Beauty Nationalism, Femininity and Affect: Racialized Feelings in Globalized Media Culture

• In Event: 2183 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 02. Race, Gender, Bodies

Abstract

Beauty and racialized emotions are drivers of national economies and global beauty markets. Beautification practices and rituals are contradictory everyday experiences that generate feelings of ugliness, shame, coercion, self-hate, injury, exclusion, as well as producing pleasure, identifications, emotional connections, aspirations, comradery, bonding and empowerment. For women of color across the globe, beauty is a site of exclusion and discrimination, due to evaluation based on the cultural dominance of white aesthetic norms but beauty can also be an investment against racism, classism and sexism.

This paper aims to examine the ways in which subjects, nations and commercial institutions are interpellated by affective economies of beauty cultures, using case studies of two racialized beauty markets, skin-lightening in India and cosmetic surgery in China. This paper will illuminate the complex politics of beauty cultures, as a regionally specific macro and micro phenomenon, to analyze the ways in which contemporary cultural and emotional changes related to globalization, may have consolidated Eurocentric racialised beauty norms, in embodiment, facial features, and skin color as aspects of modern citizenship thus conflating progress with consumption of whiteness and westernism. Reflecting upon the role beauty and feelings play in the accumulation and exercise of power in contemporary postfeminist media culture which rewards individualism, self-improvement and self-optimisation, I explore the politics of beauty, affect and nationalism.

Drawing on intersectional theories of Black, Third world, and transnational feminists, this paper also traces the global travel of beauty protests of the 1960s Black Power social movement, Black is Beautiful to an Indian anti-colourism feminist campaign, Dark is Beautiful, to reflect upon the paradoxical geo-political power of beauty as an embodied privilege as well as a site of protests mobilized by antiracist feminist anger and rage to decolonize minds, bodies, emotions, and cultures.

Meeta Rani Jha,
Gender & Women’s Studies Department,
University of California, Berkeley.

Author

• Meeta Rani Jha, University of California-Berkeley