Contrasting Scientific Discourses of Skin Lightening in Domestic and Global Contexts
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23577975 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Celeste Vaughan Curington (0000-0002-9416-6241, Sociology, North Carolina State University), Miliann Kang (0000-0001-8037-2127, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Pages | 273-291 |
| Publication date | 2019-05-09 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190842475.013.19 |
| OpenAlex | W2966671132 |
| ISBN | 9780190842475 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 18 |
This chapter examines how racial and gender ideologies shape and are shaped by scientific understandings of beauty practices via a critical examination of the scholarly discourses on skin lightening. Based on qualitative content analysis of thirty domestic and international scholarly articles on skin lightening and whitening published between 2000 and 2017, the authors found that products in Europe and the United States marketed to white customers were likely to be framed as benign beauty products, with health risks attributed to imported products. In contrast, the use of similar products overseas, particularly in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, were depicted as higher risk and locally sourced. Further, by mapping certain skin-related pathologies onto distinct human bodies, these studies reinforce discredited biological understandings of race. Overall, scientific studies of skin whitening and lightening practices enforce the scientific validation of white/western beauty practices alongside the problematization of similar practices/products when used by non-white or non-western subjects. These studies often recognize the dominance of a white cultural ideal but, rather than tracing its structural and historical determinants, instead pathologize those who aspire to it, often neglecting the dynamics of global white supremacy, marketing, production, and distribution in the global beauty economy that fuel the desire and consumption for these products.
Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Biology · Dominance (genetics) · Ideology · Literature · Political science · Politics · Problematization · Race (biology) · Social science · Sociology · White (mutation) · White supremacy · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Law
Feminist methods in social research
The science question in feminism
Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia
Black Feminist Thought
Skin Bleachers’ Representations of Skin Color in Jamaica
The Scientification of Skin Whitening and the Entrepreneurial University-Linked Corporate Scientific Officer
US Empire and the Project of Women's Studies
Dis/locating Cultures/Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism
Stereotyping Asian Americans
Who's the fairest of them all? Television ads for skin-whitening cosmetics in Hong Kong
The moral underpinnings of beauty
The Fact of Blackness? The Bleached Body in Contemporary Jamaica
Women's body dissatisfaction, social class, and social mobility
Reflections
Under Western Eyes
Threatening consumption
Moored Metamorphoses
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |