Trans-skin

Analyzing the practice of skin bleaching among middle-class women in Dar es Salaam

Bibliographic Data

ID6256192
AuthorsKatharina Fritsch (0000-0002-1524-7263, University of Vienna, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume17
Issue6
Pages749-770
Publication date2017-12-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnicities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1468-7968 • E-ISSN: 1741-2706
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1468796814565216
OpenAlexW2328489385
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited14

This essay analyses skin bleaching among middle-class Tanzanian women as performative practice. It draws on empirical material from interviews with middle-class Tanzanian women as well as from advertisements in Dar es Salaam. Skin bleaching is situated at a ‘site of ambivalence’ (Butler), revolving around ‘light beauty’ as postcolonial regulatory ideal. Thus on the one hand, skin bleaching is analyzed as a practice of ‘passing for light(-skinned), embodying urban ‘modern’ forms of subjectivation. On the other hand, the decolonizing potential of skin bleaching becomes apparent as the interviewed women’s forms of embodiment renegotiate postcolonial Blackness putting forward notions of ‘browning’ (Tate). However, ‘light beauty’ then also appears as norm, according to which forms of embodiment can only ‘fail’. In this regard, skin bleaching challenges essentialized notions of Blackness, embodied in the color of one’s skin, while it also illustrates the performativity of racialized embodiment and its intersections with other structural categories

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Beauty · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Middle class · Performative utterance · Performativity · Political science · Situated · Sociology · Gender Roles and Identity Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Obesity and Health Practices · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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