Beauty and Globalization

Rachel Becker

April 16, 2012

Response Post – Beauty and Globalization

            The theme of the readings this week seems to be about our arbitrary definitions of beauty.  As with all categorizations that we make, in order to have someone be the ideal, there has to be an opposite.  In establishing our norms, we also establish an other.  Beauty pageants present a unique opportunity to showcase a new ideal in front of a huge audience.  However, once someone is deemed the most beautiful in a given place, it makes sense that others would clamor to look like her.  This raises a few questions, though.  Who do these beauty pageants and standards benefit?  How much of a role do Western standards play?  How detrimental is this to worldwide cultures?

            Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2008) discusses the skew of beauty norms towards lightened skin.  I especially enjoyed her play on words when she called the people most likely to seek skin lightening treatments as “enlightened.”  Glenn (2008) writes, “From the perspective of the supposedly enlightened present, skin lightening might be viewed as a form of vanity or a misguided and dangerous relic of the past” (p. 283).  If we are so enlightened, why are we either continuing practices that have been going on for centuries or returning to them now?  It seems as though we should be past this desire to alter ourselves.  She also made me think about the idea of master status when she discussed how important appearance was for women.  A master status is one that holds the utmost authority in defining an individual as a person; it is the thing that the rest of society sees first when looking at them.  I think that maybe, beyond being female, a woman’s appearance is her master status and is responsible for determining her worth in a variety of situations.  Appearance makes a woman worthy of attention and we will self-police and police each other in order to ensure that everyone is up to a given standard or feels badly for not being up to that standard.

            Several of this week’s readings made me think about creating a need for a product versus creating a product for a need.  In the case of the production of skin lightening products, I’m really not sure which came first.  Glenn (2008) also poses this question when she says, “It has become a major growth market for giant multinational corporations with their sophisticated means of creating and manipulating needs” (p. 298).  It is certainly possible that people were interested in lightening their skin before products were mass manufactured for it, but there is a definite message that it is the norm if every major company has products devoted to a need.  In addition, the decision to market the bleach as a product that reveals a woman’s natural beauty is brilliant.  Most conscientious consumers are interested in being as close to natural as possible (while having as many comforts as possible) and everyone wants to be all they were intended to be.  It also implies that dark skin is unnatural and women will risk using dangerous and often ineffective chemicals to get rid of it.  I also thought about the created need for beauty pageants and the classification of one woman as the most beautiful.  By opening up this possibility, we make it necessary for women to train and alter themselves in order to be crowned this mythical title.  Why do we need to have one most beautiful woman in the world?  What does she have to do to get there?

            The most interesting piece of Susan Dewey’s Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization India for me was in her chapter titled, “Watching Miss World.”  In it she draws parallels to Foucault’s panopticon where prisoners are potentially watched all the time, but they never know when the observation is occurring.  In this case, women are imprisoned in their own bodies and societal norms of beauty and the police are often also women.  Men certainly play a role and most of the expectations of women play off of the male gaze, but the women are most vocal in critiquing either themselves or other women in their choices. Dewey quotes a Miss India official as saying, “It’s funny, because despite all the beauty here, the average person just isn’t bothered.  Like on the train, the women are just a mess.  I don’t know whether they just don’t care enough to go buy a five rupee [eleven cents] bottle of nail polish at the market or they are just too busy trying to survive” (pp. 95-96).  Admittedly, trying to survive is important, but keeping up appearances while doing so is more important.  India is a nation that faces extreme poverty, and yet there is a standard of beauty applied.

            Lastly, I’d like to comment on the two articles about fashion shows and the article on Nigeria.  I thought that Barrionuevo’s (2010) article on finding supermodels in Brazil was very interesting because it reveals a sort of science to finding the most appealing types of women.  Whether those women are most appealing in their countries of origin is irrelevant – they have to appeal to a global market.  The model scout interviewed said that he is attentive to which models are becoming most successful worldwide and tries to find more girls with their genetic makeup.  In this way, one woman’s looks can start a trend that influences how other women want to present themselves.  This is also what Onishi (2002) was saying about the trend of thinness in Nigerian women.  Being fat was ideal there and then a thin Black woman who appealed to the Western audiences won Miss World.  Women who were previously mocked could be accepted, but it’s not as though all body types will now be praised equally.  I would not be surprised to find that plumper women will begin to be regarded as less attractive as this trend evolves.  Finally, I thought the article about Pakistan was interesting because, here, fashion was used as a unifying force.  It’s still a strange concept and I don’t totally understand the importance of it, but allowing for their own interpretations of fashion was empowering.  I wonder what this ownership will do in the long run, if anything.