Emerging Work in Beauty Studies: Global, Anticolonial, Material

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines,1898 - 1941, Genevieve Clutario reminds us “Beauty tells us a great deal about social formations, commerce, consumption, labor, social interactions and control, and policy” (Duke University Press, 2023). The stakes, costs, experiences, and constructions of “beauty” have widespread implications in varied social, cultural, and political spheres. This roundtable explores new and emerging scholarship in beauty studies to think through the ways “beauty” gets subsumed as a call, place, or hope/affect. We bring together varying analytical interventions and methods, to address questions including the following: How does beauty get “weaponized”? How can beauty be a tool both of neoliberal and anticolonial thinking? How is “the body” a site of politicization and depoliticization? What is the function of “the aesthetic”? This roundtable brings together expertise around the perfected smile as a neoliberal technology for imagined upward mobility (Craig), beauty and fashion in the Philippines in relationship to imperial expansion and modern nation building (Clutario), Filipino couturiers and their reimagining of global and local fashion (Cruz), the role of bodily aesthetics in the shaping of Asian modernities and the formation of the so-called “Asian Century” (Lee), art and popular culture in the context of Black women’s contemporary natural hair movement (Rowe), and affective and intimate labor in Los Angeles’ South Asian threading salons (Sharma), in order to explore how “beauty” shows up in an era of omnipresent social and digital media, descent into fascism, global exchange, and much more.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Kristin Denise Rowe, California State University-Fullerton

Panelists

• Maxine Craig, University of California-Davis

• Denise Cruz, Columbia University

• Preeti Sharma, California State University-Long Beach

Comment

• Genevieve Clutario, Wellesley College

Biographical Information

Genevieve Clutario
Wellesley College
gc2@wellesley.edu

Genevieve Clutario is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College.
She is the author of Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines,1898 - 1941 (Duke University Press, March 2023) and is the recipient of the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University First Book Award. She published, “Pageant Politics: Tensions of Power, Empire, and Nationalism in Manila Carnival Queen Contests,” in the anthology, Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (Brill Press, 2017) and “World War II and the Promise of Normalcy: Filipina Lives Under Two Empires” in Beyond the Edge of the Nation: Transimperial Histories with a U.S. Angle (Duke University Press 2020). She co-edited with Rana Jaleel a special issue of the Amerasia Journal, entitled Rethinking Gendered Citizenship. Intimacy, Sovereignty, and Empire and co-authored with Durba Mitra and Sara Kang, “It's Time to Reckon with the History of Asian Women in America” in Harper’s Bazaar (2021).


Maxine Leeds Craig
University of California, Davis
mbcraig@ucdavis.edu
Maxine Leeds Craig is a Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Davis. She studies the politics of beauty, and the ways in which social structures of race, gender and class are lived in day-to-day embodiment. She is the author of Sorry I Don’t Dance: Why Men Refuse to Move (Oxford University Press 2014), Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race. (Oxford University Press 2002), and editor of The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics (2021). Her latest project combines archival research on the origins of orthodontics and examines how a flawless smile became a social necessity in the United States, how it came to represent one of the most recognizable marks of middle-class embodiment and, correspondingly, how providing orthodontic treatment for a child became good parenting, and its absence perceived as neglect.


Denise Cruz
Columbia University
dc3330@columbia.edu
Denise Cruz is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her work covers a range of subjects, from connections between the rise of English literature and women’s suffrage in Manila, to the vibrant world of Filipino high fashion, to the strategies Asian American authors use to represent regional, national, and transnational communities. She is the author of Transpacific Femininities: the Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012), and her articles and essays have appeared in American Quarterly, PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, American Literary History, and the Journal of Asian American Studies and the edited collections Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia, Eating Asian America and the Cambridge and Oxford companions to Asian American Literature. She has served as contributing editor for the Heath Anthology of American Literature, produced an edition of Yay Panlilio’s The Crucible: An Autobiography of Colonel Yay, Filipina American Guerrilla Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Ford Foundation and a multi-year Insight grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.


Kristin Denise Rowe (“Kris”), Ph.D.
California State University Fullerton
kdrowe@fullerton.edu
Kristin Denise Rowe (“Kris”) is an Associate Professor of American Studies at California State University Fullerton. She is a former fellow for the Career Enhancement Fellowship offered by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars funded by the Mellon Foundation. Her work has been featured in multiple academic journals, including The Journal of American Culture, Women and Language, Contemporary Ethnography, Open Cultural Studies, and Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty (forthcoming, May 2025). Her forthcoming book, tentatively titled “It’s the Feeling I Wear: Black Women, Natural Hair, and (Re)Negotiations of Beauty" is under contract with University of North Carolina Press. Kris has been quoted in publications including The Washington Post, and she is featured in the three-part docu-series The Black Beauty Effect, now streaming on Netflix. She lives in Inglewood, California.



Preeti Sharma
California State University Long Beach
Preeti.sharma@csulb.edu
Preeti Sharma (she/her) is Assistant Professor of American Studies, California State University, Long Beach. She received her Ph.D. in Gender Studies from the University of California Los Angeles in 2019. Her scholarship on feminist theories of work, racial capitalism, care and service economies, women of color and Asian American feminisms, and alternative labor organizing has appeared in The Journal of Asian American Studies, The Labor Studies Journal, and Society & Space. She is also co-editor and co-author of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice. Her book project, The Thread Between Them, examines how salon workers manage affective and intimate labor through aesthetics and temporality at the threading salon to create relations and community that are about, and also challenge, forms of devaluation in the Los Angeles beauty service industry.