Leah Feutz Blog Post

Leah Feutz Beauty and Globalization Blog Post

            Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s piece “Yearning for Lightness: Transnational Circuits in the Marketing and Consumption of Skin Lighteners” was written in the context of “conceptualizing skin color” (282). Glenn stated that skin color is a “form of symbolic capital that affects, if not determines, one’s life chances. The relation between skin color and judgments about attractiveness affect women most acutely, since women’s worth is judged heavily on the basis of appearance” (282). I thought this was a very interesting way to look at the ways that, as she describes it, the “white is right” ideology can be seen as well as the pervasive affects of the influence of Western-dominated, consumerist culture and products (282). One of the sections I found the most fascinating was her discussion of skin lightening in the United States among African Americans. In studying the internet forums on skin lightening, she concluded that “participants seek not white skin but ‘light’ skin like that of African American celebrities such as film actress Halle Berry and singer Beyonce Knowles” (288). When I read this, I also thought about some more recent controversies or discussions over photo shopping images of African American celebrities on covers of major magazines, and how it is pretty clear that their skin tone has been altered to appear lighter than their actual tone. Many of the images in magazines that we are exposed to have been altered in multiple ways, but many consumers are consistently unaware of how different these images are from the reality of what celebrities look like. In this way, we are exposed to unrealistic expectations for how we should look and how achievable these standards are.

            All in all, the predominance of this practice reveals how “achieving light skin is seen as necessary to being youthful, attractive, modern, and affluent—in short, to being ‘all that you can be’. Dark skin becomes a veil that hides one’s natural luminescence, which natural skin lighteners will uncover” (298). I thought the author made an important point when she said that cultural and social changes and more individual perception altering is important, but that this cannot take precedence over seeing the “very powerful economic forces that help to create the yearning for lightness and that offer to fulfill the yearning at a steep price” (298). There is a viable, growing market for perpetuating this ideal of beauty, which, as it continues to make a profit, will just grow larger and entrench these values in societies across the globe. I am not sure how these types of industries can be overturned or counteracted, as it seems that the drive to make money is often greater (or stronger) than the drive to make positive change occur.

            The Glenn piece connected very well to Susan Dewey’s piece. Glenn wrote in her article that, in India and Indian diasporic communities, “younger women tend to be concerned about looking light to make a good marital match or to appear lighter for large family events, including their own weddings…These women recognize the reality that light skin constitutes valuable symbolic capital in the marriage market” (289). She goes on to talk a little about the role that beauty pageants have in this ideal. In the same vein, this quote struck me from the end of Dewey’s piece: "I had to brainwash my parents that Miss India is not a skin show” (194). These women have a matter of minutes to be designated as worthy for the training program or not, just in the same way that skin color and the way one looks has a huge, almost instant impact in how many people see others. This idea of determining life chances in a matter of moments obviously extremely troubling, but I also wonder how these huge issues of racism, sexism, and prejudice in general can ever really be remedied. I am not sure if this is a stretch, but I was on the Conn homepage the other day, and I was looking at the “Commitment to Diversity” part of the page. While I am very thankful that our school does have certain “diversity initiatives” and tries to celebrate multiculturalism on campus to some extent, I am still struck by some sense of tokenism in how students of color are used to engender this image of a diverse campus. I feel like the same students are used in multiple pictures to represent the diversity of our student body, and in some ways (this might be a stretch), but it seems like this is a type of “skin show” of its own. Having a commitment to diversity is important, but I sometimes sense that this not always as purely genuine as it should be. All members of our student body deserve recognition and celebration of the individual identities they bring to our campus, but it bothers me that some of these initiatives only fall within a certain month of the year or at infrequent intervals in the semester. Issues of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, etc, should be a part of our consistent discussion and awareness; this might help to increase mutual respect and a sense of caring that is sometimes lacking at Conn. 

            The Alexei Barrionuevo New York Times Article discussed model scouts and conceptions of beauty in Brazil. I thought the following quote was particularly interesting: “The pattern creates a disconnect between what many Brazilians consider beautiful and the beauty they export overseas. While darker-skinned actresses like Juliana Paes and Camila Pitanga are considered among Brazil’s sexiest, it is Ms. Bündchen and her fellow southerners who win fame abroad” (2010). Even if, on a more “local” level, conceptions of beauty are inclusive of darker skin tones, this is not translated to the world stage, and thus ideas of what Brazilian beauty really means in the eyes of the globalized world are skewed. I wanted to connect this to the Omar Waraich/Karachi article, where this quote stood out to me: "The West can make a better black dress than anyone else. We also believe that if you are going to show something in the international market, it should be international with your own regional flavor. That's what the real buyer is looking for” (2009). The idea of being “international with your own regional flavor” means that the local ideals and values need to be shaped in the context of international systems of power and what is valued on a more global level. It seems that the global stage is more accepting of western-centric ideals, and so, even if accepted within a certain community, non-western identities and ideals can still perhaps be underprivileged in the international context. This is extremely troublesome for me, and so it is clear that initiatives on the local level and up through the globalized world need to be taken so that systems of inequality can be contended with. Norimitsu Onishi echoed this idea of prejudice when he cited the idea that, “black African women had little chance of winning an international competition in a world dominated by Western beauty ideals” (2002). And the perpetuation of these ideals has real consequences, not just ideologically, but in practice. As the article “China’s new faces” explained in the context of cosmetic alterations, “This, for the first time, is an external ideal of beauty”. Global forces that create, translate, and perpetuate certain standards of beauty have an affect on local sensibilities, especially on younger generations who are increasingly exposed to international media and products. I am left wondering how to reverse these trends. Maybe the global market is too powerful to try to start change there, but individual players within this market do have the power to change the way they communicate values of beauty, consumerism, etc, such as using larger models, incorporating more diverse perspectives into publications, and emphasizing empowerment on more levels than just through consumerism or things that are on a more “face-value” level.