Erasing Race and Racing Beauty in Asia's Global City

Bibliographic Data

ID5670495
AuthorsElizabeth Lacouture (0000-0003-2884-1760, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume24
Issue2
Pages456-479
Publication date2025-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMeridians (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1536-6936 • E-ISSN: 1547-8424
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/15366936-11864097
OpenAlexW4415031907
LanguageEN
References cited16

During the summer of 2020, global demands for racial social justice, sparked by the murder of George Floyd, reached Hong Kong, where local activists, protesting police violence in their city, reissued the call that "Black lives matter" as "youth lives matter." Altering #BLM to #YLM, Hong Kong activists erased race from their social justice. At the same time that race was erased from Hong Kong social justice, the bodies of Hong Kong women were being raced through the marketing campaigns of multinational cosmetic companies: Companies like Unilever and Johnson & Johnson announced that they would rebrand whitening cosmetics sold in Asian and Middle Eastern markets. This article examines the erasure of race in Hong Kong's social justice activism alongside the long history of racializing Chinese female bodies to explore how local and global structures of gender and race intersect and interconnect to forge concepts of Whiteness in Hong Kong. Hong Kongers navigate global, regional, and local layers of racial structures through processes of erasing and racing, thereby creating and perpetuating racialized hierarchies in Hong Kong. Thus, Hong Kong as a case study demonstrates how majority groups in Asia are both victims and perpetrators of racialized discrimination

Beauty · China · Global city · Multinational corporation · Racialization · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Japanese History and Culture · Socioeconomic Development in Asia

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