Paddon - Beauty and Globalization

Anakena Paddon

SOC 400

Beauty and Globalization

            This week’s were particularly compelling after the TEDx event on Saturday and because they focus largely on the same themes I am exploring in my final paper for this class: the issue of women’s bodies and the ideals of beauty we strive for and whether or not there is a trend towards the homogenization and globalization of these ideals.

            In “Yearning for Lightness” by Nakano Glenn, the article revolves mainly around colorism or the “social hierarchy based on inheritance of gradations of skin tone within and between racial and ethnic groups.” In many cases, the phenomenon of colorism is a negative inheritance of European colonialism in many of these countries. The dangerous mercury soaps used mostly in Southern Africa and manufactured around Europe for the purpose of lightening the skin echo this same colonial past; the products now used in the African-American community started as a heritage of slavery, when mulattos, or mixed-race people, were ranked higher socially than “pure” Africans.

            Interestingly, the use of skin lighteners today is used most by young, urban, educated women in the global South. This somewhat surprised me, because the education I am receiving here inculcates a culture of empowerment, of confidence and of pride, and the knowledge that who I am is enough. But I am also a white female living in the global North, so my day-to-day struggles with other people’s defined ideal aesthetics are not the same as a Nigerian undergraduate woman trying to move up the social ladder. And indeed, Glenn points out that it is almost automatic for people to judge others based off of skin tone. Skin color operates as a “symbolic capital” which absolutely can affect and determine one’s opportunities in life.

            Young African women today want to be two to three shades lighter, emulating the ideals created by the likes of Halle Berry and Beyonce, both of whom have been involved in various scandals of skin lightening. I took a class last semester on “Visualizing Otherness” and we looked at the case of a photoshoot Beyonce took for a French magazine called l’Officiel. In it, she is titled the African Queen, and is in blackface. In class we discussed how African  and African-American women are either challenged to find the balance between appearing “white enough” and conforming to Western ideals and upholding the post-colonial fantasy of the African Queen, always regal, and poised.

            Glenn goes on to discuss the trends in India and the Philippines to focus more on homemade concoctions until their markets were eventually opened up to and consumed by the cosmetics markets of the world. The three biggest international corporations which target specific audiences for skin lighteners are L’Oreal, Shiseido, and Unilever. The fact that the demand for their products is sky-rocketing emphasizes the “internalization” of “white is right”. Unfortunately, this is a conversation I’ve heard multiple times while here, at Conn. It did not necessarily revolve around skin but hair. Three friends of mine, all African-American were commenting on a friend’s “bold” choice to “go natural” and stop perming, straightening her hair, and instead let it grow out in its “natural fro form”. Evidently, the discourse of empowerment and confidence that I had been able to take away from this school had somewhat been lost on them, because in a sea of predominantly white students, they still felt the pressure to use expensive and extensive products on their hair, with only the boldest of them accepting to show their natural hairstyles.

            The two chapters from “Miss India, Miss World” examined the role these women play in the “embodiment of national identity.” Since I do not know much about these beauty pageants, it was really interesting to me to hear about all the inner workings of the training and the process as a whole. It is also somewhat disgusting to see how internalized nationalistic and westernized ideals prevail and govern the pageant. Simply the order of appearance of the contestants, moving from Europe, to the Americas, to Asia and the South Pacific and finally concluding with Africa highlights the ranking and preferences of the judges.

            Another point which I had not thought about was that all the women need to speak English if they truly wish to make a connection with the audience and the judges. Working with an interpreter and translator sets up a barrier and doesn’t allow for their personalities to shine through, inhibiting their potential intelligent comments to come out and instead focusing only on the beauty aspect of it.

            I thought the discourse comparing India and Venezuela was also very insightful. The main point of this contrast was to demonstrate the level of accessibility of the pageants in either country. For instance, in Venezuela, the whole country focuses generally more on beauty, with a greater percentage of the population fitting into a rising middle class. On the other hand, in India, the pageants only really cater to the top 10% of the elite classes in India, making the rest of the ceremony somewhat irrelevant to the other 90%. In chapter 5, the author also presented how the provenance of the Miss candidates was important: the difference between urban and rural candidates widens the audience gap because rural, more conservative populations would be reluctant to allow women to parade around in bikinis and they also have less access to beauty products in general.

            Chapter 5 also focused on the ins and outs of the pageants and what goes into making a beauty queen, from the dieting with Mukherjee, to the fitness with Mickey Mehta, to the training facilities were women are taught to walk in heels, answer interview questions and hold their bodies, the whole institution continues to perpetuates Western ideals. One man who was a judge brought up the issues of standardization of the pageantry business: how does one define beauty? What is poise? What is stage presence?

            Overall, the general consensus was that participation in such an event, even if you do not win, will bring you potential for upward mobility. To go back to the TEDx talk – is this progress? Do the photographs of Milan-looking fashion catwalks in Pakistan mean that the country is “progressing”? is that not just equating progress with Westernization?

The Onishi article of the Nigerian woman who won the Miss World title echoes this concern – if pageantry has just become a way of asserting one country’s “betterness” over another, then the women become pawns in a larger geo-political practice. If the women of the country are no longer representing the overall beauty ideals of their country, such as in the Nigerian case, then what’s the point?

It seems that the idea of ranking women according to their beauty is one that has always been, and continues to persist, from those middle school days when boys rank girls in terms of their physical attractiveness all the way through to billion dollar competitions where women are pitted against one another to compete for the title of most beautiful, as defined by a handful of white males.