” was increasingly used to identify technical mastery rather than innovative aesthetic production (see Williams 1983: 40–43). People who describe themselves today as “tattooers” or “tattooists” draw upon the more working class, artisan, identity than those who prefer “tattoo artist.” Although tattoo artists increasingly draw from the discourse of fne art (Kosut 2006b), tattooers have primarily embraced the more artisan-inspired social identity. Early tattooers experienced a rather homogenous, working class, outsider occupation (see Kosut 2006a: 148). These frst-generation artists experienced stark independence from fne-art institutions which helped them form a tight-knit world. This insularity, in addition to their working-class roots, helped motivate them to associate with identities of “craftsmen” or “technician” rather than “artist” per se, and it pushed their work to refect this identifcation (Kosut 2014: 149). 309

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While the position of tattooers in relation to regimes of fne art is reproduced by tattooers themselves (Barron 2017: 122; Sanders 1989: 75), the positive association between tattooing and craft production is also an efect of accumulated exclusion. Fine-art institutions largely refrain from dealing in tattoos. This exclusion is perhaps enhanced by the inability to alienate the aesthetic work from the body of its bearer (see Kraut 2016). It’s neither collectable nor in active discourse with those developing and critiquing the expressive vocabulary of contemporary art. Tattooing in the United States began on the basis of simple imagery. The reproducible “fash” patterns of frst-generation tattooers were introduced in the early twentieth century by Albert Morton Kuzman (1880–1954), a former wallpaper designer known as “Lew The Jew” Alberts (Thompson 2015: 25). The designs use bold outlines and single-color sections to communicate clear composition. Crude, yet surely not easy, the designs are judged on the basis of durability, that is to say the likelihood that they would remain stable as images on a body. They set the stage for conventions in aesthetic judgment among tattooers who foreground technical profciency and observable clarity in their determination of “good” work (Kosut 2014: 149). These older fash patterns refect a genre of tattooing now called “American Traditional.” While these fash designs emphasized endurance (with an attending phrase, “Bold will Hold”), newer genres are evaluated on the basis of their conceptual complexity or fne-line elegance. Technical mastery still reigns as the predominate mode of evaluative judgment, but tattooers – and tattoo artists – now fold the conceptual into the equation a bit more. This is in part an efect of generational change. A stark generational gap separates newcomers, those who joined tattooing after the mid1980s, from the old timers. New tattooers often trained in art school and began using fneart conventions to change tattooing forever (Barron 2017: 120–123; Sanders 1989: 63). The rise of the “custom” tattoo, a sure step in conventional change, is associated with the legacy of Don Ed Hardy, who in the 1970s began creating custom designs for clients. He had a background in printmaking and art history acquired in the San Francisco Art Institute and, as he describes it, was “on a mission to bring art to tattooing” (Hardy 2013: 74). He opened the frst “custom-only” tattoo studio in 1974, Realistic Tattoo, in San Francisco. The process of bringing art to tattooing can be described as artifcation (see Kosut 2014). Artifcation involves a process incorporating fne-art conventions into a previously artisan-oriented aesthetic practice. Kosut underlines how this process was “internal” to the tattoo world (154), guided by fne-art-inspired tattooers like Hardy (once critiqued for “Rembrandting” when adding detail into his work). Many fne-art-inspired tattooers are still perceived as challenging conventions (Kosut 2014: 150–151; Thompson 2015: 124–127). As people operating within an “artistic feld,” some tattooers distance themselves from the “negative historical and cultural baggage” of low-brow tattooing through the use of fne-art discourse (Kosut 2014). Those who do may secure fne-art positions in the feld and gain elite clientele (146–147). This process of convention change may teach scholars about how boundaries between seemingly divergent forms of identifcation (tattooer and tattoo artist) refect more historical boundaries between high- and low-brow culture (see DiMaggio 1987: 155). Yet whether they talk and act like artists or craftspeople, they all work for a living.

Tattooing as occupational practice Tattooers gain skills to succeed in their demanding roles through apprenticeship training and/or through self-guided experience. Those landing apprenticeships scrub toilets, answer phones, learn to prevent cross-contamination, and draw until they are allowed to tattoo. 310

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Once tattooing, they work toward maximizing career opportunities garnered through personal association (Barron 2017: 119; Sanders 1989: 62, see also Mifin 2001: 51). Each apprenticeship is diferent, as there are not standardized curricula or codifed standards of practice. Although most people in tattooing will argue that new tattooers should go through a structured apprenticeship, many new tattooers simply fgure things out at home (Thompson 2015: 125). Apprenticeships are hard to come by and their demands – typically without any pay – are more than people can take on. Either through apprenticeship or through self-training, however, tattooers must practice the permanent art and they make mistakes on themselves, willing friends, and shop mates as they improve. They also make mistakes on the bodies of paying clients and reel in memory of slip-ups while lying awake at night. Although it’s not quite a “winner take all” market like editorial fashion (Mears 2011), rewards in the tattoo world are unequally distributed. Some gain higher status (and wealth) while working in reputable, sometimes boutique, shops, whereas others work in “street shops” dedicated to a local clientele and to people requesting “walk-in,” on the spot, pieces. Those at the higher end make a good living largely on their own terms, while those in the street shop can work erratic hours with a less predictable income. The unpredictability of tattooing – even in some of the more high-end edges of the tattoo world – makes the working life of tattooers “precarious” (see Kalleberg 2000). Their labor and as such income is heavily conditioned by market swings, casual workplace arrangements, and waves of aesthetic interest among clientele. Their livelihood is also determined by the physical endurance of their own bodies, which often succumb to repetitive injury (Keester and Sommerich 2017). This precarity was laid bare during the 2020 economic shutdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Tattoo shops, such as the one in Oakland I worked within, closed for months. My early career stalled alongside those of everyone else in the tattoo world. While tattooers must satisfy their clients and the owners of the shop within which they work, they still enjoy an autonomy rarely known in the working world. They often establish their own hours, decide what projects they’ll take on, and take strong roles in the organization of their environment. They consistently express appreciation for what they do and seem to genuinely enjoy it. Yet tattooing isn’t experienced as positive by everyone. Women, people of color, gender non-conforming folks, and surely those with disabilities have held marginal positions in relation to the rewards of tattooing for decades. They have been excluded from apprenticeships organized by shop owners who serve as discerning gatekeepers in an otherwise inaccessible occupation. If they get in, they often face challenges that their straight, white, cis-gendered, male counterparts do not have to endure.

Women in a male-dominated industry The contemporary tattoo world resembles male-dominated occupational felds like construction (Paap 2006) and manufacturing (Levine 2009), in that it’s been inhabited by men and established through masculinized practices and meanings since its inception (Thompson 2015: 123–124). Tattoos served as markers of association among men and with positive conceptions of male bravado – risk taking, fraternal comradery, and the acceptance of pain. Mid-century tattooers were mostly men who spent their time tattooing the bodies of other men. These clients were often sailors – which helped perpetuate an association between tattoos and patriotism – but also bikers, gang members, and hyper-masculine outsiders. 311

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Some of these tattoo shops excluded women by rule, neither allowing them to become tattooed or to become tattoo apprentices (Steward 1990; Thompson 2015: 128). Those determining who could legitimately join the industry – the gatekeepers – have been men often bent on teaching other men just like them (Thompson 2015: 130). Although women have carved out signifcant and increasingly secure space for themselves, they are still marginalized from a manly tattoo world in many ways (DeMello 2000: 61; Pitts 2003; Thompson 2015: 122–151). Women seeking to join the industry are impacted by the gendered meanings associated with tattoos in a general sense. Women getting tattoos have been historically sexualized and criminalized (see Mifin 2001: 43–53). This is evidenced in a 1920 case, wherein criminal charges against a man who raped a woman were dropped after the woman’s butterfy tattoo was presented in court (Mifin 2001: 46). Turn of the century tattooers took it upon themselves to prevent “nice girls” from becoming “tramps” by refusing to tattoo them and by refusing to teach them the trade (DeMello 2000: 61; Thompson 2015: 132). Young women are now getting more tattoos than men (Pew 2010), and they increasingly have an opportunity to get them from other women. Tattooers who are women often begin tattooing like anyone else: they get tattooed, seek apprenticeships, and learn on their own. Historically, many women became tattooers through close association with established men in the tattoo world. “Rusty” Skuse, for instance, a tattooer who earned the 1970 Guinness Book of Records title for most tattooed woman, began doing tattoos after getting many from a man she eventually married (Mifin 2001: 51–52). While women work in all manner of tattoo shops today, women hoping to enter the tattoo world may seek to do so within the many women-owned shops tattooers have struggled to create since the 1970s (see Thompson 2015: 144). They may get tattooed by women traveling to other women-owned shops, wherein the tattooer may network and gain community. While some women have established these unique spaces, many other have become increasingly active throughout a contemporary tattoo world more refective of diversity (Thompson 2015). The increased visibility of queer culture has rendered many such spaces geared toward a broader gender non-conforming community. Women (and non-binary folks) face unique challenges and opportunities with the apprenticeship search and in the daily shop environment with their clients. A client may pass up a woman and get a tattoo by someone else because they appear to be a man (Thompson 2015: 149). Clients may come on to women in the shop and try to contact them after the work is done. Yet, clients may also seek a woman tattooer in order to ofer direct support to women in the industry and because they may assume the process will be more respectful (see Thompson 2015: 138). Tattooers who are women navigate the task of proving their worth on the basis of their work’s technical mastery from a marginal position. Like others in male-dominated felds (see Levine 2009; Paap 2006), women face unique critiques in that men question the source of their worth: men may associate a woman’s popularity with the attractiveness of the woman’s body and not with the quality of their work. Yet women are attaining an increased presence and power throughout the tattoo world, particularly as they open and maintain their own shops, and this may refect a broader shift in the dynamics of an industry newly responsive to systemic sources of oppression.

Conclusion and toward the social study of permanent marks To study tattooers is to engage possibility: we may garner a better understanding of the people, processes, and conditions of power in a world of cultural production. We may learn more 312

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about the emotional nature of body labor, the dynamism of artistic conventions, and the historical classifcation of cultural producers and of related regimes of power and diference. We may, of course, also learn more about the social meaning of the body and its permanent, visible, modifcation. We can learn about these things by becoming tattooers ourselves – doing what Wacquant has called “enacted ethnography” (2015) – or by talking with tattooers and using social theory to understand what they tell us. The process of doing tattoos on people would absolutely beneft a researcher in that tattooing is very hard to understand outside of its embodied experience. Sanders (1989), as insightful as his work has been, makes a comment in near-passing which would surprise even the best tattooers: that “the basic techniques (of tattooing) are easily acquired” (25). That Sanders feels confdent in this suggestion likely results from methodological constraint. Had Sanders become a tattooer, surely an incredible feat in the late 1980s, he would have been brought face to face with the absurd difculty – and emotional intensity – of tattoo labor in its most basic forms. Further research among tattooers should embrace insight from the sociology of emotions. Such a focus may aim attention toward the feelings people experience while visibly, painfully, and permanently changing the bodies of other people for money. An additional direction for research on tattooers may embrace permanence as an object of inquiry. Tattoos, as Sweetman (2012) notes, are unique among bodily modifcations in that they are nearly impossible to remove (353). Tattooers cannot rely, for instance, on the impermanence of their work when they make mistakes, as does a hairstylist I interviewed when they “try and remember that hair grows back.” They proceed into what they do with the understanding they will alter the public appearance of another person’s body forever. Tattooers experience the profoundness of permanence at work every day. It impacts their approach to design, placement, and implementation, and situates their emotional experience. Researchers may learn new things about culture, emotions, labor, and the body by engaging this aspect of the tattooers’ life and use social research from economic sociology (Beckert 2016), theories of social action (Tavory and Eliasoph 2013), and the sociology of time (Mullaney and Shope 2015) to do so. The temporalities of tattooing become a bit complicated when breaking the tattoo into two distinct temporal orders: (1) the time spent getting it, (2) the time it’s on the body. People who get many tattoos maintain, to use Beckert’s concept, a “temporal disposition” which foregrounds the time spent getting a tattoo more so than an outside observer may predict (see Beckert 2016: 21). Many of my clients seem more so concerned with the interaction than of the piece itself, something Sanders (1989) found among clients in the 1980s. An approach to the temporalities of the tattoo should take this into account and use it to construct a theoretical understanding of permanence and its social construction. As artisans, artists, and ultimately as body laborers, tattooers work in the service of others while producing technical/aesthetic products to be worn permanently within the skin of other people. Understanding their experiences can help us better appreciate the cultural signifcance of tattoos, the many social facets of tattoo labor, and broader social phenomena situated at the intersection of emotions, labor, the body, and time.

References Barron, Lee. 2017. Tattoo Culture: Theory and Contemporary Contexts. London: Rowman and Littlefeld. Becker, Howard. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beckert, Jens. 2016. Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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31 BEAUTY PAGEANTS AND BORDER CROSSINGS Te politics of class, cosmopolitanism, race, and place Karen W. Tice The Westernized beauty contest prototype of individuated competition has proven to be highly malleable. It has been molded to ft an array of historical, political, national, regional, and cultural contexts across time and space, and serves as a barometer for the encoding and embodiment of gendered exceptionality and marginality. Beauty pageants function as alterable spaces that have been modifed continuously in response to shifting idealizations of gendered, racialized, and class-based beauty, conduct, subjectivities, and respectability. These idealizations have been used to promote a variety of agendas, including touting community, national solidarity, and modernity; promoting tourism and trade; as well as showcasing civic and cultural pride, assimilation, upward mobility, and self-advancement. Attaching values to women’s faces and bodies, skin tones, behaviors, and aspirations through beauty pageantry has been a popular – if problematic – strategy to circulate norms for gendered distinction and defect, comportment, cultural citizenship, and aspirational identities. The elasticity of beauty pageants, as well as their proftability as mass-mediated visual spectacles across a variety of media platforms and locales, has ensured the longevity of pageantry for over two centuries. Today, continued corporate sponsorship of pageantry, the availability of social media platforms, pageantry/makeover phone apps and games, and the fusion of beauty pageantry with the ever-popular genre of Reality TV (RTV) for example, the 2020 season of The Bachelor will once again feature beauty queens) ensures the continual difusion and investment in the marketing and surveillance of gendered beauty, bodies, and self hood on stages and platforms across time and space, marking and ranking some bodies and subjectivities as normative and exceptional and others as fawed. Beauty pageants also continue to be signifcant transnational sites for the construction, commodifcation, circulation, and contestation of cultural understandings of normativity and embodied distinction around the world. Numerous scholars have analyzed how beauty pageants have mapped, embodied, and represented confgurations of gender, race, class, culture, identities, nationalism, citizenship, and diasporas (Balogun 2012; Banet-Weiser 1999; Cohen, Wilk, and Stoeltje 1996; Craig 2002; Ghosh 2003; Gilbert 2015; King-O’Riain 2006; Kozol 2005; Lieu 2002, 2013; Ochoa 2014; Parameswaran 2006; Santiago 2015; Saraswati 2013; Wu 2011; Yano 2006). The global circuitry fusing gender politics and global capitalism has enabled their geo-political border crossings and has secured beauty contests a 316

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prominent place in the globalized cultural imaginary, disseminating an assemblage of values, norms, and aesthetic images for gender, bodies, and self hood. The tenacity of beauty competition is also an integral part of the contemporary neoliberal and technological intensifcation of beauty pressures that demand an ever-growing microscopic and intimate tracking, self-monitoring, and social control of women’s bodies and subjectivities (Elias and Gill 2018). Pageants are entwined with an array of contradictory discourses and legitimation narratives of entrepreneurialism, self-empowerment, neoliberal mobility and hierarchies, agency, self-surveillance, makeover, citizenship, celebrityhood, cosmopolitism, belonging, cultural and national identities and pride, career success, mobility/aspiration, confdence, inner beauty, spiritual ftness, and ambassadorship. The proliferation of pageants in venues such as college campuses, post-colonial nations, deindustrialized poor communities, globalized televised markets, and social media platforms reminds us that beauty pageants continue to be rich cultural sites for revealing how bodies and beauty are shaped by confgurations of colonialist legacies, conservative nationalism, colorism, ethnicity, race, class, gender, and sexuality. Pageants continue to attract many participants willing to invest time and money in preparing and preening for the presumed opportunities for recognition, mobility, careers, confdence building, celebrity, and self-capitalization that accompany beauty contests. Despite the many dismissals and criticisms of pageants as outdated spectacles of glitter and glamour, crass commercialization, and anti-feminism, they continue to buttress the “fashion-beauty complex, an institutionally unbound assemblage of producing a specifc kind of female subject who is perpetually unhappy with her body and appearance and thus compelled to embark on regimes of self-perfectibility” (McRobbie 2009: 62–63). Pageants are also rooted in what Elias and Gill characterize as the “neoliberal optics” and “pedagogies of defect” encoded within contemporary makeover paradigms that require not only re-styling and improving bodies but also demands “remodeling psychic life and requiring a makeover of subjectivity itself, to produce confdent women of Lean In or women’s magazines who exude wellbeing, positive mental attitudes and self esteem, however fragile or insecure she may actually be feeling” (Elias and Gill 2018: 64). Beauty pageants are not just about beauty and bodies. They go beyond fesh and skin to help to defne and shape one’s sense of self and others. Pageants are deeply rooted in global capitalism, afective, and political economies and they can both reveal and conceal political/ personal desires and anxieties central to contestants, sponsors, and audiences. Beauty pageants represent a multitude of personal and political agendas and subject positions. Vast differences and contradictions in meaning, aesthetics, and rhetorics of legitimation exist within and among beauty pageants, their contestants, and sponsors. Robert Lavenda concludes that pageants are “ideologically hybrid rather than totalizing and unifed, susceptible of several diferent possible interpretations for outsiders, for organizers, and especially for participants” (Lavenda 1996: 31). Pageant organizers, sponsors, and the contestants themselves have continually engaged in a series of pageant makeovers and rebrandings designed to accommodate an ever-shifting array of historical and cultural contexts, frictions, and agendas. Despite these multivalent qualities, beauty pageants have tended to afrm and uphold hegemonic discourses and social relations for optimizing bodies and subjectivities. They construct norms for gendered, classed, and racialized exceptionality and exclusion as well as extoll embodied entrepreneurship, celebrityhood, and cosmopolitanism that can exacerbate and/or attempt to conceal race, cultural, and class divisions. But, at times, they have also been used as social justice vehicles to promote divergent (and sometimes counter-hegemonic) agendas to further diasporic, racial, cultural, and sexual identity projects. Pageants can be found in many incongruous spaces across the geo-political borders and scales. In Venezuela, a 317

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country noted for its success in international beauty pageants, it has been noted that pageants can be found “at every university, school, and neighborhood…even jails and hospices have beauty queens”(Relea 1999: 2). Today, thousands of women and increasingly men still compete in a wide spectrum of beauty pageant activities as contestants, coaches, judges, producers, and beauty service consultants and providers. One popular form of beauty contest is to crown a commodity queen. There are, for example, a variety of fossil fuel queens including Miss Coal Queen, Miss Oil Patch, Shrimp and Petroleum Queen, Miss West Virginia Oil and Gas, and Miss Pennsylvania Bituminous Coal Queen continuing a long tradition of queens to market fruit, cotton, and the seasons (Tice 2015). There are hundreds of community festivals that market regional food products such as Southern spoon bread and paw-paws, and some festivals elect queens for mammals and reptiles. Additionally, hundreds of college campuses hold ethnic pageants for students of color, drag pageants, feeder pageants for Miss America, and an array of contests sponsored by campus organizations. In the United States, there has been a steady growth of pageants for women of color including Miss Black America, Miss Native America, Miss Africa U.S., Miss India America, and Miss Caribbean, which extend pageant protocols to include ethnic costumes and truncated cultural lessons to venerate specifc racial or ethnic identities and communities. Additionally, women of color have increased their participation in historically white pageants. The successes of four Black women as Miss America, Miss USA, Miss World, and Miss Teen America in 2019 has been celebrated by some as signifcant indications of inclusion and racial progress in pageantry, which nonetheless leave untouched deeper questions of inequality. On the global stage, there are numerous competitions including Miss Universe, Miss World, Miss International, Miss Earth, Miss Globe, and the newcomer – Mister Global. Even though many secular pageants are flled with Christian contestants and a few Muslim contestants, there are specifcally faith-based pageants including Miss Christian America and Pure International Pageants, which celebrate Christian spiritual ftness and body stewardship and Miss World Muslim, which promotes Islamic piety (Gilbert 2015; McMichael 2019; Tice 2011). An array of RTV shows featuring pageantry including Toddlers and Tiaras and its ofshoot; Little Miss Atlanta; Instant Beauty Pageant; Miss America: Reality Check; Pageant School: Becoming Miss America; Here Comes Honey Bo-Bo; The Swan; Miss Naked Beauty; America Princess; Ladette to Lady; Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School; Kim of Queens; King of the Crowns; Glam Masters; King of the Crown; and, more recently, Queen America, Dumplin’, and Insatiable (which ignited a series of protests about its fat-shaming plotlines) exist as do mobile phone apps such as Mod Star that extend the reach of RTV style coverage of the behind the scenes drama of pageantry. Numerous pageant flms also attest to both the proftability and popularity of beauty pageants, on and of the runways. Elias and Gill (2018) have argued that the surveillance of women’s appearance is among the largest media content across genres and noted the stunning growth of “appearance apps” that in a 2015 Google search generated 171 million hits. Many mobile apps extend the beauty contest prototype such as “Fit for Pageant Prep,” in which pageant contestants work with personal trainers to track and customize ftness goals; and “Beauty. AI,” a pageant in which human women and men and robots are judged by robot judges; “Glytter-Beauty Contest,” a daily beauty contest; and “YOU Cam-Beauty Star,” where contestants use virtual make-up products, fashion accessories, and facial editing technologies. There are also game apps that include Girl-Beauty Queen, Beauty Plus, Fashion Doll-Beauty Queen, Live Miss World Beauty Pageant Girl Games, and the International Royal Beauty Contest, all of which celebrate beauty competition, fashion, makeover, constant self-monitoring, and calculative self-improvement. Beauty queens are highly visible on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook as 318

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well as pageant blogs such as “Sashes and Scripts,” which also provides pedagogies for beauty pageant success. Beauty pageants have served as launching pads for careers in politics, religious ministries, entertainment, beauty makeovers, beauty schools, and a wide range of beauty entrepreneurship such as pageant coaching, cosmetics, and apparel. Beauty pageant contestants enjoy multi-media platforms for sharing their competition stories and their post-pageant successes. Many frame their narratives with divergent representations and affects of an imaginative enterprising agency and pro-women empowerment rhetorics to describe their investments and experiences in beauty competitions. Pageant contestants have availed themselves of many outlets and venues for writing and speaking about their pageant experiences including the Republican National Convention, TV, church pulpits, and social media, and many have published memoirs, cookbooks, diet and fitness books, and self-help literature for achieving pageant and career success, self-maximization, and image/style makeovers. In their appearances and in their pageant narratives, contestants and sponsors typically embrace conventional neoliberal sensibilities that include celebratory stories of how pageants facilitate body/psychic discipline and positivity, aspiration, empowerment, upgrading self, making a difference, and finding a voice through humanitarianism/charity/service, scholarship, professional networking, and even feminism, to frame their pageant stories. Successful transformation of the self and the body forms the affective core of many of their pageant narratives anchored to rhetorics of self-discipline, enterprise, ascension, and perseverance. Many beauty pageant contestant narratives are also rooted in notions that pageant preparation and competition is an ideal pathway for overcoming adversities and inequalities based on class, race/ethnicity, disability, and gender. Pageant accounts both reveal and conceal the many contradictions of relying on self-­ enterprise, conversion, and willpower as a strategy for eluding the harmful structural power relations of class, race, and gender. Yet despite the generally normative nature of pageant tales and rhetorics, beauty pageants nonetheless have long been and continue to be an emotional flashpoint and combat zone for passionate debates about the monitoring, judging, and ranking of gendered and racialized bodies and behaviors; commercialization; objectification; surveillance; and commodification of cultural traditions, religion, femininity, and heteronormativity.

Rebranding beauty pageantry Beauty pageants have had a history of unruly queens who have “failed” to uphold pageants standards during their reigns. In the current #MeToo climate, contestant failures – and increasingly, sponsor and producer scandals such as fat shaming, harassment, and silencing outspoken pageant royalty – continue to tarnish the US beauty empire. Pageant sponsors have scrambled to sustain and renovate their beauty pageant enterprises and have introduced new pageant competitive criteria to deflect criticism. Although many contestants still walk the runway in spike heels, gowns, and swimsuits in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and many pageants have undergone extreme makeovers, the place of the iconic Miss America pageant has been diminished by declines in TV audiences (yet 4.3 million still watched the 2018 pageant on live TV) as well as numerous organizational scandals. In 2017, Sam Haskell, CEO of Miss America Organization, was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had sent numerous body-shaming emails about the contestants. In 2018, a newly constituted majority women led board and staff revised several Miss America pageant orthodoxies in what was dubbed by many as a “#Me Too Makeover.” Under the leadership of Gretchen Carlson (a former Miss America and news anchor on Fox News, who was famous for having sued the head of Fox News for sexual harassment during her time as a 319

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news anchor), Miss America underwent cosmetic surgery and the pageant was rebranded as an event to “prepare great women for the world and prepare the world for great women.” Carlson not only dropped the word pageant from its namesake to simply Miss America 2.0, but she also banished the swimsuit and evening gown competitions to the dustbin of pageant history. A new post-makeover look was advertised that featured not rhinestones, sashes, and bathing suits but a woman draped in a long billowing white skirt with sneakers leaping into the air devoid of glitter and cleavage. Contestants were told to wear outfts that made them feel confdent and that their “social impact initiatives” would be an important component in picking the winner. In the 2018 competition, contestants talked about the Flint, Michigan water crisis as well as the divisiveness of the Trump administration. Despite this re-styling of pageant protocols and leadership changes, the Miss America organization continued to implode. In 2018, Carlson faced an onslaught of critique from state pageant directors and former Miss America winners as well as a highly published series of accusations from the 2018 Miss America winner, Cara Mund, who accused Carlson of workplace bullying. Mund stated that the leadership has “systematically silenced me, reduced me, marginalized me, and essentially erased my role as Miss America in subtle and not so subtle ways on a daily basis,” by dictating talking points during her appearances. Carlson (Read 2018) has since resigned and the fate of Miss America 2.0 remains precarious. The Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageant systems, on the other hand, have had a very diferent history of commercial sponsorship that has helped to shape them as a distinctive form of spectacular femininity difering from the Miss America pageant. In a never-ending quest to help cushion the Miss America pageant from critiques as merely a fesh-peddling exploitation of women, the pageant has undergone many makeovers to build its connections to academics by awarding scholarships and to charity and service by requiring contestants to have platforms. By contrast, Miss Universe, Miss Teen USA, and Miss USA have unabashedly showcased beauty and fesh. Established in 1952, under the sponsorship of Catalina bathing suits, this pageant system has been rooted in distinct confgurations of sexual, cultural, class, and racial politics that have shaped its protocols. For example, the Miss Universe pageant has no talent competition, college scholarship, or pretense to social impact initiatives as does Miss America and it has been much more overt in its displays of sexualized bodies. Under the ownership of Donald Trump, Miss USA, Miss Universe, and Miss Teen USA, as well as the RTV show, Pageant Place (that followed the drama of Miss Universe pageant contestants who were living in Trump Towers in NYC), faced similar debacles to those of Miss America that generated after-shocks in the 2016 US presidential election campaign. From 1996 to 2015, under the thumb of Donald Trump, this pageant network was marred by numerous scandals. Unlike the makeover of Miss America, Trump took his triad of pageants in a new direction, boasting that he made the heels higher and the swimsuits smaller. He also celebrated the fact that Miss Universe was an ideal vehicle for promoting his global business interests including holding the Miss Universe in countries he liked to do business with or where building a Trump Tower was on the agenda. Similar to the Miss America pageant calamities, Trump notoriously body-shamed contestants including most infamously in 1996, when Trump called Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, Miss Piggy for her weight gain and Miss Housekeeper for her Latinx heritage (Bachrach 2016; Toobin 2018). Numerous accusations over the years have also been made over Trump’s unannounced visits to contestant dressing rooms and his inspection of contestants. Trump was forced to sell the pageant system when in 2015, he referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists, drug peddlers, and criminals prompting NBC, and numerous pageant judges, celebrity hosts, and sponsors to drop out of the contest. 320

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Under new ownership, Miss Universe has most recently rebranded itself as pro-women and multicultural, describing itself as a “global inclusive organization that celebrates women of all cultures and backgrounds and empowers them to realize their goals through experiences that build confdence and create opportunities for success” in eforts to shed its association with Trump’s shady business practices and gender politics. Nonetheless, this shedding of Trump management has not been extended beyond a superfcial rebranding of the pageant. The Miss Universe pageant website instructs would-be contestants that they must be “confdent, understand the value of our brand, and have the ability to articulate ambition,” consolidating neoliberal fantasies for mobility through beauty and self-reliance. Despite the many diferences between Miss America and Miss Universe, gendered self-empowerment discourses and preened bodies form the narrative template for both of these archetypical beauty contests. Seemingly sidestepping the woes, scandals, and the seedier side of US national pageants is Univision’s Nuestra Belleza Latina (NBL), one of most successful and widely watched televised transnational beauty pageants geared towards a Latinix market promoting talent, personality, and the charisma of women. The show follows beauty contestant hopefuls living in a Miami mansion as they face the constant specter of elimination based on their prowess in navigating a series of challenges. The winner is given a year’s TV contract that ensures them a public profle and connections to transnational networks of entertainment and business. With the tagline of “Without sizes, without limits, and with no excuses,” the NBL has successfully incorporated elements from popular reality shows such as American Idol, Big Brother, and America’s Top Model, and it has continued the trend of the Latinization of beauty pageantry. Winner and host, Alejandra Espinoza, as well as Denise Bidot, a plus-size model and activist, celebrate how the NBL has “evolved beyond the dated mentality of traditional beauty pageantry…it is a breath of fresh air on Latin media” (https://www.refnery29.com/en-us/nuestra-bellezalatina-univison-new-format). Allowing women of all ages, sizes, and skin tones as well as mothers and wives to compete as contestants and serve as judges, NBL, like Miss America, also does not require a swimsuit competition. It has been highly efective in developing transnational participation via text voting, Hashtags, and Twitter, to ensure its spreadability and drive buzz. Most notably, it encourages contestants to be independent storytellers and content producers. In 2014, it became the frst TV show in any language to top Facebook’s buzz rankings and it received more tweets per episode than the Bachelor, Dancing with the Stars, and American Idol. It has also released a mobile game app, NBL Casino. The pageant relies on the use of specifc tropes thought to appeal to Latinx populations including the hardships of immigration, the tensions between marriage and careerism, and the difculties of transnational mothering. Despite the touting of the egalitarian nature of their competition and the importance of appealing to a Latinx audience, in 2018, NBL was challenged by two DACA women who were not allowed to compete. As one of the protesters recounted, although she had faced many rejections for being undocumented, Univision’s rejection was especially painful since “you don’t expect your own community to reject you. The same community that advocates for you. A lot of people at Univision show their support for Dreamers on Facebook” (Bolanos 2018). Univision subsequently changed its policy and now allows Dreamers to compete.

Campus pageants The lure of material and symbolic rewards as well as rebranding has ensured that campus beauty pageantry has also persisted on college campuses. Beauty pageants for African American, Native American, Latina, Asian American, and African college women as well 321

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as pageants for men have become especially popular. Emergent strategies of signifcation and legitimation have been employed by participants and organizers to frame and justify the fusion of academics with pageant competition including academic achievement, leadership, cultural education, racial and communal pride, and professional development to rescript and modernize campus pageant traditions. Campus beauty pageants rarely lend themselves to a single coherent narrative. Aesthetics, meanings, representations, and discourses of class, race/ ethnicity, culture, sexuality, aspiration, community and individual afrmation, mobility, and exceptionality are widely divergent between and within pageants. This is especially pronounced in campus and community pageants that are not corporately managed or scripted for global TV audiences. Typically, these pageants are less orderly and more amateurishly produced than national and international pageant circuits although many serve as feeder pageants for national contests such as Miss America. As locally particular expressions of student and community life, they are embedded in localized institutional and community norms for beauty, aspiration, behavior, academics, and legacies. Although, at times, they rely on the parameters and protocols of national and transnational pageants, they are less corseted than their national and international kin, revealing the contradictory politics of middle-class codes for success, self hood, grammars of comportment and conduct embedded in the prize packages, judging and selection criterion, as well as the diverse rationales used by contestants to justify pageant participation (Tice 2012). The class politics of most transnational and national pageants are oriented towards celebrity, cosmopolitanism, and upscale lifestyles and tastes. The Miss Universe, Miss USA pageants, and NBL all bestow upon the winner a prize package that denotes a class-coded global cosmopolitanism designed to further the achievement of elite class competencies needed as jet-setting beauties crossing not only national borders but navigating the worlds of corporate business and entertainment. Miss Universe receives a yearly salary of $250,000, a luxury condo in NYC and additional money for international travel, wardrobe, ftness, and hair products, as well as access to Broadway plays, casting opportunities, movie premieres, and a modeling portfolio. This prize package afrms the importance of elite class competencies needed to construct a highly visible public profle as a celebrity of high fashion and glamour enjoying a fast-paced, elite urban lifestyle and travel. The politics of class and beauty in campus and community pageants, on the other hand, difer in how constellations of class are mobilized and performed from the elite cosmopolitanism that characterizes the Miss Universe pageant. Typically, localized pageants such as campus pageants construct hierarchies of gendered excellence that difer from many national pageants although they borrow the scholarship and a careerist narrative of the Miss America Organization to complicate and, in some cases, camoufage their emphasis on corporeal distinction. The prize package for Miss America is a $50,00,00 educational scholarship and a yearly salary to promote the winner’s “social impact initiative” and service as the National Ambassador for the Children’s Miracles Network. Unlike Miss Universe, the Miss America organization promotes scholarship and a middle-class careerist narrative, not elite upscale cosmopolitanism. Since 1944, when its scholarship fund was established, Miss America has continually trumpeted itself as the largest scholarship program for college women. Additionally, the Miss America pageant promotes the importance of gendered middle-class competencies and aspirations for professional careers and service to others. This has become the backbone and a vocabulary of motive for participants in many local pageants as well, especially campus-based pageants. Despite the insistence on scholarship and service, campus pageants nonetheless validate those contestants who can perform normative iterations of middle-class femininity, an ensemble of 322

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aesthetic and moralized codes for the self and body. As Beverley Skeggs (2005) argues, contemporary reformulations of gender and class defne “particular forms of selfhood” and a “grammar of conduct” as strategies to transcend one’s class origins and eclipse hierarchical social structures in a presumed meritocratic world. Campus contestants are all expected to confdently manage the everyday pressures of upholding middle-class aesthetic and behavioral norms for image, aspiration, lifestyle, afect, etiquette, and taste, and to erase any stigmatizing markers of class disadvantage. As John Hartigan (2005: 18) has argued, “Etiquette is a mode of naturalizing social classifcations, schemes, and hierarchies, making their importance tangible through restrictions on what can be said or done and linking transgressions of these prohibitions to the viability of the social order.” Through their roles as campus fgureheads, queens help to fortify hierarchical class-coded standards for appearance, comportment, afect, and taste. Many college contestants have interpreted class to be malleable, a constellation of enterprising, aspirational, and aesthetic norms and skills for the presentation of self that can be cultivated through hard work and self-enterprise, etiquette, dress, image, leadership, interviewing skills, body and emotional regulation, and volunteerism. However, the measuring up to the expectation that contestants can be self-assured in etiquette, conduct, and dress, as well as profcient in casual conversations about food, cultural events, politics, wine, consumption, and leisure – as well as the microscopic scrutiny of their bodies – is often fraught with uncertainty and strain. For many contestants, appearing middle class requires an ongoing process of cover-ups, concealments, border crossings, code-switching, and transformative training. Helen Lynd long ago noted the constant risk of failure and shame for those who struggle to perform middle-class protocols including the very triviality of the cause [of failure]- an awkward gesture, a gaucherie in dress or table manners, an untimely joke always a source of bitter regret, a gift or witticism that falls fat, an expressed naiveté in taste, a mispronounced word, ignorance of some unimportant detail that everyone surprisingly knows. (1958: 40) One African American campus queen noted her anxiety about failure noting, “I constantly had to smile. It was so draining because I had to make sure I was not giving them [white elite pageant sponsors] ammunition” (Tice 2012: 152). These class anxieties are often intensifed for women of color who face continual racist disparagement of their characters, communities, bodies, and life-worlds. While higher education has a long history of regulating and enhancing student behaviors and bodies, there has been an increase in the number of colleges that ofer charm schools, style shows, and etiquette training. There are numerous online college fashion business and “style scholars,” college fashion blogs, and online magazines such as Her Campus: A Collegiette Guide to Life and Academichic.com. Campus queens are expected to be poised in their self-presentation, navigating formal social occasions with alumni and university ofcials with ease. Workshops for campus queens, such as the National HBCU Leadership Conference for Black Queens, are designed to ensure emotional moderation and social acceptability in which their bodies, clothes, make-up, dress, diction, manners, and taste must visually denote contestants as properly middle-classed. Included are lengthy lists of conduct prohibitions including chewing gum, complaining, anger, drinking non-clear liquids in public, going hungry to business meals and banquets, and wearing shorts or wrinkled clothing. Contestants are encouraged to invest in pearl necklaces and carry breath mints, lipstick, and safety pins with them at all times (Tice 2012). 323

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Many attempts have been made by beauty pageant contestants to reformulate and resignify the protocols and meanings of beauty pageantry as a means for readdressing inequalities. Some students of color not only attempt to navigate the middle-class profciencies for individual advancement and self-maximization embedded in campus pageants, but to utilize campus pageantry as a strategy to advance communal and oppositional agendas in light of the ever-present dismissals and damages to their communities, cultures, life-worlds, and histories wrought by white racism and colorism. Many underscore pageantry as a political platform and means of opposing deeply rooted histories and contemporary legacies of racial exclusion and stigma of their racialized bodies and characters. While the corset of beauty pageantry can be stretched across time, space, and agendas, hopes for oppositional agendas are often muted. Despite the hopes and eforts to invest pageants with political signifcance to help unsettle borders, disrupt hierarchies, and showcase communal/cultural pride, pageant orthodoxies with their competitive hierarchies of excellence, embodiment, beauty, and social savvy domesticate these hopes for healing class, ethnic, and racial divisions, and dilute political and cultural claims for recognition. The hyper-infated optimism of the beauty pageant ethos that conjoins embodied distinction, afective and aesthetic labor, endurance, and self-capitalization with mobility, successful futures, and equality, despite the ephemeral and exclusionary nature of its rewards is yet another example of what Berlant (2011: 28) calls the “cruel bindings of cruel optimism.”

Related topics Transnational feminist approaches to beauty Girls and beauty (pageant) culture

References Bachrach, Judy. 2016. “What’s Behind Donald Trump’s Obsession with Beauty Pageants.” Vanity Fair ( January 13). Balogun, Oluwakemi. 2012. “Cultural and Cosmopolitan: Idealized Femininity and Embodied Nationalism in Nigerian Beauty Pageants.” Gender & Society 26(3): 357–381. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 1999. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageantry and National Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University press. Bolanos, Christine. 2018. “Before These Dreamers Spoke Out, Univision Told Them They Could Not Participate in Its Beauty Competition.” Latino USA ( July 19) https://www.latinorebels. com/2018/07/20/univisionbelleza/ Cohen, Colleen Ballerino, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje. 1996. Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power. New York: Routledge. Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen: Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race. New York: Oxford University Press. Elias, Ana Sofa and Rosalind Gill. 2018. “Beauty Surveillance: The Digital Self-Monitoring Cultures of Neo-Liberalism.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 21(1): 59–77. Ghosh Ahmed, Huma. 2003. “Writing the Nation on the Beauty Queen’s Body: Implications for a ‘Hindu’ Nation.” Meridians 4(1): 205–227. Gilbert, Juliet. 2015. “Be Graceful, Patient, Ever Prayerful: Negotiating Femininity, Respect, and the Religious Self in a Nigerian Beauty Pageant.” Africa 85(3): 501–520. Hartigan, John. 2005. Odd Tribes: Towards a Cultural Analysis of White People. Durham: Duke University Press. King-O’Riain, Rebecca. 2006. Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Beauty pageants and border crossings Kozol, Wendy. 2005. “Miss Indian America: Regulatory Gazes and the Politics of Afliation.” Feminist Studies 31(1): 64–94. Lavenda, Robert. 1996. “It’s Not a Beauty Pageant: Hybrid Ideology in the Minnesota Community Queen Pageant,” in Colleen Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje (eds). Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power. New York: Routledge, 31–46. Lieu, Nhi. 2002. “Remembering the Nation through Pageantry: Femininity and the Politics of Vietnamese Womanhood in the ‘Hoa Hau Ao Dai Contest.’” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 21(1/2): 127–151. ———. 2013. “Beauty Queens Behaving Badly: Gender, Global Competition, and Making PostRefugee Neo-liberal Vietnamese Subject.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 34(1): 25–57. Lynd, Helen. 1958. On Shame and the Search for Identity. New York: Harcourt Brace. McMichael, Mandy. 2019. Miss America’s God: Faith and Identity in America’s Oldest Pageant. Waco: Baylor University Press. McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change. London: Sage. ———. 2015. “Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times.” Australian Feminist Studies 83: 3–20. Ochoa, Marcia. 2014. Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and Performances of Femininity. Durham: Duke University Press. Parameswaran, Radhika. 2006. “Global Beauty Queens in Post-Liberalization India.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 17(4): 419–426. Read, Bridget. 2018. “There’s a Lot of Drama Going Down in the Miss America Pageant.” Vogue (August 21). Relea, Francesc. 1999. “The Doll Factory: A Probing Examination of Venezuela’s Obsession with Miss Universe.” Hopscotch 1(2): 2–7. Santiago-Aviles, Manuel. 2015. “Colonial Bodies at the Media Universal Stage: The Case of Puerto Rico’s Participation in Miss Universe.” Journal of Latin American Communication Research 5(2): 51–71. ———. 2015. “Nuestra Belleza Latina and Why Pageants Are Still a Thing among Latino Audiences.” Flow Journal (October 26). Saraswati, L. Ayu. 2013. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Skeggs, Beverley. 2005. “(Dis)identifcations of Class: On Not Being Working Class,” in Derek Robbins (ed). Pierre Bourdieu: Sage Masters of Social Thought. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 207–244. Tice, Karen. 2011. “The After-Life of Born-Again Beauty Queens,” in M. Bailey and G. Redden (eds). Mediating Faiths: Religion and Social Change in the 21st Century. Aldershot: Ashgate, 105–118. ———. 2012. Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageantry and Campus Life. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2015. “Embodying Appalachia: Progress, Pride, and Beauty Pageantry,” in C. Connie Rice and Marie. Tedesco (eds). Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, Activism. Athens: Ohio University Press, 86–101. Toobin, Jefrey. 2018. “Trump’s Miss Universe Gambit.” The New Yorker (February 19). Wu Tzu-Chun, Judy. 2011. “Loveliest Daughters of our A ancient Cathay: Representations of Ethnic and Gender Identity in the Miss Chinatown U.S.A Pageant,” in Phillip Scranton (ed). Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America. New York: Routledge, 278–308. Yano, Christine. 2006. Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in the Hawaii’s Cherry Blossom Festival. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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32 RETAIL WORK, RACE, AND AESTHETIC LABOR Kyla Walters

Introduction Nearly 16 million people work in retail in the United States (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2017). Retail is “the largest low-wage industry” in the country (Carré and Tilly 2008: 1). The lowest paid positions are the “frontline” sales force. Retail work can involve a range of customer interactions, from helping shoppers select items to prompting customers to apply for the store’s credit card during the sale. Known as salesclerks or “brand representatives” (Williams and Connell 2010: 357), these workers remain ever-visible to customers. In clothing retail, many workers fnd themselves obligated to wear the store’s current merchandise to model the store’s style and produce aesthetic value for the company. Service sector employment continues to expand throughout the increasingly polarized labor market (Autor and Dorn 2013). Retail and other service industries ofer most employees “bad jobs” (Kalleberg, Reskin, and Hudson 2000). Low wages, lack of benefts, and varying, unpredictable hours make retail employment relatively precarious and unrewarding. Variation among companies also creates a continuum of retail work conditions (Carré and Tilly 2017). The type of goods sold demarcates the industry’s subsectors. The so-called “big box” chains, such as Target and Walmart, carry general merchandise. Other corporations sell specifc items to a narrower clientele, such as clothing stores that target adolescents and 20-somethings, like American Eagle and Forever 21. Employer expectations for workers vary across the subsectors. The merchandise shapes the types of labor that the organization seeks from its retail workforce (Pettinger 2004). In this chapter, I focus on clothing retail. Sociologists have compellingly argued that these stores occupy a unique intersection of consumption, work, and the body (Williams and Connell 2010). Beauty and “the brand” dominate the cultural ethos of selling apparel products. Therefore, clothing stores provide scholars with a case to study how retail workers may act as sales models or interactive brand representatives (Pettinger 2005). Aesthetic labor refers to paid work that entails embodying the employer organization’s signature look – its cultural essence and commercial branding strategy (Avery and Crain 2007; Pettinger 2004) – while interacting with and/or being visible to customers (Warhurst and Nickson 2009). Theorized as employer’s expectations for workers to perpetuate the brand’s style, gender and class dimensions of this labor have garnered considerable attention 326

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(Hanser 2008; Warhurst, van den Broek, Hall, and Nickson 2009; Williams and Connell 2010). Employers’ disparate treatment across race also shapes retail workers’ working conditions and job quality (Ruetschlin and Asante-Muhammad 2015). Yet racial analyses of aesthetic labor remain relatively scant. Given calls for explicit examinations of how race shapes retail work and aesthetic labor practices (Lopez 2010; Mears 2014) along with an increasingly racially diverse workforce, more studies with this emphasis should continue to emerge. I begin this chapter by introducing the concept of aesthetic labor and situating it within dominant theoretical frameworks to study service work. Next, I survey the extant sociological literature about race and retail work, before turning to examining how aesthetic labor reproduces racialized beauty ideals. In the conclusion, I summarize the feld of aesthetic labor studies from a critical race perspective that considers anti-Black racism and xenophobia. I close by urging scholars of service work to purposefully collect more diverse samples, consider skin color in relation to racial inequality, and explicitly examine white workers and white-dominant branding strategies as racial phenomena.

Emotional labor and service work The concept of aesthetic labor stems from a turn among sociologists of work to investigate the conditions and experiences of interactive service workers, rather than factory workers (Macdonald and Sirianni 1996). Unlike the labor process of creating value through manufacturing or agriculture, which is largely composed of relationships among workers as well as those between managers and workers, the service labor process introduces a third group: customers (Leidner 1993). One major advancement in the subfeld came with the publication of The Managed Heart. In her now-classic book, Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983) introduced the term “emotional labor,” which stands in contrast to the physical labor performed on the factory foor or out in the feld. Service workers manage afective displays as part of their value production during customer interactions. During this labor process, workers’ feelings and bodily displays become central to the production of value (Macdonald and Sirianni 1996). Therefore, service labor is fundamentally social and relational work, rather than primarily focused on completing tasks and/or producing widgets (Steinberg and Figart 1999). Through ethnographic observations of fight attendants and bill collectors, Hochschild (1983) illuminated the central role of workers’ bodies, especially their displays of feelings and communication styles, in serving customers. Whether delivering in-fight cocktails or demanding payment from a call center, service interactions often entail the frontline worker internalizing, however surface-level or deeply, the emotional cues determined by their employer (Hochschild 1983). The organization that employs service workers determines what emotional performances and communication methods are desirable and appropriate. Although Hochschild’s seminal study acknowledged the organization’s surveillance of the appearance of fight attendants, her conceptualization of emotional labor “crowded out … employee corporeality and the sexualization of employees” (Warhurst and Nickson 2009: 386). Without an explicit analysis of bodies, scholars of service work gloss over one of the most salient dimensions of customer encounters.

Teorizing aesthetic labor Aesthetic labor scholarship helps reconcile how workers’ afective displays are part of an embodied labor process in which workers’ bodies become vehicles of value production 327

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(Anderson, Grunert, Katz, and Lovascio 2010). United Kingdom-based sociologists Chris Warhurst, Dennis Nickson, and their colleagues coined the term “aesthetic labor” to conceptualize the specifc form of paid labor that entails service workers possessing “the look” – the aesthetic attributes of the employer organization’s brand (Warhurst, Nickson, Witz, and Cullen 2000). Across lifestyle industries in the service sector – from fashion shops to fancy hotels – workers’ bodies and interactive styles become central aspects of the value produced during the sales encounter (Hanser 2008; Otis 2012; Pettinger 2005; Warhurst and Nickson 2007, 2009). Theoretical approaches to aesthetic labor largely stem from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital (Hanser 2008; Mears 2014; Otis 2012; Pettinger 2005; Williams and Connell 2010). These “symbolic forms of capital establish hierarchies of discrimination, or distinction … [They] can also be used to obtain other resources” (Anderson et al. 2010: 566), such as higher wages (Hamermesh and Biddle 1994). Cultural capital exists in the embodied, material, and symbolic realms, including possessions like clothing, as well as bodily dimensions of one’s smile, speech, and salutation style (Bourdieu 1984). Beauty exists at the nexus of these forms of capital and embodiment, operating to accumulate and/or be denied market value (Hunter 2005, 2007). Some scholars posit that beauty is a unique form of symbolic capital, in part due to the heightened signifcance appearance receives in contemporary market society (Mears 2014; Warhurst et al. 2009). Two dominant approaches have emerged to date within aesthetic labor studies. Each emphasizes how beauty shapes market-based value production processes. One approach explores the aesthetic cultivation of workers as branded vehicles; this set of scholarship considers how managers and workers purposefully adjust themselves to embody the store’s signature look to amplify the symbolic capital they are projecting as brand representatives (Hall and van den Broek 2012; Pettinger 2005; Walters 2016; Williams and Connell 2010). The other examines the appraisal of aesthetic capital to understand how managers afx market value to frontline employees through hiring, task assignment, and the distribution of work hours (Anderson et al. 2010; Misra and Walters 2016; Nickson, Warhurst, and Dutton 2005). Aesthetic labor scholars tend to acknowledge that aesthetic cultivation and appraisals of aesthetic capital are intertwined before delving into one of the two approaches. Some sociologists achieve an exceptional amount of analytic synthesis and balance between these two approaches within book-length manuscripts (Hanser 2008; Mears 2011; Otis 2012). Yet in general, studies of aesthetic labor tend to concentrate on only one of the two sets of processes. Cultural sociologists often take the frst approach, recognizing the ways that beauty operates as a special form of symbolic capital within service interactions. These studies take seriously the social construction of beauty and lifestyle brands as a set of embodied or body-oriented processes (Hanser 2008; Otis 2012; Pettinger 2005; Ramjattan 2018; Warhurst and Nickson 2009). Retail companies craft distinct “looks” in association with their brands and expect frontline employees to conform their appearance and demeanor accordingly (Hall and van den Broek 2012; Warhurst et al. 2000; Williams and Connell 2010). Emotional labor remains a central aspect in some of these studies, which explore the ways that workers’ bodies – as visible objects and as selling tools – are subject to the organization’s branded feeling rules and its aesthetic ideals (Gruys 2012). The second approach is to investigate the social processes of value production (i.e., forms of capital) within aesthetic labor. Economists, legal scholars, and sociologists proceed by examining how beauty appraisals shape fnancial outcomes, such as jobs and wages (Entwistle 2001; Hamermesh and Biddle 1994; Mears 2014; Rhodes 2010) as well as marriage 328

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(Hunter 2005). Within this production process, individual and organizational actors appraise aesthetic capital or “traits of beauty that are perceived as key assets capable of yielding privilege, opportunity and wealth” (Anderson et al. 2010: 566). Scholars tend to focus on either aesthetic cultivation or appraisals of aesthetic capital within this process, although exceptions, which integrate both approaches, continue to emerge (Gruys 2012; Mears 2011; Otis 2012; Walters 2018; Wissinger 2011). For both approaches, organizational context matters. Within the commercial realm, each company constructs their branded look and lifestyle using both their marketing materials, such as posters decorating the store, and their visible sales staf, such as the worker greeting patrons (Hall and van den Broek 2012; Pettinger 2004). Employer organizations determine the content of the company’s lifestyle brand while also developing labor practices to hire (Nickson et al. 2005) and mobilize workers’ emotional and aesthetic capacities to fulfll the specifc brand (Pettinger 2005; Warhurst and Nickson 2001). Survey data with employers in aestheticized service industries demonstrate that managers seek to employ individuals that ft the brand at the point of hire (Nickson et al. 2005). Yet the market is segmented so that aesthetic cultivation varies in both intensity and orientation across organizations (Hall and van den Broek 2012). In her ethnographic observations, sociologist Lynne Pettinger (2005: 471) observed a more diverse workforce “in terms of age, gender, ethnicity and orientation to fashion [which] was apparent in their appearance” in stores with lower price points. More upscale stores actively cultivate a narrower set of aesthetic sensibilities among visible sales staf (Hanser 2008; Pettinger 2004, 2005). Frontline managers shoulder the responsibility for curating a stylish staf, as well as regularly surveilling workers’ bodies (Pettinger 2005) and attempting to elevate their aesthetic capital (Walters 2016; Warhurst and Nickson 2009). The managerial role is crucial because it entails both the personal performance of aesthetic labor and the cultivation of aesthetic capital from frontline workers. Frontline managers, who occupy a relatively constricted role, attempt to implement workplace policies sent from corporate management. Across social science disciplines, researchers demonstrate the salience of beauty in shaping retail encounters for all three involved groups: workers, managers, and customers. Based on experimental and participant observation studies, scholars fnd that customer perception of workers’ physical attractiveness is often positively correlated with their reported satisfaction with the service interaction (Li, Zhang, and Laroche 2019). Echoing most other studies on beauty in retail work, this study omitted race, ethnicity, and skin color from its analysis. However, some evidence from Australia suggests that customers of color prefer interacting with sales staf who appear to share their race and ethnicity (Quach and Thaicon 2017).

Racializing aesthetic labor in fashion retail Bodies are racialized social entities (Craig 2012). Skin color, hair texture, and facial features are key physical markers of race between and among diferent racial groups (Glenn 2009; Herring, Keith, and Horton 2004). From the point of hiring to task assignment and cultivating workers’ aesthetic capital, racial forces shape all beauty appraisals and social interactions between workers, managers, and customers. Scholars must recognize that the intersection of race with gender, sexuality, and class is salient within aesthetic labor processes. White women remain overrepresented in lifestyle and beauty-based retail sectors. The composition of clothing retail workers refects this trend: women are 76.2% of the workforce, which is mostly white (76.6%), with a sizeable and growing portion of Hispanic or 329

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Latinx workers (23.2%), and smaller portions of Black (12.8%) and Asian (7.3%) workers (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018). Although white women’s presence predominates this sector, social scientists have overlooked racial dimensions of this group’s aesthetic labor in favor of gender and class analyses. Such analytic shortcomings occur across methodological approaches. Ethnographic studies tend to ignore the depth of racial and ethnic forces that shape retail work (Pettinger 2004, 2005), as do many interview-based studies with service employees (BesenCassino 2014; Butler 2014) and surveys examining how retail employers appraise applicants based on their aesthetic value (Nickson et al. 2005; Warhurst and Nickson 2007, 2009). Indeed, scholars studying retail within this context often omit race and ethnicity as variables, leading to persistent failure to substantially engage with the racial dynamics of aesthetic labor. Job segregation seems to be the modal way that inequality scholars consider the intersection of race, gender, and class on the sales foor. Sociologists Christine Williams and Catherine Connell’s (2010) piece on aesthetic labor exemplifes this analytic style. Having identifed racial discrimination within the retail sector, namely the demeaning treatment of Black and Latinx workers, Williams and Connell (2010: 367) theorize discriminatory “aesthetic judgement[s]” to be “cultural manifestations of social inequality” in the realm of service employment. Researchers thus ask: whose aesthetic capital do retail employers deem worthy of extraction? Aesthetic value is frst and foremost produced through sheer presence. Workers’ visibility is the most fundamental component of creating aesthetic value for the employer (Williams and Connell 2010). Women are the most visible retail workers, especially in beauty-centered and lifestyle branded organizations. While white women remain the “ideal” worker for the beauty-based clothing retail sector, suggesting the continued superlative treatment of whiteness, Black, Latinx, and Asian women (and some men) are an increasing part of this workforce. The increased inclusion of Black and Latina women is uneven across retail. For example, plus-size women’s clothing stores are more likely than other stores to ofer Black and Latina women frontline positions (Gruys 2012). Despite the emphasis on aesthetic cultivation of low-wage retail workers, not all workers are visible within the store. Managers tend to divide tasks into two main categories: merchandise processing and customer service. The former position usually occurs in the stockroom, an area closed to patrons. Workers who perform the merchandise processing duties of unpacking shipments, fastening security tags onto items, and otherwise preparing apparel for display are rendered almost entirely invisible. Merchandise processing may involve the occasional task of moving a stack of ready-to-sell clothes from the stockroom to the sales foor; this helps explain why these least visible workers must also abide by the organization’s dress code. Yet it remains clear that the stockroom staf are perceived by employers to ft the brand less robustly than the sales foor staf. Based on interviews with clothing retail workers and limited participant observations as a customer, Black and Latino men appear to be overrepresented in the stockroom positions and underrepresented in the visible sales foor positions (Walters 2018). This dichotomous division of aesthetic labor – between the sales foor and the stockroom – reinforces the notion that employers appraise workers’ aesthetic capital in ways that create and maintain a racially and gender-stratifed workforce. While stockroom work has its own costs and benefts relative to the frontline work performed as a more consistently visible member of the sales staf, invisibility in this employment context suggests devaluation. 330

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Anti-Black racism in aesthetic labor The market for fashion models demonstrates the endemic character of racism and colorism. Sociologist Elizabeth Wissinger (2011) argues that the white gaze intersects with the corporate concern of perpetuating its brand in ways that systematically disadvantage Black workers. In the modeling industry, racial diference may be actively erased or constructed to commodify racial otherness in ways that reinforce stereotypes (Mears 2011; Wissinger 2011). Across the aesthetic labor sector, Black women (along with other racially minoritized women) receive economic rewards for lighter complexions, chemically “relaxed” hair, racially ambiguous features, and curvier body shapes (Mears 2011; Walters 2018; Wissinger 2011). Anti-Black practices also shape retail work experiences. Interview research with a more racially diverse sample of clothing store workers in stores targeting (and employing) teenagers and 20-somethings indicates that Black women with darker skin tones tend to face aesthetic devaluation (Walters 2018). Demeaning appraisals of Blackness occurred relative to the positive appraisals of whites, as well as compared to racially ambiguous workers and/ or their otherwise non-Black racially minoritized counterparts (Walters 2018). For Black women and, to a lesser extent, Latinas, Asians, and some women of mixed race, body shape and size, hair style, and skin color are key factors shaping appraisals of their aesthetic capital in relation to the brand. Afro-centric hairstyles, namely those that look natural and do not conform to straightened styles tend to fall outside of retail companies’ lifestyle brands (Walters 2018). Such aesthetic parameters are unsurprising, given the numerous insights into anti-Black dress codes that seek to oppress and demean Black-associated aesthetics (Byrd and Tharpes 2014; hooks 1992; Rosette and Dumas 2007; Wissinger 2011). Aside from the racial valence of aesthetics, Blackness is subject to another layer of surveillance. Black shoppers are often criminalized in retail stores (Lee 2000; Pittman 2017). Such practices negatively afect Black workers as well, especially when managers explicitly request that they hyper-surveil Black customers (Walters 2018). A range of explicit and more subtle labor practices signal the harmful stereotyping of Black people that contribute to adverse working conditions for Black retail workers.

Sounding right and audible diference Visible bodies lend themselves to aesthetic analyses of the physical form. Indeed, scholars have examined the appearance-related dimensions of aesthetic labor far more than its auditory components. Recent studies aim to illuminate how oral aspects of aesthetic labor reveal another form of appraising aesthetic capital: “sounding right” (Warhurst and Nickson 2001). Sounds of speech can create aesthetic pleasure. Speech can also signal social positionality through syntax, fuency, and accent. Workers in the service sector speak to customers constantly. Efective communication skills may seem to be the most pertinent aspect of performing service work, especially given theoretical emphasis on “soft skills” as the central focus of employers hiring for frontline service jobs (Moss and Tilly 2001). The few studies that have addressed speech demonstrate that employer and customer perceptions of “sounding right” refect class and gender ideals (Butler 2014), as well as racial ideals (Eustace 2012; Nath 2011; Ramjattan 2018). Fluency and accent are quintessential markers of sociolinguistic diference. As part of the body and the process of embodying aesthetic ideals, voice launches social being into the audible realm. When individuals speak, their voices, words, and ways of orally communicating 331

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become part of their aesthetic performance. Speech that interrupts the normative pattern of spoken language in a given context may seem obtrusive – even ugly. Stammering is one example of an oral interruption within service interactions, leading to sounding “wrong” (Butler 2014). The concept of “speech-role ft” refers to the congruency  – or lack thereof – between the expectations and the perceptions of a person’s manner of speaking within the context of a specifc social position that person occupies, such as a service worker (Butler 2014). Based on interviews with men who occupy service jobs, sociologist Clare Butler (2014: 725) argues that “[a]ny divergence in speech-role ft appears to result in an audience questioning whether the message is credible,” leading to discrimination against those who stutter, stammer, or otherwise speak in ways that are incongruent with the audience’s expectation. Scholars who examine racial ideals within the context of service work have focused on issues of accent and sounding foreign as the linguistic mechanisms of racial othering (Eustace 2012; Nath 2011; Ramjattan 2018; Timming 2017). In an online-based experimental study, respondents with managerial experience in the US labor market appeared to value men’s British-accented English while devaluing applicants who spoke in Chinese-, Mexican-, and Indian-accented English (Timming 2017). Racial dimensions of language remain subject to appraisals of aesthetic capital within the service sector in ways that reward Anglophone speakers whose voices project white-centric ideals (Eustace 2012; Nath 2011; Ramjattan 2018).

Conclusion Embodying the brand is the core task in aesthetic labor. Aesthetic cultivation and appraisals of aesthetic capital are inextricable from racial belief systems. No aspect of aesthetic labor is without racial signifcance. Racial forces – namely, white supremacy, anti-Black racism, and xenophobia – shape retail work in myriad ways. As discussed in this chapter, the process of cultivating and appraising aesthetic value of retail workers’ bodies concerns both the visual and audible dimensions of aesthetic labor. Bodies are inherently racial. This social fact should beckon all scholars of beauty-related forms of labor to analyze racial forces. Racial signifcation occurs primarily through appraisals of aesthetic capital in which employers judge (potential) employees on their bodies, their style, their ability to possess the desired “look.” Controlling images, stereotypes, and otherwise racially discriminatory beliefs imbue aesthetic evaluations, often leading to a reinforcement of a beauty hierarchy that rewards proximity to white-centric ideals (Collins 2000). From encouraging straightened hair styles to positively evaluating lighter-skinned complexions and racial ambiguity, the clothing retail industry promotes a racially narrow vision of good looks and right sounds. However, there is cause for hope. Recent state laws in California and New York prohibit racial discrimination in employment based on hair style. Worker protections can curb anti-Black racism and other forms of racial inequality. Scholars and students of beauty politics should move forward with a critical awareness of how racial beauty hierarchies operate in aesthetic labor. These studies must consider the racial signifcance of white predominance among the aesthetic labor retail sales force. Migrant status, skin color, hair style, body size, and speech are key dynamics that scholars of aesthetic labor should explore.

Related topics Hourly beauty: aesthetic labor in China 332

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33 HOURLY BEAUTY Aesthetic labor in China Eileen Otis

Introduction To talk of beauty as work poses a contradiction. Beauty is efortless; work is efortful. Beauty is conventionally associated with leisure. Under certain circumstances the sweat of work can be aestheticized, but more often it poses a risk to beauty, disrupting styled hair, saturating crisp shirts, and smudging makeup. What sense are we to make of beauty work, then? How should we understand the labor of making the self or someone else beautiful? Is it a Gofmanian back stage activity that reveals artifce that potentially undermines beauty’s value (Gofman 1959)? Or is it a kind of ethical practice that refects one’s investment in reputation via attractiveness to others, something akin to a Protestant Ethic (Weber 2002)? (During feldwork in China, young women often told me that wearing makeup is a sign of respect). Alternatively, perhaps the labor of beauty is a gender performance that is itself beautiful, even seductive, captured in the iconic image of a woman bending over a sink, drawing lipstick onto her mouth as she regards herself in the mirror (West and Zimmerman 1987). Or might it constitute a form of exploitation associated with waged-work, as Marxist scholars hold? In this case it can be understood as work on the body that produces an afect whose value is not fully remunerated (Hardt and Negri 2000). I have examined beauty as a form of paid labor, not in the symbol-generating and unpredictable work of fashion modeling (Entwistle and Wissinger 2006; Mears 2011) but in the routine and mundane interactive labor of cosmetic sales, which is in a sense a labor of connecting imagery generated by fashion models to the everyday lives of women. As in many places, in China women are expected to bring beauty and often sexuality to the workplace (Liu 2016). Labor markets therefore create consumer markets for cosmetics. If high fashion generates aesthetic aspirations, cosmetic markets ofer the tools that promise to realize these fckle and elusive images. More often, they ofer some kind of compromise between the fantastic, unattainable high fashion imagery and the workaday lives of women. We can situate the labor of beauty on an aesthetic commodity chain that brings into view a political economy of beauty and embodiment (Balogun and Hoang 2018). A commodity chain analysis considers the path a product travels from the origins of its component parts and raw materials, their processing, assembly, transport, packaging, marketing, and sales activity 336

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at the point of purchase (Bair 2017; Dougherty 2008). As the product takes form with each step, value is added through the labor applied to it. Power resides in the ability to claim value and therefore the greatest proft by dominant actors in the chain. In present-day global political economy design, marketing, and sale of products command greater returns than the materials and objects themselves (Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000). With the advent of neoliberal globalization, an international division of labor (itself an historical product of colonialism) relegates low-proft sourcing, production, and assembly activities to the global south and high-proft commercial marketing and retailing in advanced economies, often in the global north (Dougherty 2008). Rarely is service work or aesthetic labor considered integral to global commodity chains. As an intangible form of work, often performed by women, it is undervalued. Rendering it visible undermines the fantasy that beauty is natural rather than achieved. It therefore remains largely invisible. It is possible to follow the penultimate links of the aesthetic chain, and the added value in the form of labor involved, by investigating the workers who show customers how to use products and display them on their own bodies. Even after the product has been sold, usually the end of conventional commodity chain analysis, we might follow the products into the reproductive sphere, where they are used to enhance the value of female bodies, which, in turn, may be central to realizing wages in labor market value, while at the same time increasing the amount of unpaid labor. Since the advent of commercialization in China, and especially in the absence of labor laws preventing gender discrimination, an economy of beauty has burgeoned. Employers of women in many if not most jobs prioritize their looks and they are often used in business entertainment as lures for clients (Liu 2016; Osberg 2013; Otis 2011). Emblematic of the phenomenon is the bestselling advice book Beautiful Faces Grow Rice by Junqing Lu (2004). As women quickly learn, beauty is not free. Cosmetic businesses, hair stylists, plastic surgeons, nail salons, gyms, and spas claim part of bounty acquired by “beautiful women” (See Balogun and Hoang 2018).

Aesthetic labor Aesthetic labor refers to the efort individuals in service industries invest so that their bodies refect middle- and upper-class notions of style, comportment, poise, and grace (Warhurst and Nickson 2007; Williams and Connell 2010). The term aesthetics denotes artful pursuit of style or beauty that appeals to the senses. Aesthetic labor is the efort workers invest to achieve a pleasing efect on an audience of customers, and managers, in order to sell a product or service (Mears 2011; Warhurst and Nickson 2007; Wolkowitz 2006). Analyses of aesthetic labor rest upon the concepts of cultural capital, class distinction, and habitus found in Pierre Bourdieu’s corpus (Bourdieu 1984; Mears 2011; Williams and Connell 2010; see also Sallaz 2010). Bourdieu did not himself study labor but theorized the phenomenon of class disposition or habitus, an enduring embodied state-of-being developed through early, repeated exposure to experiences conditioned by socioeconomic structures that shape perceptions, choices, and behavior. Bourdieu emphasizes that class is generated simultaneously at the structural and experiential levels. It is shaped by the possession of particular confgurations of educational, social, symbolic, and economic capital that individuals strategically invest. Consistent with Bourdieu’s central theoretical contributions, the aesthetic labor scholarship pays less attention to gender than to class. This is surprising given that workplace aesthetic presentations are almost always gendered and that women tend to bear more of an aesthetic burden than men, especially in heteronormative societies, in which their youth and beauty frequently serve as refections of men’s worth (Otis 2011). 337

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To pull of a successful performance, a worker’s display of class through appropriate clothing, properly ftted and worn, correct use of language and clear articulation (Warhurst and Nickson 2007), positioning of the body in relationship to others (Kang 2003; Otis 2011), as well as the movement of the body in space, treatment of the body to conceal naturally occurring odors and sounds, and expressive gestures of the body especially the face, should match the expectations of customers, guests, and patrons (Otis 2016). Most studies of aesthetic labor reveal that class efects are most often achieved by hiring people with class backgrounds that match or exceed those of their customers (Misra and Walters 2016; Warhurst and Nickson 2007; Williams and Connell 2010). As middle- or upper-class subjects they have been socialized into the modes of appropriate symbolic expression that signal their association with the privileged economic location. Because the processes of acquisition are invisible, the aesthetic skills are regarded as innate and charismatic. As a result of these processes aesthetic laborers are rewarded for their cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984). These forms of cultural capital are not signaled in job descriptions or want ads. They are an invisible mode of privilege that take the form of human capital in the labor market. Class is a kind of proxy for the requisite skills that come already assembled to the workplace. But in China, it is less likely that workers who labor in retail and other service environments originate from middle-class backgrounds. The assumptions that inform research on aesthetic labor in the United States, Canada, and Europe, then, do not entirely hold for the second largest economy in the world. In China’s retail sector, some workers in luxury stores may hail from the recently formed middle and upper class, but more often they are individuals from the country’s working class, including migrant workers from China’s rural areas. Work in the retail sector, under Maoist Communism (1949–1979) was cast as a form of undignifed subservience, a reputation that persists to the present day. For example, to capture the shame of a wealthy woman’s downward mobility, a hit television series The First Half of My Life (Wo De Qian Ban Sheng) depicted the main character’s ultimate humiliation through being forced to take a job in a cosmetics department of a retail store, a job she lost after criticizing a customer for failing to purchase any items after receiving a makeover. This is a comeuppance, as it occurs a few episodes after she lords her power and money over solicitous workers in a high-end shoe store. Upscale restaurants, karaoke bars and hotels also use the labor of the working classes. Indeed, this was the case in the luxury hotels in both Beijing, the nation’s capital and Kunming, capital of the southwest tourist center Yunnan Province, where I conducted research among the frst wave of market-era interactive hospitality workers in urban China in 1999–2000. In each of these hotels, workers were young women (between 17 and 27) and were raised by parents who had worked in state-owned factories, which were in the process of transitioning to private ownership. A key dimension of labor in these hotels was the intensive training required so that workers’ bodies might better conform to the expectations of elite customers, expectations that were shaped by the marketing of the hotels as upper class and exclusive. I term this and the labor process associated with it “market-embodied labor” (2011). Before entry into hotel employment, workers were unaccustomed to wearing makeup, showering daily, fussing with their fngernails and the like. The grooming regimen at the hotels was exacting and required forms of practice new to the workers. This labor occurred before their shifts and was therefore unpaid. Management dictated the length of nails, color and length of hair, softness of shoe soles (lest they make too much noise and disturb the guest), and types of jewelry permissible. Workers were trained how to walk, how and when to smile, and how to approach and speak to guests. The training was unremitting with managerial inspections of appearance before each shift and regular interventions around how to interact with guests 338

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through the day. The gap between the class background of the workers and the class aspirations of the customers required massive investments of labor to bridge. Workers were rarely critical of the time and efort expended on the new beauty regimens in preparation for their shifts. Hotel managers cast the bodily practices as “hygiene” so the workers took the new practices as proxies for modern cleanliness, even though practices like wearing makeup, soft shoes, and trimmed hair had little to do with a hygienic environment. The norms were accompanied by new consumer goods like deodorant, cosmetics, and various kinds of hair treatments. Another reason there was little resistance to the painstaking and time-consuming aesthetic practices is that they signaled a kind of cultural success bound up with emerging middle- and upper-classes in China. Even if their wages did not aford a middle-class lifestyle, the workers looked and acted middle class, having learned new forms of comportment and style through the careful attention of managers. Workers felt these forms of embodiment helped them to command respect and dignity in the world at large and familiarized them with new venues of consumption and entertainment emerging with China’s economic reforms. These workers gained cultural capital that was growing in value in the new market economy. They were learning a new class disposition but in the absence of the material resources controlled by the middle and elite classes. I term the norms that guide workplace presentation and use of physicality, including movement, comportment, dress, facial gestures, touch, and the ways all of these features are used to symbolize the frm, body rules. Body rules for aesthetic labor in North America and Europe may escape notice because they often parallel the rules of physicality guiding social interaction in society at large. However, in places where the bodily norms acquired through primary socialization, are replaced with new norms, the acquisition of body rules become a form of labor, often invisible or unrecognized as labor, as well as a potential site of consent or dissent. Sociologists have analyzed various types of invisible labor (Crain et al. 2016; Otis and Zhao 2016), work that is not apparent as such, or cast as an activity that is not-work and therefore devalued. The classic example of this work is the paid or unpaid reproductive labor that takes place in the household, like cleaning, childcare, and cooking. This kind labor is invisible as a function of the place where it is undertaken, the home. A less widely acknowledged type of invisible labor is the efort that must remain invisible in order for its efects to be fully realized. This kind of work must be kept secret and suppressed often in order to represent its efects as naturally occurring. The category of workers who perform this labor then experience a particular kind of invisibility that transfers recognition of its efects to the customer/patron. In other words, for beauty to be taken as natural, the labor of the beauty worker (the hair stylist, makeup artist and others) must be concealed. At the same time intimacy often develops in the process of advising a customer or client about their appearance and applying the skin, nail, and hair treatments that support beauty (Gimlin 1996; Kang 2003). Sharing the “secrets of beauty” is frequently a gender segregated activity that prompts the collective sharing of other personal secrets as refected in representations of the beauty parlor or barber shop as a site of bonding within communities (Barber 2016).

Aesthetic labor process This, what we might call necessary invisibility, is a largely unacknowledged dimension of the aesthetic labor process. The labor process approach is a method of analyzing work through employees’ experiences as they navigate power relationships with managers and customers and complete assigned tasks in the workplace (Braverman 1998; Burawoy 1982; Sherman 2007). As a Marxist inspired construct, the labor process is fgured through managerial 339

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struggles, and worker counter-struggles, for maximum extraction of surplus value. The framework emerged from studies of factory labor, but is also applied to the service sector (Sherman 2007). How are we to understand labor processes within a workplace that requires workers to, instead of making products, relate products to customers? Of course, I am far from the frst to raise this question and many others have examined the features of interactive labor that include emotion work, aesthetic labor, and a triangular structure of control in which two-way alliances can form between customers, workers, and managers (Hochschild 1983; Leidner 1993; Subramaniam and Suqeet 2018; Villarreal 2010). However, because competencies associated with aesthetic labor are learned in the middle-class home, scholarship struggles to fully grasp the entirety of the aesthetic labor process (Misra and Walters 2016; Williams and Connell 2010). Few bodily transformations are visible to researchers, since these have already been accomplished in the homespace as a product of socialization. When we examine workplaces bringing on employees who do not embody the dispositions of the customers, a process of bodily change may be witnessed and the black box of the aesthetic labor process opens to the light of day. The case of cosmetic workers who labor in retail stores in China ofers rich data to tap for a thorough understanding of aesthetic labor processes. With the help of a research assistant, who asks not to be named, I collected and analyzed ethnographic data at Walmart, an American hypermarket chain that has created a retail infrastructure of 453 stores in China. Hypermarkets, sometimes called “big box” outlets, are expansive chain stores that sell groceries as well as a wide spectrum of non-perishable goods. Walmart is the world’s largest frm largest frm in revenue and personnel, with a retail presence in 27 countries. The frm opened its frst retail store in China in 1996, joining multiple local and global hypermarkets in an intense competition for the country’s consumer spending. For well over a decade now, the government has tried to stimulate growth in consumption to shift economic reliance away from exports. For its part, Walmart seeks to expand its retail presence outside of the United States, where it has virtually saturated consumer markets. In so doing, it must adapt to local conditions. Unlike its stores in the United States, Walmart’s China stores do not ofer the lowest priced consumer goods. It cannot manage to underprice local retail chains like Wu-Mart. It holds appeal for the country’s middle-class consumers, who take the frm’s US brand name and its no-questions-asked return policy as indicators of product quality. This is especially critical for middle-class consumers in a context where numerous food and product scandals have resulted in illness and even death (Yan 2012). Given the limits of government regulation, consumers take the American brand name as a proxy for safety, even though Walmart has on occasion exercised lax oversight of its food supply. One branch of the research project focused on the labor process of sales workers in the cosmetics department, with much of the data coming from ethnographic observation at an outlet in Kunming, Yunnan. Since consumer anxieties about product quality in China extend to cosmetics, Walmart is a popular place to purchase these items. In the recent past, cosmetics with toxic ingredients that cause skin reactions have appeared on retail shelves throughout the country. In 2015 a “bumper-haul” of counterfeit cosmetics (some 53 million items) was discovered by inspection ofcials in southeastern Chinese ports. Many contained harmful substances such as mercury, lead, arsenic, and even human urine and rat droppings. These substances can elicit allergic reactions like rashes and even burns (Chen 2017). In my own study of a beauty training school for migrant women in Yunnan, one student’s skin broke out in reaction to the cosmetics used there (Otis 2011). Purchasing globally branded cosmetics from the American retailer was a strategy that middle-class consumers used in an attempt to avert such outcomes. 340

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Walmart cosmetic department workers were migrant women from the countryside hired as “dispatched laborers” to sell products (Gamble and Huang 2009). Dispatched staf (paiquan yuangong) are not directly employed by the chain but rather work for vendors who sell their products at the retailer. This is a system widely used by retailers throughout China. In the early days of China’s transition from Maoist communism to capitalism it ensured that factories supplying new and growing retailers with goods paid their own employees to oversee the stocking, display, and sale of those goods (Hanser 2008). Today the system works similarly although it places emphasis on sales and marketing. Hypermarkets host up to 300 of these workers. Most of them are precariously employed as part-time and seasonal staf. They earn minor commissions, realized only on days that bring a brisk trafc of customers. Their activities create a lively service foor turning what can be at times vacant retail space into an environment that is social and even festive (renao). The bubbling atmosphere is a lure for customers. The dispatched system of employment limits managerial oversight. The vendors pay retailers to place their representatives on the sales foor and retail department managers are vested with responsibility to oversee their labor. They are at liberty to use them to perform tasks for the retailer, like collecting shopping baskets, cleaning shelves and re-arranging displays. They can eject unruly workers, place them on a “blacklist” that bars them from working at the store in the future and report them to their vendors (Otis 2016). Vendor managers travel only on occasion to the service foors, often to deliver goods or oversee the creation of a new display. Most of the time they do not directly oversee workers. In general, the store managers have their hands full overseeing the frm’s directly employed workers, so the dispatched workers are frequently left to their own devices. In the cosmetics department this independence from supervision proved consequential for the labor process: between precarious low-paid work, limited managerial supervision, and caches of expensive cosmetics openly arrayed on stands to invite customers to try the product, the workers were poised to indulge in daily experimentation with the products. In fact, they used these tools at their disposal to undertake a process of self-transformation that simultaneously made them more adept cosmetic workers and recognizable as urbane feminine subjects. I call this labor regime embodied hegemony. Hegemony, a concept developed by Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, is a form of rule that rests upon the consent of the subjugated (1989). Michael Burawoy applies the frame to the factory, juxtaposing hegemonic workplaces, in which workers’ consent to exploitation is organized through competition, with “despotic” workplaces, which extract workers’ efort through fnes, penalties, and threat of job loss (Burawoy 1982). Ching Kwan Lee, taking this framework to Chinese factories that recruit distinctive generations of women workers, fnds that hegemonic and despotic labor regimes are organized through managerial narratives that don’t rely on competition as much as on the gendered and generational ideologies of matron and maiden workers (1998). While Lee discovered the gender dimension of the labor process, in a study of American luxury hotels Rachel Sherman fnds that workers consent to labor that brings them face-to-face with the wealthy because they are showered with gifts from these customers and they can also cast themselves as superior to them (Sherman 2007).

Class mobility and forms of control This raises questions about a workplace whose inequalities are shaped by rural-urban cultural and material inequalities, in which rural-origin workers are required to convince middle-class customers to spend their earnings, a workplace that is organized around conceptions of beauty, especially feminine beauty and conceptions of hygiene. Questions about the body and its 341

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capacity to project an aesthetic are central to understanding the labor process in many retail clothing, jewelry, and cosmetic sales, beauty salons, gyms, and spas. Drawing on case studies of female cosmetic sales workers in Taiwan, Lan develops a corporeal theory of the labor process arguing that the energies and capacities of workers’ bodies constitute indeterminate symbolic and interactive potentials that management attempts to mobilize and control through varied strategies of organization (2001). At Walmart, sales representatives working for vendors were barely controlled at all because they were dispatched workers. Despite the lack of managerial control, workers’ bodies evinced all the physical signs of “subjected” and “obedient” aesthetic workers: their hair was coifed, clothing neat and fresh, and their faces expertly and often artistically made up. Some wore uniforms. They treated customers with attentiveness and care. Why did their bodies seem so well controlled even as managerial oversight was so limited? I argue that an embodied hegemony invests the workers in their own appearance. Young women workers from rural areas found opportunities to discover and cultivate an urban look through the cosmetics available to them on the service foor. Opportunities for bodily transformation constituted the conditions of hegemony. Workers consented to work under precarious and poorly paid conditions and at the same time carved out a wide space to alter their appearances through the use of the cosmetics they sold. These dynamics cannot be understood outside of the profoundly unequal spatial inequalities characterizing China. Six cosmetic frms dispatched workers to oversee the sale of products at the store. With the exception of my research assistant, who gained employment with one of the frms, all the workers hailed from rural areas. Upon being hired and sent to the store to oversee the stocking and sale of products, Li (a pseudonym) was ofered virtually no training. The cosmetic frm, a French brand, gave her a uniform that she elected not to wear because the pant cloth was so thin it revealed her undergarments. When she appeared on the service foor and met her new colleagues, workers employed by other brands – all of which were global – they were surprised to see she had a cosmetic-free face. Remarkably when she was hired, the frm was only interested in her ability to ofer a sales pitch, which they asked her to demonstrate during her interview. Since wages were low, turnover was quite high and the frm was eager to fnd sales representatives. Demand for cosmetics in China is robust and dispatched sales agents have been shown to improve sales for their frms (Gamble and Huang 2009). Upon arriving to work, Li’s colleagues chided her for not wearing her uniform and, even worse, showing up with a cosmetic-free face. They immediately gave her a makeover, and in the process, taught her the methods of discussing the delicate matter of appearance with her prospective urban, middle-class customers. They showed her how to raise potentially sensitive matters like asymmetrical facial features, skin characterized by oil and dryness, wrinkles, sun darkened skin (a feature considered unattractive in China), thin lips, and other perceived faws. Most of them had faced a similar predicament upon arrival at the job: they had received very little training from their vendors. They taught themselves, making full use of what would otherwise be prohibitively expensive tools at the store: lipsticks, creams, bases, powders, mascara, eye shadows, and eye liners. They called on the instructional resources they had available: fashion magazines and the vast cache of appearance advice and guidance on the internet. Li and her colleagues developed these skills not just as a self-indulgent pursuit to ease boredom when the service foor was slow, but as shields against the frequent and varied ofenses migrant women experienced in encounters with urbanites. In general, urbanites hold a low opinion of rural people, whose demeanors, accents, and dress establish the foor for what is called locally “low quality” (suzhi di). The “quality” discourse has become a set 342

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of background assumptions that operate through frst and second generation rural migrants’ lack of “numeric capital,” a form of human capital, or labor market value distributed by the all-important school test scores that measure levels of academic success in the nation’s educational system, that is fetishized as a yardstick of human worth (Woronov 2016). As one of the most unequal societies in the world, status anxieties circulate widely and create conditions for extreme discrimination and class exclusion (Shi et al. 2015). Newspapers, magazines, blogs, movies, and television programing reproduce these class-related schemas that perpetuate rural people’s outsider status (Yan 2008). The residential permit system continues to prevent rural people from residing permanently in many large, cosmopolitan urban metropolises (Chan 2018). They are often prevented from sending their children to urban schools and so leave their children in urban villages to be raised by grandparents (Chan 2018). Research in other service work sites fnd that rural people often encounter disparagement from urbanites (Gaetano 2015; Otis and Wu 2018). At the Kunming Walmart, while most of the urban customers were pleasant and polite, sales representatives encountered rude, disrespectful customers once or twice a day, which was enough to prove demoralizing. On a few occasions, customers criticized Li for selling makeup because her skin was allegedly too dark. Customers assumed she was, like her coworkers, also a migrant worker. Light skin is taken as a largely unquestioned standard of beauty (See Walters 2018). Every major global brand markets skin-whitening creams across Asia, using media advertising to promote white skin as a beauty standard. L’Oréal, Clinique, and Estee Lauder sell between 7 and 15 whitening products each. Light pigmented skin is associated with China’s imperial aristocracy and celebrated in some of its ancient classical texts like, The Book of Poetry and the Liezi (Man 2000). Contemporary colorism is associated with global racial hierarchies and nationalism (Huang 2020). Light skin is even promoted among men. For example, a clothes detergent brand, Qiaobi, broadcast a commercial in which a woman is approached by a seductive Black man who has been painting her house. His shirt is stained with paint drippings. Just as she is about to kiss him, she places a detergent capsule in his mouth, pushes him into a washing machine and runs a cycle through which he screams and struggles. Eventually he reemerges as a fair-skinned Chinese man who the woman is visibly relieved to encounter (Huang 2020). Even though Li was familiar with local beauty standards valuing light skin, critical commentary about her pigmentation was nevertheless hurtful. Customers enforced norms of light skin among workers, who they presume are migrants whose skins are darkened by work in agricultural felds. In response to these incidents her fellow workers showed her care and support. They collectively determined to tell future ofending customers that “dark is beautiful too.” Unsolicited commentary on appearance was not the only annoying customer behavior. On other occasions customers demanded extra free gifts and samples given to the agents to gin up sales. Even worse, on a few occasions sales representatives were asked by customers to carry their baskets around the store while they shopped, like shopping caddies. Such ofenses only served to draw workers closer together. When customers demanded gifts and samples from one worker, others shared their personal stashes to ofer their colleague relief from the pressure and potential criticism. The commission system that ofered incentives for selling their brands in theory should have pitted the representatives in competition against each other. In practice, however, they fully cooperated with each other, even taking care of their fellow workers’ stock of products when they left for lunch or a bathroom break, or a longer reprieve to run errands or meet a boyfriend (see Sloan 2012). When customers were scarce, often in the morning, workers marched to the bathroom one-by-one, washed their faces, and upon return to their stations began to use the expansive 343

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cosmetic display samples to work on each other’s faces. To labor over each other’s appearances required physical intimacy and workers taught each other how to touch the face, with their hands, sponges, and brushes softly so as to avoid discomfort. Their own faces closed in on their colleagues faces so that breath could be felt and heard. These acts required a certain vulnerability and trust on the part of the recipient. The physical intimacy went hand-inhand with emotional intimacy, as the workers shared throughout the day their personal stories, dreams for upward mobility, fears and struggles. Boyfriends visited, matchmaking was attempted, and they spent of hours visiting each other. Intimate labor built a community of workers characterized by mutual support and trust (Boris and Parreñas 2010). Interestingly, the aesthetic labor literature suggests that workers are motivated to work for retailers because they identify with the brand, which is often associated with a middle-class lifestyle (Misra and Walters 2016; Williams and Connell 2010). While the cosmetics workers at Walmart in Kunming were certainly fascinated by the makeup they sold, instead of pursuing employment because they liked a certain brand, they discovered brands and their class-resonant meanings on the service foor itself. After Li had been working for a couple of weeks, she lamented that her frm’s products were relatively inexpensive and low status. She found that some of her fellow workers also felt little loyalty to their own brands and used downtime when customers were scarce to inquire about job openings with vendors from higher status frms. Recruiters for diferent vendors would also show up and try to draft existing workers into new jobs. If wages were low, at least employment with a cosmetics vendor ofered sales representatives some compensation through opportunities to experiment with otherwise prohibitively priced makeup not only on the table displays for customers use but also through access to abundant free samples and gifts distributed to entice customers to purchase products. Sales representatives would amass these items, trade them with each other, and then ofer them as gifts to friends and family. A kind of barter economy formed on the service foor as the sales representatives traded their samples with each other, frequently inspecting and assessing the constant stream of new shades of makeup, face cleansing ointment, creams, and perfumes made available to them. Sometimes they used these gifts solidify bonds with people who might be able to help them in the urban center. Giving a gift with a personal touch, like a lipstick shade that a representative felt matched an acquaintance’s coloring could help to enforce good will with people in the urban center who might connect them to a better job. When shared with families at home, these items became tokens of their transformation into urbanites. Embodied hegemony encapsulates this labor regime that is driven by workers’ personal interest in gaining beauty status in the context of low wage and precarious urban work. Instead of resting upon preexisting class dispositions it is premised upon aspirations for mobility in the urban center, and the use of consumer goods to facilitate the aspirations by transforming the body to refect an urban, middle-class aesthetic. For the young migrant women working in a makeup department, acquisition of the requisite marketing skills were communally directed and driven by desires to acquire the ability and resources to look urbane. Fines, penalties, and disciplinary oversight had little role in sales representatives’ work efort. Their desire and rationale for taking low-wage jobs diverge from middle-class service workers, who already command consumption skills. As skilled consumption becomes part of an increasing number of jobs in the post-Fordist economy (du Gay 1995), workers who lack particular kinds of class know-how may consent to a certain amount of exploitation in order to acquire the knowledge to look and act like class insiders. In the future, research would do well to pay attention to this divergence between working class and middle-class workers and the role of access to beauty and other types of aesthetics in drawing workers to labor in poorly remunerated jobs. 344

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Related topics Retail work, race, and aesthetic labor

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PART SIX

Beauty and the lifecourse

34 GIRLS AND BEAUTY (PAGEANT) CULTURE Hilary Levey Friedman

From the day children come into the world, their appearance is noted. Frequent remarks include, “Oh, she is so cute,” “Just look at all that hair,” or “Those eyes are just beautiful.” With the concurrent rise of digital photography and social media, caregivers often take multiple photos of infants and toddlers each day, sometimes posting just as many online. In other words, in the twenty-frst century attention to children’s appearance has grown. Which is not to say that children’s beauty had previously been overlooked. Throughout the twentieth century, for example, kids who appeared as “cute” were celebrated. Precocious Shirley Temple, with her dimpled smile and corkscrew curls, who had skills beyond her years, became the prototype for cute kids thanks to the expanding mass media including radio and television, but especially the movies in the 1930s. By the end of the last century, that cute precocity had evolved to include diferent aspects of appearance, namely, looking and not just acting beyond one’s years. The murdered child beauty queen, JonBenét Ramsey, became the new, tainted poster child. To some the use of make-up and grown-up hairstyles and clothing evoked awe, while to many others it evoked disgust. In explaining the shift from celebrated innocent girls like Temple to seemingly sexualized ones like Ramsey, historian Gary Cross questioned in the forcefully titled, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture: “Are we turning kids into sex objects, targeting them for perverts? Are we exploiting babies by toying with their innocence, forcing them to play out our adult fantasies of glamour, depriving them of a childhood?” (2004: 6) This chapter on children and beauty culture begins by discussing aspects of appearance as they appear in childhood. Both for purposes of clarity and to address the most modal issues around beauty in childhood, the focus is on pre-adolescent girls, especially relevant when it comes to sexualization of girls, which heavily relates to appearance and beauty. Activities like child beauty pageants and various forms of dance are discussed, revealing the need for future research in this important area. These two activities – child beauty pageants and competitive dance – are highlighted as the author has previously studied these topics and published books on each of the topics (Levey Friedman 2013 and 2020).

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Aspects of appearance and sexualization in girlhood Economist Daniel Hamermesh has studied the impact of good looks – for both men and women – on political success and income, and the resulting book title summarizes his fndings: Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful (2011). Kids do not escape the beauty bias. Elementary school teachers assume that cuter children are more intelligent and that their parents are more interested in their education. This has ripple efects for educational attainment based on popularity in school and even athletic performance (Hatfeld and Sprecher 1986: 47). The components of beauty that matter for adult women are rooted in youthful aspects of girlhood, including skin and hair. Skin itself can be a sign of general health, and hence fertility, but today it serves more as a marker of class. As Joan Jacobs Brumberg describes in her classic The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, skin came to be seen as a sign of respectability and cleanliness. Parents invested in skin treatments for daughters understanding that “good looks were an important vehicle of social success for their daughters” (Brumberg 1997: 61). Having smooth and clear skin, especially on the face, matters because of its connotations with pre-puberty youth (Note that make-up highlights features related to fertility and sexual arousal. At the point of climax women have: larger eyes, which eyeliner and mascara help recreate; fushed cheeks, replicated through blush; and darker, or red or pink, lips, simulated through lipstick.) (Etcof 1999). Hair is also very powerful for women of all ages because it can help identify gender, class, religion, and politics. One enduring ideal related to beautiful hair is that it should be blonde. The color blonde is seen as a symbol of youth, since tresses darken later in life ( Jolly 2004: 47). Another trend related to hair – specifcally the preference for a hairless body – is much more recent. The expectation that women will not have hair on their face, on their legs, under their armpits, or on their bikini line is again tied to what a female body looks like pre-puberty. The preference for no body hair appears to be more societal than biological (Herzig 2015). The same can be said when it comes to body size. Historically, a more rounded shape for women was preferred given links, again, to fertility. Beyond reproduction, it also used to be that thinness was a sign of poverty and malnourishment, whereas now being overweight is class-laden. Peter Stearns writes in Fat History: Over the past century, a major addition has occurred in Western standards of beauty and morality: the need to stay thin… Failure to live up to the new, standardized body image entails at least an appalling ugliness, at most a fundamentally fawed character. (Stearns 2002: xviii) The preference for youth is a bit more complicated – chubby babies are celebrated, but that starts to change by the time girls enter primary school, and fully changes by the time puberty hits. Childhood obesity is a serious issue, but so is the increase of eating disorders (to be thin) in adolescence. In the end, both nature and nurture play a part in physical attractiveness, both for women and girls. Evolutionary psychologists argue that when it comes to facial beauty and bodily attractiveness, humans are still very much animals. Our brains quickly and subconsciously respond to certain signals like clear skin, healthy hair, and fushed cheeks, which helps explain the societal eforts people undertake to enhance features that signal fertility. Girls learn about preferences when it comes to attractiveness through the ever-growing mass media. Before social media there were movies, magazines, and television. The rise 350

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of image-based applications like Instagram, with opportunities to smooth skin and elongate the body, means that girls are bombarded daily with idealized images about how they should look. In all forms of media, there are many images that sexualize girls, and media scholars argue that the sexualization of girls’ bodies is starting earlier than ever before. This dictates tastes in hairstyles, make-up, and clothing. In the 2014 documentary America the Beautiful 3: The Sexualization of Our Youth, flmmaker Darryl Roberts argues that body image ideals for young women that focus on being “perfect” have long-lasting implications for various aspects of health and safety. Roberts also argues that the dearth of realistic images of healthy women’s bodies, combined with companies advertising clothing and products that make a girl appear older than her biological age, can lead to increased cases of sexual assault. In making his arguments he visits a child beauty pageant, one of few childhood activities that unabashedly focus on physical appearance.

Child beauty (pageant) culture This section draws on research done by attending over two dozen child beauty pageants. While some child beauty pageants include categories like talent, interview, or various modeling options, the sine qua non of child pageantry is the “beauty” competition. In this part of the contest competitors wear “formalwear,” which for younger girls means a cupcake style dress, with a very full skirt and tight bodice covered in rhinestones, as they walk slowly on stage. As girls become tweens and pre-teens they often shift to wearing longer dresses, modeled after gowns. Whatever their clothes or ages, child beauty pageant contestants sport hair and make-up styles that tend to look similar, fashioned after what a much older woman might wear. Those preferences include big and elaborate hair creations that make use of hair falls or wigs, and heavily made up eyes that are enhanced by false eyelashes. In addition, many contestants also get spray tans and dental “fippers,” which are retainers that cover uneven teeth or fll in missing teeth. In short, much of the “beauty” that is celebrated in child beauty pageants is not authentic. It is often enhanced or fake. While the child’s own face, hair, and body form the blank canvas, the fnal product often looks quite diferent. We know from psychological studies referred to as rouge and mirror tests that by 18 months, half of all children recognize their refection in the mirror as themselves. Sixty-fve percent of children at 20–24 months try to wipe of rouge or other makeup on their faces when they see them in the mirror, because they know that those marks are not “them” (Amsterdam 1972). While we do not know what happens when one sees a version of oneself who appears much older, it presumably elicits a similar response. Most of the fake enhancements used at child pageants are tied to sexuality. False eyelashes make the eyes appear wider. Similarly, cheeks are rouged and lips darkened because both occur due to heightened blood fow during arousal. Having lots of hair on the head is related to fertility, which explains why long hair extensions are often used. (The two sexual exceptions are having straight and white teeth and tan skin, which are now more associated with class status than sexuality, but which are certainly considered necessary to be attractive these days.) These “fake” enhancements are heightened in child pageant photos, which are in a category by themselves. The usual photo is a close-up of a child’s face, punctuated by bright colors and accessories. The faces are then retouched in a way that makes all the photos look 351

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similar. The cumulative efect of retouching makes the girls look almost double their age and highlights sexual features. The process adds eyelashes and a glint to the eyes, and often reshapes facial features (like more almond-shaped eyes or rosebud-shaped lips). Retouching also often smooths out the skin, but in a way that is not natural. When you see a retouched glitz pageant photo, you will likely be startled by how much the child looks like a doll. Undoubtedly, young girls in pageants are being sexualized. This may not be intentional on the parts of the mothers, and the girls likely do not understand what it means. Nonetheless prepubescent girls are being sexualized when they get done up to compete at a child beauty pageant because of what is being enhanced in particular ways. With some girls this sexualization can also happen through their outfts. This may be intentional, like one mom on Toddlers & Tiaras who dressed her three-year-old up as the prostitute version of Julia Roberts’ character in Pretty Woman. In other cases it can be unintentional, like cutouts in the bodice of an outft, or similar to other sexualized clothing worn outside of pageants as well (like a fve-year-old girl wearing a tiny bikini). Then there are the routines that girls perform while wearing those outfts. Some child pageant modeling routines showcase skill, perhaps featuring multiple heel and fashion modeling turns. But those that incorporate lots of winking and blowing kisses at the judges and audience raise concern. Typically, a wink is meant to show afection or be firty. While this may not be how it is intended in the context of a child pageant, it has that meaning outside of the competition. Similarly, when a girl shakes her hips and shimmies on stage, mothers may not think they are teaching their girls to be sexual, but the movement itself is sexual regardless of the intention (note I use “mother” here because parents of daughters competing in child beauty pageants are overwhelmingly women). Many pageant moms will say that anyone who “twists” what a three-year-old does on stage at a child beauty pageant into something sexual is the sick one (Levey Friedman 2020). On the one hand, there is truth to the sentiment that the environment at child beauty pageant is not internally sexualized, largely because not many heterosexual men are present. This is partly because at child pageants the environment is tightly controlled. More often than not, someone at the door checks to be sure that anyone entering the ballroom has bought a ticket because of being connected to someone competing at the pageant. More often than not, then, heterosexual-presenting men are relatives of a contestant. Also, far from being a male environment, child beauty pageants are remarkably female dominated. Yes, some of the more successful hair and makeup artists, photographers, and coaches have been men – but they are usually men who are openly gay. Most of the time the judges are also female. On the other hand, while in the context of a child beauty pageant a four-year-old may blow kisses and bat her fake eyelashes because that is what other winners have done in their onstage routines, the reality is that outside a pageant ballroom those same actions would have a very diferent meaning. From my observations, mothers do not do a good job of explaining to their daughters what might be pageant appropriate and what that same move might mean outside pageants. This is likely especially true given heterosexual men are not common at child pageants, so the issue is “easier” to overlook. Some of the same fake aspects of child beauty pageants are common in other children’s competitive activities. This is especially true at dance competitions, including ballroom. In the competitive versions of those activities, girls sometimes go a step beyond the child beauty pageant, using highlighter to paint on abdominal muscles and biceps or to deepen the space on their chest that could indicate a bust. This was common on the reality show Dance Moms, which aired 2011–2019. 352

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In 2010, a video of a group of fve seven-year-olds dancing to the Beyoncé song “Single Ladies” went viral. Yes, the dancers were cute and talented, but the performance went viral because they wore costumes that suggested lingerie and thigh-high boots. Also at times the choreography was extremely suggestive, which made viewers liken the routine to child pornography. One might also say the same about cheer, gymnastics, fgure skating, and even synchronized swimming – all activities where sequins and rhinestones are often embraced along with makeup, hair falls, and false eyelashes. One thing that unites these activities is that the young, female body is being subjectively assessed, which partly explains the “emphasized femininity” (Connell 1987: 183) that is displayed. At the same time, it is fair to say that in these activities there is a much bigger focus on what that feminine body can do, rather than mainly focusing on how it appears. In fact, many child pageant girls go on to do at least one of these other activities as they get older. Until their girls are old enough to cheer or compete in gymnastics, these moms choose pageants as a way to jumpstart their daughters’ performance skill-based acquisition. But what if a child does not happen to be physically talented or strong enough to do those other activities? If a mom wants to teach her daughter that physical appearance is likely to be assessed in our society, she could turn to child modeling or child acting. Among child performers, enhancing appearance with alterations such as fippers is also common (Darvi 1983). Because in these instances children make money as opposed to parents spending it, child actors and models are often seen as more socially acceptable than child pageant queens – though still problematic. Even mothers who do not envision a career in entertainment for their daughters see child pageants as teaching their daughters how to best use their appearance for fnancial gain (Levey 2009). At one pageant I attended I noticed a six-year-old girl whose read-aloud ambition was to become a dentist and a doctor. Later, in an interview, I asked her mother her opinion on how child pageants ft into the goal of becoming a doctor, a dentist, or both. She replied, Obviously, if the child looks like Barbie, and my daughter does, I mean there are some obvious attributes, I tell her to exploit it. I tell her you’re gorgeous, exploit it. Use it everywhere you can. Use it in your life. One of the few studies that looks at the impact of young girls’ participation in pageants was published in 2005 in the academic journal Eating Disorders. The study looked at responses from 11 college-age girls – a very small sample size – who reported ever having done a pageant along with responses from similar girls who did not. The hypothesis was that the pageant girls would be more likely to have an eating disorder. But the authors found that on measures of bulimia, body perception, depression, and self-esteem those who participated in pageants did not difer signifcantly from those who did not. However, “childhood pageant participants scored higher on body dissatisfaction, interpersonal distrust, and impulse dysregulation than non-participants” (Wonderlich et al 2005: 291). The growth in interest in child beauty pageants and their longer-term efects was certainly driven by the 1996 murder of JonBenét Ramsey. But, more broadly, this was also the time of the rise of pink princess culture (Orenstein 2011). The frst American Girl store opened in Chicago in 1998. The Disney Princesses line of marketing started in the early 2000s. Justice clothing stores for girls opened in 2004. As successful as these brands have been, they have also faced critiques, including from those who say that girls are being taught too early to be consumers and, in some cases, to be too sexy too young (Levin and Kilbourne 2009). 353

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The American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls released a report in 2007. All the companies named in the previous paragraph were mentioned in the report, along with specifc activities, including child beauty pageants. The report delineates four ways in which sexualization can occur: a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics; a person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness (narrowly defned) with being sexy; a person is sexually objectifed – that is, made into a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making; and/or sexuality is inappropriately imposed upon a person. (2007: 1) The last of these most applies to child beauty pageants. Having been to many child beauty pageants, I can say with certainty that within the context of a child pageant, made-up faces, contestants’ gestures, and suggestive costumes are largely read by contestants, parents, and judges as non-sexual, and seen as components of what a performance is expected to be in order to win. Outside a hotel ballroom would some of the moves be considered sexual? Absolutely, but that meaning is nearly completely absent in the room, and certainly to the young children I watched. But as communications professor Gigi Durham writes in her book The Lolita Efect, “Clothing and makeup aren’t problematic. It’s the corollary assumption – that youth is sexy, that little girls are sexy, and that because of that they can be seen as having the same sexual awareness as adults – that’s of real concern” (Durham 2008: 126). Taking Durham’s assessment further, and linking it to the APA report, when sexy is equated with beauty, and that is equated with worth, girlhood is perhaps most damaged. In this case then, it is useful to think of young girls being hyper-feminized and pursuing the beauty standards of adult women as what is especially problematic, whether in an organized competitive activity or in everyday life.

Future directions in beauty and childhood Drag queen RuPaul has famously said, “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.” Because of biological imperatives many will still react to the beauty and appearance of a naked infant. But as that infant grows and wears clothes and gets haircuts, socially constructed expectations around beauty will infuence the choices her family and eventually she will make. Inevitably, cosmetics and fashion marketing directed at young consumers through traditional and social media advertising will translate into some girls wearing make-up and more revealing outfts earlier. The same can be said for the content shown on various media platforms as well, including beauty pageants and other shows and specials like the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, America’s Next Top Model, Dance Moms, and more. Interestingly, Toddlers & Tiaras and RuPaul’s Drag Race are reality television series that began airing within a few years of one another, with the latter preceding the former. Drag Race is of course a competition among drag queens (some of whom have also competed in drag pageants) and Toddlers & Tiaras follows three young competitors as they prepare for and compete at a specifc child beauty pageant. Though comparing drag pageants to adult pageants might seem obvious, there are also a remarkable number of similarities between child pageants and drag. Both are at heart about the art of female illusion, as the little girls are dressing up to look like women – a form of exaggerated femininity that relies on makeup 354

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and costumes to complete the transformation. In fact, in several Toddlers & Tiaras episodes, drag queens are featured. In season 4 one family looks to drag for inspiration on how to be ferce. In season 5 one child pageant contestant is coached by a drag queen, and in season 6 a full drag-queen panel judges a child pageant in Las Vegas. While these may be more extreme examples, beauty is nonetheless a part of American girlhood. Because of the media airing and amplifying shows like these, and more, girls are bombarded with more and more images of “ideal” girlhood and womanhood daily. In some cases we can make educated guesses about what the long-term impacts might be as these girls become women, but in most cases we simply do not know enough. First, we need to better understand how girls understand beauty during girlhood. While it is more extreme, a good frst step would be to assess what the consequences are of looking much older and/or diferent for an event than one looks in everyday life. This would mean studying girls who compete in child beauty pageants, dance and cheer competitions, and more. It would then be important to have more longitudinal studies, not just with women who participated in hyper feminized activities as girls, but also with all women who consumed media that promoted sexualized and idealized beauty standards both of girlhood and womanhood. Finally, comparing how beauty and appearance standards difer for boys and girls would be useful. Do boys get fewer messages and are they less impacted by what they do see? Has there been an increase in idealized standards for men as well that has trickled down to boyhood, as it has done for girls? Undoubtedly, young girls are inundated with messages about feminine beauty expectations from young ages. There are more types of expectations than before – including when it comes to race and ethnicity – and both cute and cool precocity are celebrated. But how the increases will shape future American girlhood remains to be seen.

Related topics Beauty pageants and border crossings: the politics of class, cosmopolitanism, race, and place

References American Psychological Association, Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. 2007. Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. American Psychological Association. Amsterdam, Beulah. 1972. “Mirror Self-Image Reactions before Age Two.” Developmental Psychobiology 5(4): 297–305. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Vintage Books. Connell, R.W. 1987. Gender and Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cross, Gary. 2004. The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Darvi, Andrea. 1983. Pretty Babies: An Insider’s Look at the World of the Hollywood Child Star. New York: McGraw-Hill. Durham, M. Gigi. 2008. The Lolita Efect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do about It. New York: Overlook Press. Etcof, Nancy. 1999. Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. New York: Doubleday. Hamermesh, Daniel. 2011. Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hatfeld, Elaine and Susan Sprecher. 1986. Mirror, Mirror: The Importance of Looks in Everyday Life. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Herzig, Rebecca. 2015. Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. New York: New York University Press.

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Hilary Levey Friedman Jolly, Penny Howell. 2004. Hair: Untangling a Social History. The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. Levey, Hilary. 2009. “Pageant Princesses and Math Whizzes: Understanding Children’s Activities as a Form of Children’s Work.” Childhood 16(2): 195–212. Levey Friedman, Hilary. 2013. Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2020. Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Levin, Diane E. and Jean Kilbourne. 2009. So Sexy, So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids. New York: Ballantine. Orenstein, Peggy. 2011. Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. New York: Harper. Roberts, Darryl. 2014. America the Beautiful 3: The Sexualization of Our Youth. Brainstorm Media. Stearns, Peter. 2002. Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West. New York: New York University Press. Wonderlich, Anna L., Diann M. Ackard, and Judith B. Henderson. 2005. “Childhood Beauty Pageant Contestants: Associations with Adult Disordered Eating and Mental Health.” Eating Disorders: Journal of Treatment and Prevention 13: 291–301.

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35 THE POLITICS OF LOOKING OLD Older adults and the aging body Laura Hurd

Introduction Capturing the cultural ambivalence with which aging is held, Bette Davis once said that “Old age ain’t no place for sissies” (Chandler 2006). Her oft-quoted assertion points to the taken-for-granted assumption that growing older is a horror-inducing, undesirable fate. The deeply held belief that getting old is unpleasant, if not tragic, arises from and is reinforced by the complex politics that circumscribe the experience and perception of being old in Western society (Hurd Clarke 2017). In this chapter, I will explore the meanings attributed to the physical changes that typically accompany aging and the social devaluation of old people more generally in our youth-centric society (Calasanti and Slevin 2001; Gullette 2011). I will consider the ways that oldness has been defned and understood in relation to chronological age, appearance, health, and lifestyle. I will examine the social consequences of being old, drawing on the theorizing and research concerning age relations and age-based discrimination. I will further discuss the gendered consequences of oldness, paying particular attention to how femininity and masculinity ideals diferentially impact older men and women. Finally, I will review the research that has investigated how older men and women make sense of and respond to the social and physical realities of their changing, aging bodies.

Te challenge of defning oldness Any discussion about the politics of oldness is invariably bound up with the difcult task of defning what we mean by the term “old.” The various defnitions of and cultural meanings attributed to oldness are simultaneously ambiguous, deeply contested, and, as I will discuss further below, refective of underlying age and gender relations (Calasanti 2009). Perhaps the most obvious defnition of oldness stems from the use of chronological age as a marker of the life course transition into later life. In particular, the onset of oldness has traditionally been tied to retirement, specifcally the age of 65 (Costa 1998). However, one only needs to survey government policy documents, the latest studies purporting to investigate various aspects of aging and later life, or the reports and programs of prominent groups like the World Health Organization to discover that there is no consensus as to which chronological age demarcates the moment when a person becomes old. Everything from age 45 to 75 is used as a cut-of 357

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point for inclusion into the demographic category of the old, depending on the policy, study, or report in question. These inconsistencies and ambiguities have led scholars like Palmore (1999: 50) to conclude that “there is no legal consensus on when old age arrives, just as there is no popular consensus…[t]herefore, any chronological defnition of old age must be arbitrary and of limited usefulness.” In lieu of chronological age, appearance is often used to assess and determine whether a person is young or old. While youthfulness is equated with smooth, clear skin, frm muscles, athletic frames, high fashion, and ease of mobility, agedness is associated with wrinkles, gray hair, sagging skin, age spots, stooped postures, frumpy or old-fashioned clothes, and stif or halting gaits (Palmore 1999). The use of physical appearance as a proxy for chronological age is increasingly complicated by the ever-expanding scope of anti-aging medicine and consumer culture. A dizzying array of products and services make it possible to obfuscate one’s chronological age and delay being relegated to the category of the old (Katz 2002). For example, one can use everything from hair dye, makeup, fashion, Botox, laser treatments, injectable fllers, cosmetic surgeries, exercise, and special diets to fght the ravages of time on one’s appearance and thereby more closely approximate youthful body ideals (Hurd Clarke 2011; Smirnova 2012). Health and appearance are often intertwined, if not confated, in social assessments of a person’s age. Youthfulness is associated with autonomy, vitality, strength, mental acuity, and health (Palmore 1999). In contrast, ageist stereotypes position later life as an inevitable time of physical decline and decay characterized by growing frailty, dependence, and senility, such that old age is assumed to be synonymous with poor health (Ayalon and Tesch-Romer 2018). In this way, ageism is linked to and buttressed by ableism or the cultural positioning of health, independence, and able-bodiedness as the natural and preferred states of being (Larsson and Jonson 2018). At the same time, and similar to the perceived malleability of appearance, health is presumed to be a modifable quality that people are expected to strive for through personal efort, self-discipline, and healthy lifestyles (Higgs et al. 2009). In other words, health is no longer thought of as a passive status that results from a combination of luck and genetics but rather is believed to be both a personal responsibility and the consequence of individual lifestyle behaviors (Crawford 1980). Poor health, and by extension old age, is now perceived to be a choice that individuals make, stemming from the failure to engage in adequate health-related self-care (Higgs et al. 2009; Hurd Clarke and Bennett 2013). Building on the idea that individuals have agency over how they age, the concepts of the Third Age and the Fourth Age act as powerful social imaginaries of esteemed and reviled ways of growing older. Linked to celebrity culture and positive portrayals of post retirement freedom, the Third Age is associated with health, autonomy, leisure, consumption, social engagement, wealth, and pleasure (Gilleard and Higgs 2013). In essence, the Third Age is an “aging youth culture” (Higgs and McGowan 2013: 22) in which “growing older without aging” (Katz 2005: 188) has become a possibility, if not a moral imperative. The power of the Third Age is illuminated by its contrast, namely, the Fourth Age. The Fourth Age is positioned as the “era of fnal dependence, decrepitude, and death” (Laslett 1996: 4) in which individuals are thought to become old as they capitulate to the negative stereotypes of later life (Gilleard and Higgs 2010; Lloyd 2015). The Fourth Age is assumed to be the epitome of oldness as it is “characterised by the combination of advanced chronological age, bodily decline, loss of functional health and mobility, and increasing dependency on others for help with everyday activities” (Lloyd 2015: 261). Encompassing all of our worst fears about getting old and dying, the Fourth Age is a harbinger not only of our ultimate demise but also of all the indignities and losses associated with the most dreaded and devalued stage of life. 358

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Ageism and the gendered consequences of being old Despite the ambiguities surrounding and debates about the age at which one leaves midlife, there is a wealth of research that has documented how age-based discrimination shapes and constrains the lives of those deemed old. Ageism, or “the systematic stereotyping and discrimination against older adults because they are old” (Butler 1975: 12) is expressed in a myriad of everyday policies and practices. Defned as a “set of oppressive social relations” (Laws 1995: 112), age-based discrimination entails the use of either chronological or perceived age as an organizing principle of society (Calasanti and Slevin 2001). Ageism is largely accepted because “those who are advantaged by this system view their position as ‘natural’ and beyond dispute” (Calasanti 2007: 336). Age relations result in older individuals experiencing progressive marginalization and loss of access to resources and opportunities relative to younger individuals who hold and retain power over those who are deemed old (Bytheway and Johnson 1990). This systematic process is gendered, such that men and women face discrimination and exclusion in distinctly diferent ways (Krekula, Nikander, and Wilinska 2018). Sontag (1997) has argued that there is a double standard of aging whereby looking old is especially damaging to women, whose social value is inherently tied to their appearances and their ability to attract the male gaze. Sontag (1997) notes that signs of aging in older men, particularly those who are wealthy, are thought to make them look distinguished and may even enhance their status as experienced and powerful leaders (Hurd Clarke, Bennett, and Liu 2014; McGann et al. 2016). One of the places that ageism is most acutely experienced is in the workplace. Older workers often face age-based discrimination in relation to their recruitment, training, promotion, and job security (Harris et al. 2018; McGann et al. 2016; Stypinska and Turek 2017). Assuming older workers are less competent, productive, skilled, hard-working, or adaptable, employers have been found to often express an unwillingness to hire or retain older workers (Posthuma and Campion 2009). Older employees are more likely to face hostility in the workplace as well as job displacement, and involuntary, early retirement (Henkens 2005; Loretto and White 2006). Sexism intersects with ageism, resulting in older women being perceived as less profcient than either older men or their younger female counterparts (Duncan and Loretto 2004; Walker et al. 2007). Moreover, older women experience age-based discrimination at younger ages, and the resultant exclusion and unfair treatment are typically linked to their appearance and sexuality (McGann et al. 2016; Walker et al. 2007). Being old has also been found to negatively impact a person’s access to health care. In particular, older adults often encounter negative attitudes from health care professionals who, having internalized ageist stereotypes, infantilize them or view them as an unpleasant burden (Ben-Harush et al. 2017; Chrisler, Barney, and Palatino 2016). Internalized ageism on the part of health care practitioners has also been found to result in older adults receiving poorer health care (Rogers et al. 2015). For example, when compared with younger patients who have similar health conditions, older patients tend to be less likely to receive adequate diagnoses and treatment (Bowling 1999; Burroughs et al. 2006; Hadbavna and O’Neill 2013; Kagan 2008; Robb, Chen, and Haley 2002). Similarly, older adults with complex health care needs such as those with dementia often experience various forms of implicit, health care rationing from health care providers (Bail and Grealish 2016). Additionally, aged-based discrimination is pervasive in everyday interactions. Older adults, especially older women, frequently report feeling invisible to younger individuals as well as to potential mates (Hurd Clarke and Grifn 2008; Ward and Holland 2011). In their encounters with younger people, older men and women state that they are not seen by 359

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younger others, who jostle or bump into them in public spaces or who approach them with hostility and rudeness (Hurd Clarke and Grifn 2008; Minichiello, Browne, and Kendig 2000). In the context of dating and relationships, older men typically express a preference for younger women (Alterovitz and Mendelsohn 2011; Brown et al. 2019) and emphasize appearance as an important quality in their mates, leading older women to perceive that they are not only unseen and but also devalued by their male counterparts and society more generally (McWilliams and Barrett 2014). The social devaluation and invisibility of older adults are further evidenced by cultural representations of oldness in various media, which are relatively scarce and typically reinforce ageist and gendered stereotypes (Edstrom 2018; Low and Dupuis-Blanchard 2013). Whereas older men tend to be positively portrayed (Dolan and Tincknell 2013; Hurd Clarke et al. 2014), media depictions of older women frequently highlight and reinforce the takenfor-granted notion that aging women progressively lose their sexual appeal and social currency over time (Lemish and Muhlbauer 2012; Sink and Mastro 2017).

Navigating the politics of oldness: older adults’ body image and body practices As well as shaping and constraining the everyday lives of older adults, the politics of oldness also infuence how individuals perceive and feel about their changing, aging bodies. There is a growing literature that explores how cultural body ideals infuence older men’s and women’s body image, or their attitudes toward, perceptions of, feelings about, and investments in their aging bodies (Grogan 2016). As exemplifed in media depictions, ideal male bodies are powerful vehicles for action that are characterized by youthfulness, strength, athleticism, slimness, virility, self-reliance, and health (Calasanti and King 2005; Thompson and Langendoerfer 2016). In contrast, idealized female bodies are primarily valued for their aesthetic appeal as qualities such as youthfulness, thinness, voluptuousness, and softness are esteemed (Bordo 2003; Grogan 2016). The extant research, which is limited by its focus on white, middle-class, heterosexual individuals, reveals that older men tend to be more positive in their assessments of their bodies, less concerned about their appearances than older women or younger men, and largely accepting of the ways that their bodies change as they grow older (de Souto Barreto, Ferrandez, and Guihard-Costa 2011; Jankowski et al. 2016; Liechty et al. 2014). That said, gay men are more dissatisfed with their appearances than heterosexual men and most men, irrespective of age and sexual orientation, express displeasure with their weight and a desire to be more muscular (Tiggemann, Martins, and Kirkbride 2007). Older men are also aware that the physical realities of growing older result in their being increasingly relegated to subordinate positions in the hegemonic masculinities hierarchy (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Slevin and Linneman 2010). For their part and irrespective of race, social class, and culture, older women often articulate displeasure with the various ways that aging alters their appearances (Chung 2018; Elfving-Hwang 2016; Hurd Clarke and Korotchenko 2011). In this way, older women are similar to their younger female counterparts in their ubiquitous expression of body dissatisfaction (Hurd Clarke 2000; Liechty 2012). As well as being displeased with their weights (Hurd Clarke 2002; Liechty 2012), older women frequently articulate unhappiness with gray hair, wrinkles, sagging skin, and other appearance changes that they perceive make them look old (Cameron et al. 2019). While some studies have found that lesbians are protected from the negative body image found in their heterosexual counterparts, other studies report 360

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that lesbians are similarly displeased with the appearance and functional changes that accompany aging (Hurd Clarke and Korotchenko 2011; Slevin 2006). That said, regardless of sexual orientation, older women are pragmatic about the physical realities of growing older and they often emphasize health over looks, particularly in the face of declining functional abilities (Hurd Clarke 2011). Rather than passively accepting negative attributions of their bodies and identities, older men and women may endeavor to resist age-based discrimination and social exclusion, albeit by often continuing to accept and reinforce underlying age relations. For example, they may point to their busy lives and social and physical divergence from ageist stereotypes as evidence of their youthfulness and membership in the category of the “not old” (Hurd 1999). Distinguishing their appearances from their ages and thus refecting their own internalized ageism, older adults may similarly assert that they feel “young at heart” or have a “youthful spirit” (Hurd 1999). Older adults also frequently engage in various forms of health and appearance work in order to approximate gendered, youthful, body ideals (Berkowitz 2017). Older men have been found to use physical activity to maintain their health and masculine qualities of strength and independence (Hurd Clarke, Currie, and Bennett 2020; Liechty et al. 2014). They also report using products such as Cialis or Viagra to redress the efects of aging, specifcally erectile dysfunction, which they experience as a threat to their masculine identities (Hurd Clarke and Lef kowich 2018). In contrast, women turn to various anti-aging products such as hair dye, make-up, anti-wrinkle creams, fashion, non-surgical cosmetic procedures, and cosmetic surgery with the expressed goal of looking more youthful and avoiding being seen as old (Cameron et al. 2019; Hurd Clarke and Grifn 2008). They also engage in exercise and dieting to maintain their weights and thus their feminine appeal as well as to fulfll their perceived moral responsibility to strive to age optimally (Cameron et al. 2019; Hurd Clarke 2002). In this way, the politics of oldness shape how older adults feel not only about their changing bodies but also about their appearance and body management practices.

Concluding comments In this chapter, I have explored the complexities of defning oldness in relation to chronological age, appearance, health, and lifestyle. I have examined how being seen as old is socially deleterious with well-documented, negative consequences in the workplace, health care, and everyday interactions, particularly for older women. The literature concerning the politics of oldness reveals that looking old in Western society is risky to one’s social inclusion and sense of identity and well-being. Indeed, in a youth-centric world where one’s social value is largely determined by one’s ability to approximate and embody cultural ideals of youthful femininity and masculinity, being seen as old leads to progressive and unrelenting marginalization, discrimination, and cultural invisibility.

Related topics The incredible invisible woman: age, beauty and the specter of identity

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Laura Hurd Bail, K., and Grealish, L. 2016. “‘Failure to Maintain’: A Theoretical Proposition for a New Quality Indicator of Nurse Care Rationing for Complex Older People in Hospital.” International Journal of Nursing Studies 63: 146–161. Ben-Harush, A., Shiovitz-Ezra, S., Doron, I., Alon, S., Leibovitz, A., Golander, H., Haron, Y., and Ayalon, L. 2017. “Ageism among Physicians, Nurses, and Social Workers: Findings from a Qualitative Study.” European Journal of Ageing 14(1): 39–48. Berkowitz, D. 2017. Botox Nation: Changing the Face of America. New York: New York University Press. Bordo, S. 2003. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, 10th Anniversary edn. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bowling, A. 1999. “Ageism in Cardiology.” British Medical Journal 319(7221): 1353–1355. Brown, S.L., Lin, I., Hammersmith, A.M., and Wright, M.R. 2019. “Repartnering Following Gray Divorce: The Roles of Resources and Constraints for Women and Men.” Demography 56(2): 503–523. Burroughs, H., Lovell, K., Morley, M., Baldwin, R., Burns, A., and Chew-Graham, C. 2006. “‘Justifable Depression’: How Primary Care Professionals and Patients View Late-Life Depression? A Qualitative Study.” Family Practice 23(3): 369–377. Butler, R.N. 1975. Why Survive? Being Old in America. New York: Harper and Row. Bytheway, B., and Johnson, J. 1990. “On Defning Ageism.” Critical Social Policy 10(29): 27–39. Calasanti, T.M. 2007. “Bodacious Berry, Potency Wood and the Aging Monster: Gender and Age Relations in Anti-Aging Ads.” Social Forces 86(1): 335–355. ———. 2009. “Theorizing Feminist Gerontology, Sexuality, and Beyond: An Intersectional Approach,” in V. Bengtson (ed.) Handbook of Theories of Aging 471–85, 2nd edn. New York: Springer. Calasanti, T.M., and King, N. 2005. “Firming the Floppy Penis: Age, Class, and Gender Relations in the Lives of Old Men.” Men and Masculinities 8(1): 3–23. Calasanti, T.M., and Slevin, K. 2001. Gender, Social Inequalities, and Aging. New York: AltaMira Press. Cameron, E., Ward, P., Mandville-Anstey, S.A., and Coombs, A. 2019. “The Female Aging Body: A Systematic Review of Female Perspectives on Aging, Health, and Body Image.” Journal of Women and Aging 31(1): 3–17. Chandler, C. 2006. The Girl Who Walked Home Alone: Bette Davis, a Personal Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster. Chrisler, J.C., Barney, A., and Palatino, B. 2016. “Ageism Can Be Hazardous to Women’s Health: Ageism, Sexism, and Stereotypes of Older Women in the Healthcare System.” Journal of Social Issues 72(1): 86–104. Chung, S. 2020. “Resistance and Acceptance: Ambivalent Attitudes towards the Aging Body and Antiaging Practices among Older Korean Migrants Living in New Zealand.” Journal of Women and Aging 32(3): 259–278. Connell, R.W., and Messerschmidt, J.W. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society 19(6): 829–859. Costa, D.L. 1998. The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History 1880–1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crawford, R. 1980. “Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life.” International Journal of Health Services Research 10(3): 365–388. de Souto Barreto, P., Ferrandez, A., and Guihard-Costa, A. 2011. “Predictors of Body Satisfaction: Diferences between Older Men and Women’s Perceptions of Their Body Functioning and Appearance.” Journal of Aging and Health 23(3): 505–528. Dolan, J., and Tincknell, E. 2013. Representing Older Women in the Media: The Key Issues. Bristol: University of the West of England. Duncan, C., and Loretto, W. 2004. “Never the Right Age? Gender and Age-Based Discrimination in Employment.” Gender, Work, and Organization 11(1): 95–115. Edstrom, M. 2018. “Visibility Patterns of Gendered Ageism in the Media Buzz: A Study of the Representation of Gender and Age over Three Decades.” Feminist Media Studies 18(1): 77–93. Elfving-Hwang, J. 2016. “Old, Down and Out? Appearance, Body Work and Positive Ageing among Elderly South Korean Women.” Journal of Aging Studies 38: 6–15. Gilleard, C., and Higgs, P. 2010. “Ageing without Agency: Theorizing the Fourth Age.” Ageing and Mental Health 14(2): 121–128. ———. 2013. Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment. New York: Anthem Press.

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Laura Hurd Laws, G. 1995. “Understanding Ageism: Lessons from Feminism and Postmodernism.” The Gerontologist 35(1): 112–118. Lemish, D., and Muhlbauer, V. 2012. “‘Can’t Have it All’: Representations of Older Women in Popular Culture.” Women and Therapy 35(3–4): 165–180. Liechty, T. 2012. ““Yes, I Worry about My Weight…But for the Most Part I’m Content with My Body”: Older Women’s Body Dissatisfaction alongside Contentment.” Journal of Women and Aging 24(1): 70–88. Liechty, T., Dahlstrom, L., Sveinson, K., Staford Son, J., and Rossow-Kimball, B. 2014. “Canadian Men’s Perceptions and Experiences of Leisure Time Physical Activity and the Aging Body.” Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise, and Health 6(1): 20–44. Liechty, T., Ribeiro, N.F., Sveinson, K., and Dahlstrom, L. 2014. “‘It’s About What I Can Do with My Body’: Body Image and Embodied Experiences of Aging among Older Canadian Men.” International Journal of Men’s Health 13(1): 3–21. Lloyd, L. 2015. “The Fourth Age,” in J. Twigg and W. Martin (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, pp. 261–268. London: Routledge. Loretto, W., and White, P. 2006. “Employers’ Attitudes, Practices and Policies towards Older Workers.” Human Resources Management Journal 16(3): 313–330. Low, J., and Dupuis-Blanchard, S. 2013. “From Zoomers to Geezerade: Representations of the Aging Body in Ageist and Consumerist Society.” Societies 3(1): 52–65. McGann, M., Ong, R., Bowman, D., Duncan, A., Kimberley, H., and Biggs, S. 2016. “Gendered Ageism in Australia: Changing Perceptions of Age Discrimination among Older Men and Women.” Economic Papers 35(4): 375–388. McWilliams, S., and Barrett, A.E. 2014. “Online Dating in Middle and Later Life: Gendered Expectations and Experiences.” Journal of Family Issues 35(3): 411–436. Minichiello, V., Browne, J., and Kendig, H. 2000. “Perceptions and Consequences of Ageism: Views of Older People.” Ageing and Society 20(3): 253–278. Palmore, E.B. 1999. Ageism: Negative and Positive, 2nd edn. New York: Springer. Posthuma, R.A., and Campion, M.A. 2009. “Age Stereotypes in the Workplace: Common Stereotypes, Moderators, and Future Research Directions?” Journal of Management 35(1): 158–188. Robb, C., Chen, H., and Haley, W.E. 2002. “Ageism in Mental Health and Health Care: A Critical Review.” Journal of Clinical Geropsychology 8(1): 1–12. Rogers, S.E., Thrasher, A.D., Miao, Y., Boscardin, W.J., and Smith, A.K. 2015. “Discrimination in Healthcare Settings Is Associated with Disability in Older Adults: Health and Retirement Study, 2008–2012.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 30(10): 1413–1420. Sink, A., and Mastro, D. 2017. “Depictions of Gender on Primetime Television: A Quantitative Content Analysis.” Mass Communication and Society 20(1): 3–22. Slevin, K.F. 2006. “The Embodied Experiences of Old Lesbians,” in T.M. Calasanti and K.F. Slevin (eds.) Age Matters: Realigning Feminist Thinking, pp. 247–268. New York: Routledge. Slevin, K.F., and Linneman, T.J. 2010. “Old Gay Men’s Bodies and Masculinities.” Men and Masculinities 12(4): 483–507. Smirnova, M.H. 2012. “A Will to Youth: The Woman’s Anti-Aging Elixir.” Social Science and Medicine 75(7): 1236–1243. Sontag, S. 1997. “The Double Standard of Aging,” in M. Pearsall (ed.) The Other within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging, pp. 19–24. Boulder: Westview Press. Stypinska, J., and Turek, K. 2017. “Hard and Soft Age Discrimination: The Dual Nature of Workplace Discrimination.” European Journal of Ageing 14(1): 49–61. Thompson, E.H., Jr., and Langendoerfer, K.B. 2016. “Older Men’s Blueprint for ‘Being a Man’.” Men and Masculinities 19(2): 119–147. Tiggemann, M., Martins, Y., and Kirkbride, A. 2007. “Oh To Be Lean and Muscular: Body Image Ideals in Gay and Heterosexual Men.” Psychology of Men and Masculinity 8(1): 15–24. Walker, H., Grant, D., Meadows, M., and Cook, I. 2007. “Women’s Experiences and Perceptions of Age Discrimination in Employment: Implications for Research and Policy.” Social Policy and Society 6(1): 37–48. Ward, R., and Holland, C. 2011. “‘If I Look Old, I Will be Treated Old’: Hair and Later-life Image Dilemmas.” Ageing and Society 31(2): 288–307.

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36 THE INCREDIBLE INVISIBLE WOMAN Age, beauty, and the specter of identity Brenda R. Weber In 2019, Netfix released the feature flm Otherhood (Chupak 2019) – starring Patricia Arquette, Felicity Hufman, and Angela Bassett – describing the flm as both a female bonding and midlife crisis narrative. The movie follows the exploits of “three best friends” who, “feeling forgotten on Mother’s Day,” leave their upstate suburban homes so that they might “drive to New York City to surprise their adult sons” (Netfix 2019). The idea, really, is that each woman will forcibly occupy her son’s life until she is able to enact their battle cry: “Make him love you!” The internet movie database (IMDB) characterizes the flm as: “A  grounded, soulful, celebratory comedy about three mothers and their adult sons. The flm explores the stage after motherhood, Otherhood, when you have to redefne your relationship with your children, friends, spouse, and most importantly, yourself ” (IMDB 2019). As both comedy and domestic melodrama, the flm plays into and reinforces tired stereotypes about aging women, specifcally that age makes cis women neither relevant nor even visible. While it might be one sign of progress were the flm able to see the harm of invisibility as something experienced by both those assigned female at birth and those who are women-identifed, Otherhood resolutely positions womanhood as a fact of biology rather than of identity choice. According to the logic of the flm, invisibility brought by age is seemingly a universal experience for all women over 50 since neither race nor sexual orientation or sexual identity factor in the movie’s telling. Indeed, Angela Bassett’s Wakanda-inspired ferce Black mother fgure must stand for all forms of cultural diversity, her character receding into a bland template of whiteness articulated through big-housed suburbia and champagne brunches where aging womanhood is understood as a position of absence and absence factors as a form of comic-trauma. When Felicity Hufman’s character, Helen, prepares to meet her son in a trendy New York City restaurant, for instance, her friends lurk in the background, trying not to be seen. But then, suddenly, they remember that hiding isn’t necessary. Says Patricia Arquette’s character, Gillian, to Angela Bassett’s character, Carol, in what could best be described as a cynical moment of realization: “We’re middle-aged women in Manhattan. We’re practically invisible!” This notion of the incredible invisible woman is a common trope and comedic punchline in media fare from feature flms, such as Otherhood, to serialized comedies, to blockbusters. Indeed, writing for the British newspaper The Guardian, writer, campaigner, and performer Nicola Clark laments, “middle aged women are invisible on screen.” The presence of 365

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absence is evident in ways large and small, though Clark locates it most strikingly in romantic couplings, noting, “The latest Mission Impossible flm sees the 55-year-old [Tom Cruise] paired with 34-year-old Rebecca Ferguson, which sends a message… that men in middle age are still capable and vibrant, energetic and passionate, whereas middle-aged women are redundant” (Clark 2018). Ageism is not isolated to Tom Cruise and the Mission Impossible franchise, of course. Indeed, in 2015, 37-year-old actor Maggie Gyllenhaal went public with her own experience of age discrimination when told by a Hollywood producer that she was too old to play the love interest of a male actor who was 55. Ageism is the leitmotif of a good number of media fare, including The Wrap, which runs popular click-bait articles titled “17 Movies Pairing Older Actors and Much Younger Women” (Zerbib, Verhoeven, and Christian 2015) and “11 Leading Ladies Who have Spoken Out Against Ageism, Sexism in Hollywood” (Otterson 2014). Academy-award-winning actor Frances McDormand has become a virtual one-woman campaign dedicated to bringing political interest and urgency to the topic of women and aging, even naming one of her wrinkles for her son (who she says caused it). McDormand, who bucks the Hollywood trend of anti-aging and rejuvenation techniques, soundly rebukes a Hollywood culture that asks women to erase the signs of age from their faces and bodies. The incredible invisible woman is not just a fact of Hollywood fare but also of real life. Indeed, when I did a web search on the key terms “invisible, woman, middle aged,” I had 11,700,000 hits! There is even a syndrome and a support group, as well as a series of well-meaning self-help groups that urge women over 50 to refute their own invisibility, in what we might call mind over immateriality. For the majority of women over 50 who feel invisible, the experience seems to be one of profound pain, alienation, and injustice, but as I will discuss throughout this chapter, the logic of invisibility also reinforces the hegemonic codes of both heteronormativity and whiteness. Ultimately, we must decide if representation, which is to say visibility on screen, resists or reinforces media codes that have often positioned women as lacking in power, meaning, and validity, particularly as they age.

Representation, shame, and the gaze: age as the new closet? When gender and media scholars speak of representation, we refer to what and who viewers see on screens, both the large screens of the movie theater and the small screens of television, computers, advertisements, and portable devices. The politics of being looked at on screen – called in flm studies “the male gaze” or “gaze theory” – suggests that women are objectifed (turned into inanimate objects without agency or will) when made the object of the male gaze (Mulvey 1975). In this formulation, gazing is always gendered – so to survey the screen and to be active, is gendered masculine while to be looked at is to be passive, which is gendered feminine – regardless of the sex of either looker or looked-at. The gendered logic here is that a woman spectator could enjoy looking at a male-bodied or female-bodied person on screen, but the active verb of looking would be gendered masculine, while the passive state of to-be-looked-at-ness would be gendered feminine. While gaze theory has modifed somewhat since its initial emergence in the 1970s, it gives little quarter to an authentic and agentive female gaze. Film theories of the male gaze are further problematic because they discount meaningful possibilities for women by over-relying on a metric whereby to be the object of the gaze is to be objectifed (rather than to be empowered and capable of decision and action). And fnally, theories of the gaze overly consider young girls and youthful women as the objects of such objectifcation, thereby removing aging and aged women from 366

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contemplation. The latter is a double form of symbolic harm, it seems to me, since it suggests that grey-haired grannies are not even worth thinking about as subjects of harm. “Not being looked at” here translates into not being seen and so somehow not being thought to matter, or even to exist. Redundancy is a good metaphor, since it underscores an idea of erasure – what once was vital now is peripheral, soon to vanish entirely. Representation matters because it normalizes certain kinds of bodies and identities, often at the expense of others, suggesting not just how the world is ordered but who speaks, who has authority, and who has agency within that world. In 1985, feminist cartoonist Alison Bechdel devised the Bechdel Test – a measure of representation that asked if a work featured two women, with names, who spoke about something other than a man (Bechdel 1986). A  2015 study run through the Annenberg School looking at the 700 top-grossing flms from 2007 to 2014 revealed that 30% of the speaking characters were female (Smith et al. 2015). In 2016, journalists Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels extended the Bechdel Test by undertaking their own survey, looking at 2,000 screenplays attached to the highest-grossing flms of all time, which typically required breaking the $45m threshold. Their results are fascinating, particularly a fnding that only 22% of flms prioritize speaking roles for women. Further, as characters and actors age, there is an inverse relation between men and women. Write Anderson and Daniels: “Dialogue available to women who are over 40 years old decreases substantially. For men, it’s the exact opposite: there are more roles available to older actors” (Anderson and Daniels 2016). In sum, as flm scholar Deborah Jermyn puts it, “in Hollywood you are less likely to hear a woman over age 40 speak than anyone else!” ( Jermyn 2018). This disparity, she notes, exists before we even start factoring in other categories of identity – like race, social class, and sexual orientation – that move characters away from the white, masculine, hegemonic ideal. The logic of representation is insidious, argues scholar and activist Ashton Applewhite, because, “When a group is invisible, so are the issues that afect it.” This means, she argues, that trying to pass for younger is like a gay person trying to pass for straight or a person of color for white. These behaviors are rooted in shame over something that shouldn’t be shameful. And they give a pass to the underlying discrimination that makes them necessary. (Bennett 2019) Indeed, many feminists of “a certain age” speak of aging as a diferent kind of closet on par with the queer closet, where one retreats or is forced to go because of a larger cultural pressure that stigmatizes what you do and who you are. For example, in her introduction to Lynne Segal’s feminist rumination on aging, Out of Time, the literary critic Elaine Showalter asks readers to think of what it means to admit to age. “It’s not easy to come out as an old person,” she says, “especially as an old woman” (Segal 2013: 1). Showalter argues that acknowledging oneself as old is ostensibly admitting to something that “everyone can see” yet no one is supposed to reveal. Thus, conceding one’s age is doubly stigmatizing, she contends. “We’re supposed to deny being old,” Showalter reminds us. “Like being fat, being old has its own kind of secret closet,” she writes. While the semiotics of aging is shifting, the signs of age and aging remain highly stigmatized and stringently policed. In The Coming of Age, feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir called aging, “society’s secret shame” (de Beauvoir 1970: 588). Although aging clearly afects all bodies, de Beauvoir and other feminist theorists, such as Showalter and Segal, note a particular cultural 367

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punishment of women, often through the symbolic erasure of viability and visibility that is directed at women’s bodies and identities. Thus, for many women, age and aging are marked by fears about stigma, senility, asexuality, and a sense of no longer being either valuable or interesting. McDormand has refected on age: “I think that ageism is a cultural illness; it’s not a personal illness” (Campbell 2014). And of course, she’s right – ageism, or the social oppression of people because of their age, isn’t natural, it’s constructed. Part of the way this social oppression is created is through media. Jermyn has argued, for example, The absence of older women from cinema screens has long been one of the most grievous criticisms levied against the industry… a key instance of how, unlike their male counterparts, older women in our culture are systematically rendered invisible, spent, obsolete, as they age. ( Jermyn 2018) Jermyn suggests that the romantic comedy ofers one hopeful place of redemption where stars “of a certain age” might play characters in mid to late life with interesting stories to tell on the big screen. Yet often, as we see in the case of Otherhood, representation isn’t always enough. Even while putting a trio of middle-aged women who are ostensibly in search of self-fulfllment at the heart of the story, Hollywood has a hard time imagining a world where a middle-aged woman has value unless she is ratifed by a man, even and especially her own son. As Patricia Arquette’s quip about her own invisibility indicates, the middle-aged woman is also in on the joke of her own approaching obsolescence, a fact that seemingly obscures and even forgives the pain of her erasure. And let’s think more, too, about the problematic metaphor of the closet to describe the phenomenon of aging. As it is used in the contexts above, typically by white and seemingly straight women, the closet is a place of shame where one has been forced to go because something that once conferred meaning and value, in this case recognition and perhaps even a certain amount of sexual appreciation, is no longer present. The closet is not a place of refuge but of punishment. Being in the closet or coming out of the closet has long been used to talk about LGBTQ+ experience, yet the closet metaphor typifes not only a feeling of visibility but of exposure. While gay liberation champions being out and proud, it is also fully aware of the risks of coming out. Visibility is very often vulnerability. This is particularly true for those who are multiply marginalized through race or class, for whom visibility is often dangerous or for whom mis-recognition – an inability to be seen – is a lifelong struggle. Using the closet metaphor to invoke the experience of age for women thus performs a dangerous sleight of hand by essentializing white, straight cis women’s aging as all women’s aging, thus rendering the specifcities of sexuality, race, class, and disability all the more invisible. In this we can be certain: all bodies age, but not all bodies are marked equally by age. Age is both outside identity (in that race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity cannot alter time’s progress), yet age is made salient by culture, meaning one’s identity location has direct bearing on how and in what way a body ages and how the markers of age will be decoded. As such, age is both an ontological category of embodiment marked by the chronology of time and history and an epistemological category whose meanings might be negotiated. These are not new ideas – but they are newly expressed almost entirely as a factor of life in the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries. Ancient scholars from Hippocrates to Galen hypothesized about the role and meaning of society’s elders, yet it has only been in the last 50 years that scholars have turned to the concept of aging as a category of being and identity 368

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that can be defned, categorized, and critiqued, largely for the social stigma it imposes. In 1969, Robert Neil Butler coined the term “agism” or “ageism” to articulate a form of discrimination against elders that is patterned on racism and sexism. Butler defned “ageism” as a combination of three connected elements: “prejudicial attitudes towards older people, old age, and the aging process; discriminatory practices against older people; and institutional practices and policies that perpetuate stereotypes about elderly people” (Wilkinson and Ferraro 2002). While ageism might also work in reverse through the personal and systemic dismissal of young people, the preponderance of stigma attaches to the old. Or those who are perceived to be old. Like the racist and the sexist, the ageist rejects an Other based on a perceived diference. But ageism is unlike these other forms of discrimination in that it is directed at something the ageist will one day, ideally, become. Thus far in this chapter, I have talked about the fraught metaphor of the closet, the concept of aging, and politics of the gaze in general relation to visibility as a signifer of someone or something who holds cultural power. In the remainder of this chapter, I’d like to turn ever so slightly to think about two additional elements: the hyper-visibility that comes through celebrity and technologies of plastic surgery that, when done well, might re-write the codes of what age and aging look like. I do this, by turning to the actor, Renée Zellweger.

Did she or didn’t she?: Renée Zellweger and the mediated pedagogies of age and surgical selfood On Monday, October 20, 2014, Renée Zellweger, the actor known for playing the “wanton sex goddess” and famously fawed Bridget Jones, shocked the world with an entirely new appearance that many argued made her unrecognizable (Oldenburg 2013). Appearing at Elle magazine’s annual Women in Hollywood awards, Zellweger’s face evoked “audible gasps” from the audience and paparazzi. The New York Daily News quoted an anonymous source, “When people got up close to her, they were taken back by what she had done to her face. Everyone was whispering about how diferent she looked” (Stebnner 2014). Seemingly, the rest of the press was in full agreement. “Renée Zellweger looks unrecognizable,” noted the Hufngton Post, UK (Bagwell 2014). While still conventionally attractive, press accounts agreed that she didn’t look like “herself.” Indeed, later in the day Huf Post UK published a list of fve stars who look more like Renée Zellweger than Renée Zellweger: Juliette Lewis, Christina Applegate, Cameron Diaz, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Rosie Huntington Whitely. In this treatment, surgery here stands as a powerful and frightening tool in the alienation of body (and brand) from self, while age and how it writes itself on the body complicates notions of looking like oneself. As I discuss in Makeover TV, while other representations of aesthetic plasticity, specifcally the reality television makeover, resolutely reinforce the claim that self hood is more successfully secured through aesthetic interventions like plastic surgery  – allowing subjects to declare with delight, “I’m me now!” – the world seemed aghast by Zellweger because she no longer looked like herself (Weber 2009). “I’m not me anymore!” just didn’t have the same ring to it. Zellweger also did not look like the character, Bridget Jones, who has become so iconic with her brand – but more on that in a minute. My objective here is to indicate that while this cautionary tale about a star’s purported use of plastic surgery might seem to undo the reality TV ethos for transformation, it actually reinforces the point from two diferent sides in that self hood remains the fulcrum on which these arguments for and against plastic surgery rest. In this, media and celebrity provide a concentrated pedagogy attesting to the absolute necessity to locate the self, love the self, and beautify the self as gestures of modern belonging (Dyer 1998; McGee 2005). For if plastic 369

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surgery can push a star outside of the circumference of her own brand and lead her fans to ask, “Who is that person?,” to NOT engage in plastic surgery can expose people to a diferent charge – as Anne Balsamo reminds us – that “they failed to deploy all possible resources for a ‘better life’” (Balsamo 1995: 66). Let us return, then, to the site of controversy, Renée Zellweger’s “shocking” new face. British papers piled on in their scrutiny of the actor. “Stop what you are doing,” cried Britain’s Metro. “Renée Zellweger has a whole new face” (Baillie 2014). Reporter Katie Baillie, writing for Metro, breathlessly reported, The actress attended a premiere of a diferent kind this week – the one of her new face. We kid you not. That really is Renée Zellweger. You know, the one who made Mark Darcy fall crazy in love with her, and who made it acceptable to be a normal, curvy girl. Apparently, Baillie said this without irony, since it was actually the zaftig character Bridget Jones who made Mark Darcy fall in love with her and gave the green light to normal-girl curves who caused these outcomes, not the sinewy actor Renée Zellweger, who worked like hell to lose Bridget’s pounds from her lithe body as soon as flming was complete. Mediation around Zellweger’s “new look” continued in a manner that put her under the spectatorial gaze. Continued Baillie, “Well apparently her own face wasn’t acceptable, so she’s completely changed it with some new pufy cheeks, a wrinkle-free forehead, and an entirely new set of eyes.” The Daily Mail was equally astounded, “What Has Renée Zellweger done to her face?” reporter Rebecca Davison gushed, engaging in a variation of what Carole Spitzack insightfully identifes as the masculinized, power-rich evaluative gaze of surgeon over the feminized docile body of the patient (Davison 2014; Spitzack 1988). Other news sources used the conventions of marking the plastic surgery patient’s body to write a truth on Zellweger’s body that she, herself, denied, superimposing arrows and explanations over Zellweger’s image and fxing the certainty of her private choices. The logic behind these onscreen displays was clearly meant to undo Zellweger’s denials, providing ontological clarity in the midst of epistemological uncertainty. In other words, these rhetorical fourishes worked through a diagnostic gaze that put pundits and readers in the authoritative role of doctor and reinscribed Zellweger into the passive role of body, completely undoing the possibility of agency for her as a potential cosmetic surgery consumer (Davis 1994; Gimlin 2012; Pitts-Taylor 2007). Wrote Davison for the Daily Mail in her own form of spectatorial scrutiny, “The Jerry Maguire actress looked almost unrecognisable with her super line-free forehead, altered brow and suspiciously pufy face, although she has never admitted to getting surgery” (Davison 2014). Many British pundits worried about the fate of their iconic loveable Bridget: “Her new look leaves us with one huge question: How on earth will they explain this at the Upcoming Bridget Jones movie?” (Bagwell 2014). Speculation was equally intense across the ocean. Writing for The New York Times, contributor Alex Kuczynski reported that Zellweger had “fooded news outlets,” and ABC news spoke of Zellweger “burning up the internet” (Kuczynski 2014). But the interest wasn’t entirely about Renée’s new face, it was also about the nature of that change. Not only had Zellweger “never admitted” to getting plastic surgery, she fat out denied it. Zellweger dismissed the allegations of plastic surgery as “silly.” The change in her appearance, she said, could be attributed to the natural processes of aging and living a “happy, more fulflling life.” “I’m glad folks think I look diferent!” Zellweger told People (Heyman 2014). “My friends say that I look peaceful. I am healthy. I’m thrilled that perhaps it shows.” If this is the case, then it was her former younger appearance that was the 370

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imposter-self, the pufy cheeks and slightly hooded eyes that had so marked her star brand a false signifer of her true self hood. Zellweger’s denials created both an epistemological problem and a feminist crisis that scholars of the body such as Debra Gimlin and Kathy Davis have so eloquently discussed. Media discussions began to center on how it was possible for Zellweger to look the way she did absent plastic surgery’s intervention, while counter-discourses mobilized feminism to bolster opposite ends: either to claim that Zellweger was duped by a beauty culture that demanded eternal youthfulness from women or to counter reactions that condemned these critiques as robbing Zellweger of her choice to do whatever she wanted with her body. All of these discourses worked on and through the striated, cross-platform media that is sustained by professional and amateur production – from major outlets like CNN and The New York Times to gossip sites like Just Jared and TMA, from blog posters to the “real people,” as opposed to the paid journalists, of The Hufngton Post (including, as I will soon discuss, Renée Zellweger herself ). Indeed, Zellweger became a rallying clarion call for feminism. “Yes, she looks drastically diferent, but you can’t blame her for trying to fght time, trying to fght age. It would be great to grow old gracefully,” said Erika Soutier, editor of The Stir on The Wendy Williams Show. “If you can have a little help, then why not utilize it” (Williams 2014). Just as suddenly, the issue turned and began to sing the song of second wave feminism that asked: how could Zellweger have capitulated to the body/beauty pressures that women face, her transformation to a blander prettier younger version of a woman not only distancing herself from the star brand and individual unique-ness of Renée Zellweger but also serving as a poor role model to women in the culture? “Has the quest for perfection gone too far?” asked ABC’s Nightline, using Renée Zellweger as exhibit Number One in its indictment of plastic surgery culture (former supermodel Janice Dickerson, who is represented as a surgery junky, seals the deal for the prosecution). In the Nightline piece, the reporter Neal Carlinsk intones Zellweger “didn’t seem to be herself ” because “she looks physically diferent,” all in a voice of mocking amusement that suggests this is all just so much ridiculous fuf (Nightline 2016). As a lead-up to the premiere of the third flm Bridget Jones’ Baby in 2016, the controversy raged on. Writing for Variety in advance of the flm’s release, critic Owen Gleiberman asked, “If she no longer looks like herself, has she become a diferent actress?”(Glieberman 2016). Gleiberman contended that Zellweger went the way of most Hollywood starlettes, who use plastic surgery as “a ritual of our vanity-fueled image culture.” Yet, this (and its implications for women in beauty culture) bothered him less than a niggling feeling that Zellweger had done harm to her character, Bridget Jones. He writes, The movie’s star, Renée Zellweger, already had her “Did she or didn’t she?” moment back in 2014, and I had followed the round-the-world scrutinizing of her image that went along with it, but this was diferent. Watching the trailer, I didn’t stare at the actress and think: She doesn’t look like Renée Zellweger. I thought: She doesn’t look like Bridget Jones! Oddly, that made it matter more. Celebrities, like anyone else, have the right to look however they want, but the characters they play become part of us. I suddenly felt like something had been taken away. If Zellweger cannot be blamed for her forays into aesthetic enhancement, he claimed, she can be faulted for grievous injury to her character, Bridget Jones. What he, or most any other media critic failed to mention was not only had Zellweger’s face altered Bridget’s countenance, but her body was diferent too – largely because Zellweger refused to gain the 20–30 371

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pounds she had put on to play Bridget in Bridget Jones Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). The famously pudgy Bridget became the famously skinny Renée. But Gleiberman didn’t stop there. He used his piece to launch a diatribe against the artifciality of Hollywood’s female actors. “Today, more than ever,” he wrote, movie stars look like models, and there’s a pressure on them to conform to certain “standards.” The amount of cosmetic surgery that goes on in Hollywood would shock almost anyone who learned about it, because the truth is that a great many stars who don’t look nipped and tucked, and who publicly decry plastic surgery, have had the work done. But that, by defnition, is to keep them looking younger, to keep them looking like “themselves.” (That’s why you can’t tell.) The syndrome we’re talking about is far more insidious, because when you see someone who no longer looks like who they are, it’s not necessarily the result of bad cosmetic surgery. It’s the result of a decision, an ideology, a rejection of the self. These are fghting words. And Gleiberman got plenty of blow-back. In the interest of brevity, I won’t detail the full tsunami he inspired, but I do want to point to a few highlights. Writing a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter, actor and feminist activist Rose McGowan called the critique: “vile, damaging, stupid and cruel” (McGowan 2016). She equated Gleiberman to an online bully and indicted all of Hollywood as being complicit in his cruelty by not coming to Zellweger’s defense. “You are an active endorser of what is tantamount to harassment and abuse of actresses and women,” she retorted. “It also reeks of status quo white-male privilege.” Zellweger herself published a response called “We Can Do Better” in the Hufngton Post on August 8, 2016, three weeks after the Variety column hit (Zellweger 2016). She called the concerns about her face inconsequential, “just one more story in the massive smut pile generated every day by the tabloid press and fueled by exploitative headlines and folks who practice cowardly cruelty from their anonymous internet pulpits. Not that it’s anyone’s business,” she wrote, “but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes.” (Meaning what? Someone else made the decision for her?) “This fact is of no true import to anyone at all, but that the possibility alone was discussed among respected journalists and became a public conversation is a disconcerting illustration of news/entertainment confusion and society’s fxation on physicality.” Zellweger’s post slamming tabloid news culture (including The New York Times) came a month after actor, producer, and director Jennifer Aniston wrote a similar Hufngton Post blog saying she was sick of being harassed by photographers and tabloid reporters. Aniston wrote, “I am not pregnant…. I’m fed up with the sport-like scrutiny and body shaming that occurs daily under the guise of ‘journalism,’ the ‘First Amendment’ and ‘celebrity news’” (Aniston 2016). Like Aniston, Zellweger said the speculation and criticism of her physical appearance left a “problematic” message for younger generations, and “triggers myriad subsequent issues” including image, equality and health. “It’s no secret a woman’s worth has historically been measured by her appearance,” Zellweger said. Too skinny, too fat, showing age, better as a brunette, cellulite thighs, facelift scandal, going bald, fat belly or bump? Ugly shoes, ugly feet, ugly smile, ugly hands, ugly dress, ugly laugh; headline material which emphasizes the implied variables meant to determine a person’s worth. (Renee Zellweger Slams 2016) 372

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As we can see from the waves of these debates, for some Zellweger’s “crime” was not that she engaged in plastic surgery (if she did) but that she would lie about it. For others, the issue is that Zellweger’s altered appearance provided startling evidence of an oppressive beauty culture that demands eternal and pretty youthfulness from mature women. For others still (and if the Hufpost article is to be believed, this is particularly true for Zellweger) the heart of the problem is media itself and a seeming collapse between entertainment and news.

Gaslighting and the semiotics of age The debate about Zellweger’s face is unlikely to end soon, largely because it is fueled by an intermedial and ever-growing archive of old and new media that thrives on these moments of controversy hinged to investments in both the cosmetic and “the natural” that are often tied to the appearance of youthfulness. That it incorporates both calls for feminist empowerment and rights to privacy makes the topic all the more enduring. But scandal aside, these sorts of mediated discussions tell us a good deal about age, beauty, and investments in self hood. I’d like to end this piece by pointing at yet another fash point that has emerged from the controversy: the disingenuous relation between what we see and what we are allowed to talk about. Writes cultural commentator Elizabeth Bromstein about Zellweger’s appearance: “What’s with this weird argument that it’s somehow anti-woman or anti-feminist to do anything other than pretend you don’t notice anything?” (Bromstein 2016). Or as Rosie O’Donnell said on The View in her inimitable style, If somebody who is a public fgure drastically changes their appearance so that they’re unrecognizable, are we as a society supposed to pretend we don’t see it? I agree we shouldn’t be mean about it but to actually observe the fact that she looks drastically diferent than she used to, if it’s not done in a mean, judgmental tone, I think it’s OK. Otherwise it’s the elephant in the room. (The View 2014) But acting as if Zellweger looked the same also served as a more serious denial of history and experience that could well be equated with gaslighting, in this case by pretending that the appearance of eternal youthfulness is a natural by-product of clean living, happiness, and lots of beauty sleep. Said actor Ali Wentworth on The Wendy Williams Show, I had my eyes done a few years ago, and I went online, I couldn’t fnd anything about it. I went to celebrity friends and asked, “Who did your eyes?” And they all said, “I haven’t anything done.”… And this is my point…when I look at magazines or I see these celebrities and they say, “I just drink a lot of water and hike.” I say, don’t do that to me. Because I look at these magazines and feel so disgusted, fat, and inadequate. Just tell the truth. (Williams 2014) Notions of truth and the authentic self take us back to where we started – a desire for epistemological and ontological certainty, articulated in stable self hood revealed through the gaze and made legible through the fantasy of a body that does not change, or at least according to all outward appearances a body that doesn’t age and so thus, the logic goes, will never sacrifce a “rightful” claim to visibility. 373

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These debates about women, appearance, and aging evidence the way that media discourses serve as pedagogical tools on the meaning of self hood and how aesthetic surgery (and its correlatives like Botox or microdermabrasion) operates along a slippery hermeneutic that both afrm and deny the “authentic” expression of one’s self through the body. These issues also reinforce Wendy Chapkis’ prescient observation, However much the particulars of the beauty package may change from decade to decade – curves in or out, skin delicate or ruddy, fgures fragile or ft – the basic principles remain the same. The body beautiful is woman’s responsibility and authority. She will be valued and rewarded on the basis of how close she comes to embodying the ideal. (Chapkis 1999: 14) It is perhaps a ftting irony that the “did she or didn’t she” scandal re-emerged in 2019 in the lead-up to the premier of Judy, a feature-flm biopic about the classic Hollywood singer and actor Judy Garland, starring Renée Zellweger (and for which she won the 2020 Academy Award). In advance interviews, the controversy over Zellweger’s appearance was continually cited as a real-lie experience that allowed her to play the famously troubled and drug-addicted Judy Garland with sympathy and a kind of honest grit (McPhee 2019). Zellweger was praised for her ability to lose herself in the character of Judy, here her invisibility and unrecognizability testifying to her craft as actor. What is perhaps most surprising is that the 50-year-old Zellweger had to wear heavy makeup and prosthetics to portray the 47-year-old Garland, the appearance of age so very diferent between 1969 and 2019. In all, Zellweger-as-Garland and the controversy about “Renée Zellweger doesn’t look like Renée Zellweger” ofer an exquisite illustration that even as the semiotics of age and aging are ever shifting in their meanings, women are held to exacting accountability to uphold the signifers of a “natural” youthful beauty.

Related topics The politics of looking old Botox and beauty politics

References Anderson, Hanah and Matt Daniels. 2016. “The Largest Analysis of Film Dialogue by Gender, Ever.” April. The Pudding. https://pudding.cool/2017/03/flm-dialogue/index.html. Aniston, Jennifer. 2016. “For the Record.” July 12. Hufpost. https://www.hufpost.com/entry/ for-the-record_b_57855586e4b03fc3ee4e626f. Bagwell, Matt. 2014. “Renee Zellweger Looks Unrecognisable.” October 21. Huf Post. http://www. hufngtonpost.co.uk/2014/10/21/renee-zellweger-face-surgery-pictures_n_6019670.html. Baillie, Katie. 2014. “Stop What You Are Doing: Renee Zellweger Has a Whole New Face.” October 21. Metro. http://metro.co.uk/2014/10/21/stop-what-you-are-doing-renee-zellweger-has-awhole-new-face-4914561/. Balsamo, Anne. 1995. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke University Press. Bechdel, Alison. 1986. “The Rule.” Dykes to Watch Out For. Ithaca: Firebrand Books. Bennett, Jessica. 2019. “I am (an Older) Woman. Hear me Roar.” January 8. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/style/women-age-glenn-close.html. Bromstein, Elizabeth. 2016. “I am Not an Awful Person for Wondering about Renee Zelleger’s Face.” August 9. HufPost. http://www.hufngtonpost.ca/elizabeth-bromstein/renee-zellwegersface_b_11407390.html.

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INDEX

Note: Italic page numbers refer to fgures Abdelgabar, Omar 123 abjection, and fat activism 167–169 abject whiteness 25–27 Abou El Fadl, Khaled 250 Academichic.com 323 Acosta, Navild 153 Acoustic Soul 194 activism 4–5 Adair, Vivyan 269 Adams, Rachel 152 Adkins, Lisa 21 advertising: beach body ready 103; and beauty 9, 13; for Botox 260; of cosmetics in Sudan 123; dentistry 266–268; of skin lighteners 33, 94 Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) 95 aesthetic entrepreneurship 10; and neoliberal beauty 15–16 aesthetic labor: anti-Black racism in 331; in China 336–344; defned 337; emotional labor and service work 327; process 339–341; and race 326–332; racializing aesthetic labor in fashion retail 329–330; and retail work 326–332; sounding right and audible diference 331–332; theorizing 327–329 aesthetics 148; Black (see Black aesthetics); disability (see disability aesthetics); everyday 126; genital (see genital aesthetics); lesbian and gay communities 160; white 5, 88 aesthetic standards: among men in Japan 114–115; among men in the West 114–115 aesthetic surgery 374; see also cosmetic surgery afect, and beauty 38–40 A for de piel (Salcedo) 38, 39

African Americans: and colorism 87; and New Woman image 64 African American women: fat aversion 80–82; and fappers 70–71; and Gibson Girl 66–67; politics of hair 23; and politics of respectability 164; thicc women 77–79; see also Black women; women age: gaslighting and semiotics of 373–374; mediated pedagogies of 369–373; as the new closet 366–369; representation, shame, and the gaze 366–369 age-based discrimination 359 ageism 369; cultural 261; employment-based 258; and gendered consequences of being old 359–361; internalized 359, 361; sexism intersecting with 359 aging 6; body and older adults 357–361 Ahmed, Anwar E. 123, 127 Ahmed, Sara 40 Âlâ 251 Alzaky, Ibaa 124 American Girls 65 American Idol 321 American Psychological Association (APA): Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls 354 American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 257 American Society of Plastic Surgeons 86, 258 America’s Next Top Model 354 America’s Top Model 321 America the Beautiful 3: The Sexualization of Our Youth 351 anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) 114 ancient Greece 249

377

Index Anderson, Hanah 367 Anderson-Fye, E. 106 Andre Talks Hair (Walker) 199 Anglophone West: body hair removal in 6; constructing baseline for normative gendered body in contemporary 238–244 Aniston, Jennifer 372 anti-blackness 99–100 anti-Black racism: in aesthetic labor 331; postrace 205–208 anti-colorism 99–100 anti-racist social movements 7 appearance in girlhood 350–351 Applewhite, Ashton 367 Arbus, Diane 155 Armand Beauty Products 69 Arquette, Patricia 365, 368 art: disability 148–151; and disability aesthetics 154; outsider 155 artisans, tattooers as 309–310 artists 38; on beauty and emotions 38–40; and disability aesthetics 153; disabled 148–151; tattooers as 309–310 Asian American 85, 86, 284, 321 assimilation 162–165 Association of African Students in India (AASI) 101 attractiveness, in cosplay 140–142 autonomy: bodily 230; of choice 230; neoliberal ideologies of 260; and Third Age 358 Aysha 251 Baartman, Saartjie Sara 33, 177–178 The Bachelor 316, 321 Badu, Erykah 194 Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi 179, 180 Balogun, Oluwakemi M. 31 Balsamo, Anne 370 Barad, Karen 248 Barnes, Natasha 182 Barnett, Richard 266–268 Bartky, Sandra Lee 49, 108 Basow, S. A. 240–241, 242 Bassett, Angela 365 Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Tamara 184 Beautiful Faces Grow Rice (Lu) 337 beauty: and afect 38–40; Black anti-racist feminist approaches 49; and childhood 354–355; commercialization of 67–71; complex entanglements between religion and 247–254; conceptualizing 248–249; and emotions 37; expanding 304; future directions in 354–355; and imagination 38–40; in Japan 112–114; in Mestizo 55–56; mobilization of aesthetic dualities 43–46; and narrative 38–40; negotiating, in cosplay 142; outside the con 134; and perception 38–40;

theological perspectives 249–251; in United States 63–71; in the West 112–114 Beauty and the Beast 148 beauty apps 14 beauty cultures 19, 20 beauty flters 85 beauty ideals 23; across cultures 108–109; changing 65–67; competing 31–32; crosscultural diferences on 104; in Sudan 124–126 The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (Wolf ) 163, 170 beauty pageants 31, 34, 163; and border crossings 316–324; campus pageants 321–324; rebranding beauty pageantry 319–321 beauty pageants culture: aspects of appearance in girlhood 350–351; aspects of sexualization in girlhood 350–351; child 351–354; future directions in beauty and childhood 354–355; girls and 349–355 Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful (Hamermesh) 350 beauty politics 3, 4, 32; Black women and 187–190; Botox and 256–262; contemporary Muslim 247; and cultural agency 46–47; and fat activism 167–173; and imperalism 32–33; and philosophy 37–47; and racial capital 89–90; scholars and students of 332; in Sudan 124–126 beauty pressures 12–13 beauty products 12 beauty services 12–13 beauty service workers 21–22; Asian women over-represented as 22; and class 22 beauty studies: critiques 49–50; overview 49 Beauty without Borders 33, 96 beauty work: Koreans’ motivations to engage with 276; normative 266; orthodontics as expected 265–271 Bechdel, Alison 367 Bechdel Test 367 Becker, Howard 308, 309, 313 Beckles, Hilary 178 Beckmann, Max 41 Bell, Jaye 160 Benedictis, Sara de 12 Benjamin, Walter 210 Bennett, Bruce 26 Berkowitz, Dana 271 Berlant, Lauren 96–97, 170 Better than Good Hair: The Curly Girl Guide to Healthy, Gorgeous Natural Hair (Walton) 197 Beyoncé 280, 353 Bidot, Denise 321 Big Brother 321 Billaud, Julie 33 Black aesthetics 75–77; fat aversion 80–82; thicc women 77–79

378

Index Black Africans 100–101 Black anti-racist feminists: on beauty 49; on white beauty is iconic 51 Black beauty 44 Black Diamond 194 Black hair: culture 189; mapping the roots of 190–191; practices 189 Black is Beautiful 94, 191–193 Black power 191–193; Black is Beautiful and 191–193 Black Power Naps (Acosta and Sosa) 153 Black publications, feminine beauty in 74–82 Black resistance to racial cosplay blackfshing 205–213 Black sexuality 22 Black women: and beauty 186–202; and beauty politics 187–190; Black is Beautiful and Black power 191–193; building a new natural 194; commodifcation 198–200; on derogatory white stereotypes 67; and embodiment 186–202; and hair 186–202; and hair hierarchies 198–200; mapping the roots of Black hair 190–191; natural hair in media and cultural representations 194–195; new directions and future work 200–202; and New Woman image 64; 1970s and beyond 193–194; pre-Black power movement 190–191; and the rise of Curls 198–200; #TEAMNATURAL 195–198; and thick body 177–184; twenty-frst-century movement for natural hair 195–198; see also African American women; women blanqueamiento 31 Blay, Yaba A. 89 The Bluest Eye (Morrison) 44 bodily autonomy 230 body: as an object of consumption 273–276; and cosmetic surgery 273–282; and discourse of Westernization of Korean bodies 273–282 body fattening products 127 body hair removal 238–244; building on the foundations 241–242; foundational empirical studies 240–241; historical accounts 240; men’s body hair removal practices 242–243; overview 238–239; prevalence of 239; pubic hair removal practices 243–244; women’s mundane body hair removal practices 239–240 body image, and peer pressure 115 The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (Brumberg) 350 body size: cross-cultural diferences on 103–105; cross-cultural perspectives on 103–109; and modeling 297–304; overview 103; and socioeconomic development 107–108; and Westernization 105–106

body weight: in Japan 112–114; in the West 112–114 The Book of Poetry and the Liezi (Man) 343 Book of Proverbs 250 border crossings and beauty pageants 316–324 Bordo, Susan 165, 170 Botox 6, 271; background 256–259; and beauty politics 256–262; becoming and being a Botox user 260–261; future research 262; implications for feminist and social theory 261–262; marketing 259–260 Botox Cosmetic 256–257 Botox Nation 260 Bourdieu, Pierre 20, 22, 209, 328 Bow, Clara 69 Braun, V. 242–243 Brazil: folk taxonomy of appearance 288; nasal surgery in 288–289; race-based inequalities 288; racial surgeries in 289; world’s second largest cosmetic surgery market 285 Brazilian wax 244 Bridget Jones’ Baby 371 Bridget Jones Diary 372 Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 372 Brilliant Distinctions program 260 Broken Britain 25 Bromstein, Elizabeth 373 Brooks, Abigail 269 Brooks, Rayshard 153 Brown, Jefrey A. 26 Brown, Marie G. 125 Brown, Wendy 10 Brueggemann, Brenda 147 Brumberg, Joan Jacobs 350 Brzostowska, Aga 205 bumpah politics 177–184 Burawoy, Michael 341 Butler, Clare 332 Butler, Judith 216, 220–221 Butler, Robert Neil 369 Caldwell, Paulette M. 193 Campbell, Naomi 209 campus pageants 321–324 Cancer of the Uterus (Mutu) 42 capital: cultural 20, 21; social 20; symbolic capital 20; value of 208–210 capitalism, racial 208–210 capitalist feminist 215 Carlinsk, Neal 371 Carlson, Gretchen 319–320 Carlyle, Thomas 78 Carmichael, Stokely 191 Carnegie, Dale 266 Carruthers, Alastair 256 Carruthers, Jean 256 Cepeda, Maria Elena 31

379

Index Chanel 9 Chapkis, Wendy 374 chav 25, 26 checklist gaze 13 Chen, Julie 86 Cheng, Anne Anlin 44 Chernin, Kim 170 Cherry, Matthew A. 186 child beauty (pageant) culture 351–354 childhood: beauty and 354–355; future directions in 354–355 Children’s Miracles Network 322 Chin, Elizabeth 269 Chin, Stephanie S. 89 China: aesthetic labor in 336–344; aesthetic labor process 339–341; class mobility and forms of control 341–344; commercialization in 337; demand for cosmetics in 342; economic reforms 339; middle- and upperclasses in 339 Chinese Americans 163–164 Christianity 249, 250 Christy, Howard Chandler 65–66 Christy Girl 66 Chubsters 170 Circle Stories 152 ‘civilizational thinking’ 97 Civil Rights Movement 5 Clark, Minnie 66 Clark, Nicola 365–366 Clarke, Hester 253 Clarke, V. 243 class: and beauty service workers 22; classed body 19; classical bodies 19–20; grotesque bodies 19–20; politics 24 classed body 19 classical bodies 19–20 classic vs. edgy (or thin vs. thinner) body 300–302 class mobility and forms of control 341–344 Cold War 287 Coleman, Rebecca 190 colonialism: and beauty politics 32–33; European 87 color-based discrimination 88 The Colored American Magazine (CAM) 75–77 colorism 85–90; for African Americans 87; historical foundations of 86–88; skin tone stratifcation 88–89; and white aesthetics 88 color-line 50 Color of Change 186 The Color Purple 74, 75, 82 The Coming of Age 367 commodifcation: hair hierarchies 198–200; and the rise of the Curls 198–200 conceptualizing: beauty 248–249; religion 248–249

Connell, Catherine 330 Connery, Sean 104 cons 133; beauty outside the 134 consumer culture 65, 69 consumer feminism 35 consumerism 65 consumption: body as an object of 273–276; and cosmetic surgery industry 273–276 Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Hopkins) 75 conventions in tattoo production 309 Cooper, Carolyn 179, 180 Cooper, Charlotte 168 cosmetic dentistry 267, 270 cosmetics: advertising, in Sudan 123; demand in China 342; promotion through Instagram 205; skin-lightening 33–34, 94, 125, 127; and working-class women 70 cosmetic surgery 85–86 cosmetic surgery industry: and body as an object of consumption 273–276; Korean 274, 280 cosmopolitanism 316–324 cosplay: attractiveness and objectifed bodies 140–142; deciding which characters to 138–139; and importance of thinness 136–137; negotiating beauty in 142; overview 133; sexual objectifction of women 135; studying 134–135; support vs. negativity in 139–140 cosplayers 133–134; experience 135–136; ideals of beauty 136–138 costume play see cosplay Cottom, Tressie McMillan 168, 172 Council of Fashion Designers of America 297 Courtin-Clarins, Jaques 12 Covid-19 pandemic 311 Cox, Aimee M. 200 Craig, Daniel 104 Craig, Maxine 23, 49, 99, 164–165, 188, 192 Creation of the Birds (Creación de las aves) 47 The Cripples (Pieter Breughel the Elder) 150 Cross, Gary 349 cross-cultural diferences 103–105; on beauty ideals 104; on body size 103–105 cross-cultural similarities 103–105 CROWN Act 186, 194 cruel optimism 96–97, 190 Cruise, Tom 366 Cryle, Peter 270 Cübbeli Ahmet Hoca 250 cultural ageism 261 cultural binaries 40–43 cultural capital 20, 21 cultural imperialism 231–232 cultural intermediaries 21 cultural plastic 165 cultural scafolding 15

380

Index culture: representations, natural hair in 194–195; tattoo world and production of 308 Cummings, Ronald 179–180 Curls: commodifcation 198–200; and the rise of 198–200 Curtis, Eloise 162 curvy bodies and thin faces 302–303 The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (Cross) 349 The Cutter-Up 66 Czerniawski, Amanda M. 298, 303 dag al-shallufa (tattooing of the lower lip) 126–127 The Daily Mail 370 Dance Moms 352, 354 Dancing with the Stars 321 Daniels, Matt 367 Danto, Arthur 38–39 Dark Is Beautiful (DISB) 94, 95–96, 97, 99 Das, Nandita 94 Dash, Julie 188 Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) 159 Daughters of the Dust 188 Davidson, Michael 148 Davies, Carole Boyce 183 Davis, Angela 193 Davis, Bette 357 Davis, Kathy 281, 371 Davis, Viola 196 Davison, Rebecca 370 Daylights (Walker) 40–41, 41 de Beauvoir, Simone 367 decentering: beauty in Latin America 52–53; white iconicity 51–52 Den Besten, Liesbeth 218 Deneuve, Catherine 219 dentistry: cosmetic 267, 270; evolution of 267; histories of 266–268 deracializing Korea 279–281 Desai, Ashwin 100 The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 157 DiMoia, John 274, 280 disability, relationship with aesthetics 147–148 disability aesthetics 5; contradictions in 155; and disability art 148–151; overview 147–148; radical rise of 151–155 disability art: defned 151; and disability aesthetics 148–151 The Disappearance of My Mother 217, 218 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 24 Dix, Otto 150 Doan, Laura 68 Dolce & Gabbana 303 Dosekun, Simidele 190

double eyelid procedure in South Korea 286–288 Douglass, Frederick 75 Dr. Oz 195 DuBois, W.E.B. 50 duCille, Ann 43–44 Durham, Aisha 182 Durham, Gigi 354 Dyer, Richard 25 Eating Disorders 353 Elbagir, Yousra 126, 127 Elfving-Hwang, Joanna 270 Elias, Ana 13 Elias, Sofa 24 Elle magazine 369 Emami Skin Care Company 95 embodied hegemony 344 embodied nationalism 30–31 emotional body labor 307 emotional labor 21–22, 327 emotional management 307 employment-based ageism 258 enacted ethnography 313 Enlightenment 248 Enloe, Cynthia 124 Entwistle, Joanne 298 Espinoza, Alejandra 321 Essence 196 Eurocentric beauty ideals 23 European colonialism 87 Fábos, Anita 125 Fahs, Breanne 14, 172, 241 Fair and Handsome 95 Faria, Caroline 32 Farrell, Amy E. 167 fashion: as homophile strategy 159–161; masculine clothing 161–162 fashion-beauty complex 108 fashion retail: racializing aesthetic labor in 329–330; and women 329–330 fat activism 5; and beauty politics 167–173; and feminism 170; and health/ism 170–171; stigma and abjection 167–169; and ugliness 171–173 The Fat Female Body (Murray) 171–172 Fat Feminist Caucus (Orbach) 170 Fat History (Stearns) 350 fatness: in African American periodicals 81–82; fetishization of 169; media representations of 168; psychology notions of 170; stigmatizing 168; in the United States 168, 171; and white masculinity 81; see also fat activism Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (Farrell) 167 fat talk 15

381

Index Fat Underground (FU) 170 Fatwa Center (Fetva Meclisi) 252 Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (Strings) 76 female genital cutting (FGC) 231 Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation (FGC/M) 126–127 The Female Grotesque (Russo) 19 feminine beauty: in Black publications 74–82; and media 217; and nation branding 30–31 feminism: and fat activism 170; sex-negative 220; sex-positive 220 feminist social movements 7 Feminist Theory 52 feminist theory, and Botox 261–262 feminity see feminine beauty femvertizing 15 Figueroa, Mónica Moreno 190 First Epistle to Peter 250 First Epistle to Timothy 250 The First Half of My Life (Wo De Qian Ban Sheng) 338 Fisher, Harrison 65 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 69 fapper 67–71 Flores, Renata 221, 222 Floyd, George 98 Ford, Tanisha 99, 164, 188 forensic beauty 13–14 Foucault, Michel 24, 261 Foxton, E. 80–81 Frankenberger, Jenny 216 Fraser, Benjamin 155 Frederick Douglass Paper 78 French, Kassandra 89 Freyre, Gilberto 289 Galliano, John 297 Game of Thrones 148 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 100 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 148, 270 gaslighting, and semiotics of age 373–374 Gaultier, Jean Paul 297 Gauteng Department of Education 201 Gay, Roxanne 173 Gay Liberation Movement 158, 162 gays see lesbian and gay communities Gay Science (Nietzsche) 37 gaze: and representation 366–369; and shame 366–369 gender normalization 23–24 genital aesthetics 229–234; bodily autonomy 230; cultural imperialism 231–232; health discourse 232–234; overview 229–230 Geordie Shore 27 Get It Beauty 275 Gibson, Charles Dana 65–67

Gibson Girl 65–67 Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend 184 Gill, Rosalind 24 Gill, Tifany M. 164, 191, 200 Gimlin, Debra 20, 21, 371 girlfriend gaze 13 Girlfriends 194 girls: aspects of appearance and sexualization in 350–351; and beauty (pageant) culture 349–355; see also women glamour labor 16 globalization 29 global political economy 33–35 Global War on Terrorism 248 Gofman, Erving 167, 273 Good Hair 189, 194 Good Times 193 Gore, Al 195 Graefer, Anne 26 Gramsci, Antonio 341 Great Depression 158, 266 grotesque bodies 19–20, 25 The Guardian 365 Gyllenhaal, Maggie 366 gynaeoptic surveillance 13 Hagar’s Daughter 76 Haiken, Elizabeth 270 hair hierarchies: commodifcation 198–200; and the rise of the Curls 198–200 Hair Love 186 hair removal practices: men’s body 242–243; pubic 243–244 Hakim, Mary 164 Half-Century 69, 70 Hall, Stuart 50 Hallberg, Emma 205, 207–208, 212 halo efect 88–89 Hamermesh, Daniel 350 Hamid, Mohamed E. 123, 127 Happy to Be Nappy parties 197 Hardy, Don Ed 310 Harewood, Susan 179, 181 Harper’s 161 Harper’s Monthly 63 Hartigan, John 323 Haskell, Sam 319 Hassaballah, Hadia 129–130 Hasse A. M. 121 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 78 Health at Every Size® (HAES®) 171 health discourse 232–234 health/ism, and fat activism 170–171 hegemony 50–51, 341 Held, John, Jr. 69 Her Campus: A Collegiette Guide to Life 323 Herzig, Rebecca 240

382

Index Hesna 251 heterosexual/heterosexuality 49, 68, 114, 134–136, 138, 159–161, 169, 241, 243, 252, 300 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks 164 Hill, Lauryn 194 Histology of Diferent Classes of Uterine Tumors (Mutu) 42, 42 histories of dentistry 266–268 H&M 15 Hoang, Kimberly Kay 34 Hobson, Janell 178, 188 Hochschild, Arlie Russell 327 Holla, Sylvia 299 Holliday, Ruth 270 Holliday, Tess 297 The Hollywood Reporter 372 Homophile Movement 158, 161, 162 homosexuals 159; see also lesbian and gay communities Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth 75–76 horizontal surveillance 13 Hottentot Venus 177–179 Howard University 191 How to Win Friends and Infuence People (Carnegie) 266 Hufngton Post 371–373 Hufngton Post, UK 369 Hufman, Felicity 365 Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Gay) 173 The Hungry Self (Chernin) 170 Hunter, Margaret 187 Hurston, Zora Neale 75 ideology of democracy of beauty 23 imagination, and beauty 38–40 imperialism: and beauty politics 32–33; cultural 231–232 An Inconvenient Truth 195 India: advertising of skin lighteners 94; colorism hierarchy 99–100; Indian Blackness 100; Indian whiteness 97–99 Indian Blackness 100 Indian whiteness 97–99 indigenous beauties 53–55 Instagram 197, 211, 351 internalized ageism 359, 361 International Body Project 104–105 internet movie database (IMDB) 365 interpellator of beauty 216 Interview magazine 202 In the Dream House (Machado) 222 investment in self 276–279 Isenberg, Nancy 25 Islam 249–250, 253 Islamic beauty: negotiating, in Turkey 247–254; scholarly literature on 253

Jag Model Agency 303 Japan: aesthetic standards among men in 114–115; beauty in 112–114; body dissatisfaction in women 113; body shaming 116–117; body weight in 112–114; kawaii (cuteness) culture 112, 117; mass media and beauty standards 115; weight loss 116 Japanese Americans 163 Jenner, Kylie 215, 216, 224 Jerry Maguire 370 Jersey Shore 26–27 Jha, Meeta Rani 35 Jim Crow 74, 75 Johnson, Barbara 44–45 Johnson, Helen 179 Judaism 249 Kang, Miliann 22 Kant, Immanuel 248 Kardashian, Kim 224, 225 Karenga, Maulana 192 The Karma of Brown Folk (Prashad) 100 kawaii (cuteness) culture 112, 117 Keeling, Kara 202 Kent, Le’a 168 Kenyon, S. J. 239, 241 Khan, Shah Rukh 95 Kingsolver, Barbara 265 Klein, Anne 162 Knowles, Beyoncé 194 Knowles-Carter, Beyoncé 189 Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta 152 Koegeler-Abdi, Martina 164 kohl (powder eyeliner) 129–130 Korean Society of Plastic Surgery 280 Korean War 280, 287 The Korea Times 276 Kournikova, Anna 179 Kristeva, Julia 38–40 Kuczynski, Alex 370 Kunming Walmart 343–344 Kuzman, Albert Morton 310 labor of beauty 6 The Ladder 157–162 Ladies’ Home Journal 63 Langhorne, Irene 66 Lapper, Alison 155 Las Meninas (Velázquez) 150 Lathan, Sanaa 197 Latina look 31 Latin American 52, 53, 221, 286 Latinxs, and colorism 87–88 Lavenda, Robert 317 Lawson, Deana 221 Lazar, Michelle 12 Lebanese Americans 164

383

Index LeBesco, Kathleen 167–168, 173 Lehrer, Riva 152, 154 Lemlich, Carla 66, 67 Le Monde 219 lesbian and gay communities 157–158; aesthetics 160 Let Me In 275 Life 63 Lil’ Kim 86 Lipsitz, George 98 Literary Digest 69 Littler, Jo 10 Lodge, David 265 The Lolita Effect (Durham) 354 Lopez, Jennifer 32, 280 L’Oréal 15, 99 Lu, Junqing 337 LYB (love your body) messaging 15 Machado, Carmen María 222 MacKinnon, Catherine 219–220 MacKinnon, Katherine 215 Magubane, Zine 33 Makeover TV (Weber) 23, 369 Making the American Mouth (Picard) 266 Malone, Annie Turnbo 190 The Managed Heart (Hochschild) 327 Maoist Communism 338, 341 marketing, Botox 259–260; see also advertising Martin, Del 160 masculinity, white 81 McAndrew, Malia 163, 164 McGowan, Rose 372 McKay, James 179 McRobbie, Angela 11, 12 Mears, Ashley 9, 298 measuring models 298–299 meat market 90 media: fatsploitation 168; and feminine beauty 217; natural hair in 194–195; and natural hair movement 196 mediated pedagogies of age 369–373 men: body hair removal practices 242–243; prevalence of body hair removal 239 Mercer, Kobena 189, 193 mestizaje 31, 52–53, 55–56 Mestizo 53–55; beauty in 55–56 #Me Too Makeover 319 #MeToo movement 11, 215, 216, 219, 223; beautiful body in the age of 215–225; other beauties 220–225; self-expression of selfploitation 217–220; selfies or belfies 216–217 Meyer, Birgit 249 Millard, David Ralph 280, 287 Miller, Laura 277 Millett-Gallant, Ann 153 Mission Impossible 366

Mock, Janet 201 modeling: and body size 297–304; classic vs. edgy (or thin vs. thinner) 300–302; curvy bodies but thin faces 302–303; drop the plus 303–304; expanding beauty 304; measuring models 298–299 modern girl see flapper Modleski, Tania 217 moody signs 40 Morgan, Jennifer 177 Morrison, Toni 44–45, 189 Moten, Fred 46 Motion Pictures Classic 70 Mowry, Tamara 197 mulatta women 79 Mules and Men (Hurston) 75 Murray, Samantha 171–172 Musser, Amber Jamilla 189–190 Mutu, Wangechi 38, 40–43, 42 Nanny of the Maroons 179–181 nano-surveillance 13 narratives, and beauty 38–40 nasal surgery in Brazil 288–289 National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF) 276 National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) 169; Fat Feminist Caucus, Body Image Task Force (BITF) 170 The National Era 79 National Islamic Front/National Congress Party (NCP) 125 nationalism 29; embodied 30–31 National Urban League 186 nation branding 30 Nation of Islam 192 natural hair: and cultural representations 194–195; in media 194–195; 1990s-early 2000s 194–195; twenty-first-century movement for 195–198 NBL Casino 321 neoliberal beauty: and aesthetic entrepreneurship 15–16; culture 15; denial of structure and of labor 23–24 neoliberalism 3–4; and beauty pressures 12–13; everyday 10–12; neoliberal beauty culture 15; and women 11 Neoplatonians 249 Netflix 365 New Woman: message and Black women 64; promotion in the United States 63–65 The New York Daily News 369 New York Radical Women 163 The New York Times 85, 161, 370, 371 Nguyen, Mimi Thi 248

384

Index Nietzsche, Friedrich 37 The Night (Beckmann) 41 1970s and beyond 193–194 Nolde, Emil 271 NO-LOSE 170 normative gendered body in contemporary Anglophone West 238–244 The North Star 77, 81 Noura 251 Nova, Annie 205–206, 209–210 Nuestra Belleza Latina (NBL) 321 objectifed bodies, in cosplay 140–142 The Obsession: Refections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (Chernin) 170 older adults: ageism and gendered consequences of being old 359–361; and the aging body 357–361; body image and body practices 360–361; challenge of defning oldness 357–358 oldness: challenge of defning 357–358; navigating the politics of 360–361 O’Neil, K. 242 online pornography 229 On the Politics of Ugliness (Rodrigues and Przybylo) 172 The Oprah Winfrey Show 196 Orbach, Susie 170, 279 Orgad, Shani 12 orthodontics: as expected beauty work 265–271; histories of dentistry 266–268; representations of the smile 268; smile as example 268–270 Otherhood 365, 368 Otto, Mary 267–268 Out of Time 367 outsider art 155 Pageant 160 pageants see beauty pageants Parameswaran, Radhika 97 Park, Joowon 277 patriarchy 12 Patton, Tracey Owens 187 peer surveillance 13 Pennie, Laurie 223 Penny, Laurie 220 People Magazine 297 perception, and beauty 38–40 phenotypes 31–32 philosophy, and beauty politics 37–47 Picard, Alyssa 266, 268 Pieter Breughel the Elder 150 place 316–324 plastic surgery: goal of 287; positive images of 287; race and the rise of 285–286; racial politics of 284–291 Plastic Surgery for Ethnic Patients 86

Plato 249 Poetic Justice 194 politics: of class 316–324; of looking old 357–361 The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Stallybrass and White) 20 Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) 240 popular feminism 11 Pornhub 229 post-Asian Financial Crisis South Korea: investment in self 276–279; presentation of self in 276–279 postfeminism 11 post-race anti-Black racism, and white supremacy 205–208 Prashad, Vijay 100 Preissing, Christophe 154 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Gofman) 277–278 Pretty Woman 352 pronatalism 32 Protestant Ethic 336 Przybylo, Ela 172 Puar, Jasbir 79 pubic hair removal 239; practices 243–244 race 316–324; and aesthetic labor 326–332; and rise of plastic surgery in US 285–286 racial authenticity vs. blackface 205–208; and post-race anti-Black racism 205–208; and white supremacy 205–208 racial capital 86; and beauty politics 89–90; defned 89; vs. racial identity 89–90 racial capitalism 208–210 racial cosplay/blackfshing 208–210; Black resistance to 205–213; white colonial psyche of 211–213 racial identity 86; vs. racial capital 89–90 racial mixing 25 racial plastic surgery: concluding discussion 289–291; double eyelid procedure in South Korea 286–288; nasal surgery in Brazil 288–289; overview 284–285; race and the rise of, in United States 285–286 racial politics of plastic surgery 284–291 racism 4, 51, 56–57; anti-Black 205–208; Black resistance to 205–213; and indigenous beauties 53–55 Ragoria, Anjali 97 Rai, Aishwarya 98 Ramos, Uruguayan Luisel 297 Ramsey, Jon Benét 349, 353 Ranciere, Jacques 19 Real Beauty campaign 94, 169 rebranding beauty pageantry 319–321 religion: complex entanglements between beauty and 247–254; conceptualizing 248–249

385

Index representation: and the gaze 366–369; and shame 366–369 resistance 50–51, 162–165; and beauty pageants 163–164 respectability politics 19, 22–23 Reston, Ana Carolina 297 retail work: and aesthetic labor 326–332; and race 326–332 Ricci, Nina 161 Rivers-Moore, Megan 52 Roberts, Darryl 351 Roberts, Julia 352 Robinson, Cedric 208 Rock, Chris 189, 194 Rodrigues, Sara 172 Rogers vs. American Airlines 193 Romance with Voluptuousness: Caribbean Women and Thick Bodies in the United States 183 Rose, Nikolas 273, 274 Roseberry, William 51 Ross, Angelica 202 Ross, Diana 199–200 Ross, Tracee Ellis 194, 199 Rubenstein, Helena 23 RuPaul 354 RuPaul’s Drag Race 354 Russo, Margaret 19 Sadre-Orafai, Stephanie 298 Salcedo, Doris 38, 39 Sandahl, Carrie 154 Sanders, Clinton R. 309, 313 Saraswati, L. Ayu 98 Saro-Wiwa, Zina 196 scent: al-bakhoor 128; al-khumara 128; dag al-riha 128; importance in Sudan 128; Sandalia 128 Scharf, Christina 10 Schroeder, Fred 268 Schultz, Jaime 179 Segal, Lynne 367 self: post-Asian Financial Crisis South Korea 276–279 self-expression of self-ploitation 217–220 selfes or belfes 216–217 self-ploitation: self-expression of 217–220; woman to engage tropes of 220 self-responsibility 23 Sen, Sushmita 98 service work and emotional labor 327 Set It Of 202 sexism 51 sex-negative feminism 220 sex-positive feminism 220 sexual identity 317, 365 sexuality 104, 219; Black 22; and child pageants 351; female 25, 68, 180 sexualization in girlhood 350–351

sexual minorities: in United States 157–158; see also lesbian and gay communities Shaadi.com 99 Shades of Prejudice 85 Shakira 32 shame, as ideological form of control 24 Shapeshifters:Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Cox) 200 Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy D. 178 Shaw, Andrea 184 shilukh (face scarring) 126 Showalter, Elaine 367 Siebers, Tobin 151–152, 155, 270, 271 Six Bomb band 287 size discrimination 5 Skat Players (Dix) 150 Skeggs, Beverley 22–23, 24, 323 skin-lightening cosmetics 33–34, 125 skin-lightening industry 94 skin tone stratifcation 88–89 smile: as example 268–270; representations of 268 Smile Stealers 266 Smith, Anna Nicole 26 Smith, Naskesha 198 Smith, Zadie 266 Snider, Stefanie 169 Snyder, Sharon L. 150 social capital 20 social change 4–5 social media 5, 85–86, 123, 126, 135, 195, 197, 215, 224; see also specifc campaigns social theory: Botox and implications for 261–262 social threat: abject white body as 25–26 socioeconomic development: and body size 107–108 Song in A Minor 194 Sosa, Fannie 153 Sosa, Sammy 86 The South African Gandhi: The Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Desai and Vahed) 100 South Asians 100 South Korea: and body as an object of consumption 273–276; cosmetic surgery industry in 273–276; deracializing 279–281; double eyelid procedure in 286–288; investment in self 276–279; presentation of self in post-Asian Financial Crisis South Korea 276–279 Southworth, Emma D.E. 79 Soutier, Erika 371 speech-role ft 332 Stallybrass, Peter 20 Stanfeld, Michael Edward 30 Stearns, Peter 350 Stephens, Elizabeth 270 Steptoe, A. 121

386

Index stereotypes 31–32 Stevens, Mitchell 268 stigma: defned 167; and fat activism 167–169 #StopRacismatPretoriaGirlsHigh 201 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 78 Sudan: beauty ideals in 124–126; beauty politics in 124–126; everyday aesthetics 126; harmful beauty and bodily practices 126–128; kohl (powder eyeliner) 129–130; scent and identity 128; skin-lightening products in 123; women’s clothing 125 Sula (Morrison) 44–45 surgical self hood 369–373; Renée Zellweger and 369–373 Swann, Cathy Bickerton 256–257 Sweetman, Paul 313 symbolic capital 20 The Talk 86 Tate, Shirley Anne 51–52, 189 tattooers: as artists and artisans 309–310; conventions in tattoo production 309; emotional body labor 307; social study of permanent marks 312–313; tattooing as occupational practice 310–311; tattoo world 308–309; tattoo world and production of culture 308; women in a male-dominated industry 311–312; at work 307 tattooing as occupational practice 310–311 tattoo production, conventions in 309 tattoo world 308–309; and production of culture 308 Taylor, Breonna 98 #TEAMNATURAL movement 195–198 technologies of embodiment 34 technologies of the self 261 Teeth (Otto) 267 Temple, Shirley 349 Terrell, Mary Church 67 Terry, G. 242–243 Texturemedia Inc. (TMI) 198 thicc women 77–79 Thick: And Other Essays (Cottom) 172 thick Black female bodies 177–184 thinness 136–137, 300–302 Thompson, Wanna 209 Tiggemann, M. 239, 241 Toddlers & Tiaras 352, 354–355 Toerien, M. 240, 241 Touch Cinema 218 transnational feminist approaches: to beauty 29–35; beauty ideals 31–32; embodied nationalism 30–31; overview 29–30; phenotypes 31–32; stereotypes 31–32 Trigère, Pauline 162 tropicalism 31 Trump, Donald 320–321

Turkey: beauty and theological perspectives 249–251; conceptualizing beauty and religion 248–249; conclusion and outlook 253–254; negotiating Islamic beauty in 247–254 Turkish High Commission on Religious Afairs 250 Turner, Terence 248 twenty-frst-century movement for natural hair 195–198 Twitter 197, 205, 209, 318, 321 Tyler, Imogen 25, 26 Tzu-Chun Wu, Judy 163 ugliness: and fat activism 171–173; politics of 5 UK Advertising Standards Authority 103 Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Bordo) 170 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 78 Unilever 99 United States: beauty in 63–71; class in 63–71; dentistry in 266–268; male Botox consumers in 258; medical spas in 257; orthodontics in 266; politics of gender in 63–71; race and rise of plastic surgery in 285–286; sexual minorities in 157–158; social and cultural history of dentistry in 266 upper arm defnition 12 Vahed, Goolam 100 Valie Export 218, 219 value of capitals 208–210 Variety 371 Varo, Remedios 47 Velázquez, Diego 150 The View 373 Vogue 161 Wacquant, Loïc 313 Wade, T. Joel 89 Walker, Andre 199 Walker, C.J. 190 Walker, Kara 38, 40–43 Walmart 340, 342, 344 Walton, Nikki 195, 197 War Cripples (Dix) 150 Wardle J. 121 Weber, Brenda 23 weight-loss behavior, and peer pressure 116 Weinberger, Lisa 216 Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 67 The Wendy Williams Show 371, 373 Wentworth, Ali 373 Western Center of Law & Poverty 186 Western culture: aesthetic standards among men in 114–115; beauty in 112–114; body dissatisfaction in women 113; body weight in 112–114

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Index Westernization: and beauty ideals 105–106; and body size 105–106 Westernization of Korean bodies: body and 273–282; cosmetic surgery and discourse of 273–282 White, Allon 20 white colonial psyche of racial cosplay/ blackfshing 211–213 white iconicity 51–52 white masculinity 81 whiteness 25–26, 56 white supremacy and post-race anti-Black racism 205–208 white trash 25, 26 White Trash (Isenberg) 25 Who is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds Vol. 1 194 Widdows, Heather 269 Wilkinson, S. 240 Williams, Christine 330 Williams, Kandis 221 Williams, Raymond 208 Williams, Serena 179 Wilson, Julee 196 Winch, Alison 11, 13 Winfrey, Oprah 193, 196, 199 Wisdom of Solomon 250 Wissinger, Elizabeth 298, 331 Wolf, Naomi 163

women 365–374; age as the new closet 366–369; body dissatisfaction in 113; clothing and Sudan 125; gaslighting and semiotics of age 373–374; in a male-dominated industry 311–312; and mediated pedagogies of age 369–373; mundane body hair removal practices 239–240; and nation branding 30; and neoliberalism 11; prevalence of body hair removal 239; and Renée Zellweger 369–373; representation, shame, and gaze 366–369; and surgical self hood 369–373; as symbols of nation 30; working-class women 22–23; see also specifc entries of women Women of Worth (WOW) 96 Women’s Club 252 Women’s Voice 69 working-class women 22–23 World Health Organization 357 World War II propaganda 271 The Wrap 366 Wu-Mart 340 Yawson, Ama 198 Young, Iris Marion 49 YouTube 197, 205, 211 Yursick, Patrice 195–196 Zellweger, Renée 369–373

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