Beauty âwisdomâ and racialization
âBeauty comes from withinâ, âbeauty is only skin deepâ and âbeauty is in the eye of the beholderâ are only sayings but do they betray other meanings? To call them sayings is very suggestive as a âsayingâ is both âa piece of wisdom or rule of conductâ and âonly a sayingâ â truth and fiction. Letâs take this a bit further in terms of âwisdomâ/ ârule of conductâ. For Foucault (1995) the body is the object of power/knowledge and its resultant discourses are regimes of truth that lay down the possibility for thinking and speaking, such that at any particular time only some statements will come to be recognized as âtrueâ. These discourses impact on us because they are not just textual. They are also put into bodily practice as individuals monitor their own behaviour and put other bodies under surveillance so as to ensure that the accepted wisdom has no dissenters. Questions of bodily practices such as those of beauty are always already discursive and subject to the gaze of the other. Sayings such as âbeauty comes from withinâ thus reveal themselves as very potent pieces of âwisdomâ and ârules of conductâ whose power has emerged through long histories of repetition which define societal taboos on beauty, ugliness and vanity. The rule of conduct which emanated from âbeauty comes from withinâ could, for example, be that we should not be vain but at the same time we should not aspire to ugliness either. What is interesting about these sayings is their global purchase as they are used wherever English is spoken. The sayings themselves also make invisible the racialization of beauty and the impact of this on the lives, psyches and bodies of Black women (Craig 2002; Gilman 1985, 1992; Hobson 2005; Rooks 2000; Russell et al. 1992; Taylor 2000; Tate, 2007a).
What can we make of these sayings when we have Black women like Lorna, for instance, who say:
You know it would be quite easy to deny your past and say, âno, Iâve never wished I was whiteâ. But you are lying to yourself, you know. I have to be honest, Shirley, and say that I did used to wish I was white when I was young because I always saw white girls as beautiful and I never saw anything beautiful about myself.
âI always saw white girls as beautiful and I never saw anything beautiful about myselfâ. With these words Lorna highlights for us the racialized paradox of beauty. Iconic beauty was white in her childhood (Taylor 2000; Craig 2002; Gilman 1992). In their childhoods growing up in 1960s Britain, Black girls like Lorna and their Black women significant others, had to âlive upâ to this norm of âwhite girls as beautifulâ. As a norm âwhite girls as beautifulâ is not necessarily explicit but remains implicit within the psyches and practices of sociality. This norm is therefore difficult to read. It is only discernible in the effects it produces (Butler 2004a). The effect of the norm for Lorna is a feeling of ugliness and a desire for whiteness when she was a child. Racialization means that there is an inscription of beauty on some bodies and not others so that beauty is always embodied as white. As a norm âwhite girls as beautifulâ âis acted out in social practice and reidealized and reinstituted in and through the daily social rituals of bodily life ⌠it is itself (re)produced through its embodiment, through the acts that strive to approximate it, through the idealizations reproduced in and by those actsâ (Butler 2004a, 48). The norm confers recognizability through bodily practices which can also alter norms at the everyday level. Norms, practices and recognizability imply visibility and surface.
In this case, then, beauty cannot come from within and although beauty might be skin deep, the Black skin which is inhabited lies outside of the realm of âthe beautifulâ because of the work of racialization so you have no beauty âin the eye of the beholderâ. Lorna alerts us to the idea that beauty relates to skin, hair, facial features and all that is outside, all that is on the surface, all that can be seen. Beauty is about âthe visibleâ. If we recognize the beauty paradox produced by racialization and the âto be seen-nessâ of beauty then it makes us look at âbeauty comes from withinâ differently. We can only use this phrase with comfort and without question from a position of privilege, from a position in which we possess the idealized characteristics of white beauty â the skin deep beauty â which is validated by the look âof the beholderâ. For those supposedly outside of this location because they are not white it is much harder for this phrase to ring true as this beauty is not imprinted on the surface of their bodies, on their hair, skin and faces.
At the level of hair, for example, Selma speaks about her experiences as a girl:
I remember we used to play a game and I remember we would put cardigans on our heads. I donât know if youâve ever done that as a child. Button it and flick the sleeves and stuff like that. You know us Black girls in school used to do that a lot.
Selma and other Black girls in her school in the 1960s didnât have the requisite straight, blonde flowing locks of normative beauty and so were compelled to get them through playful artifice. Such behaviour makes us view hair as more than just hair within a context of racialized beauty in which the only beauty âtruthâ is âthe straight hair ruleâ (Taylor 2000). Hair may only be organic matter but it carries deep racialized meaning in terms of beauty (Mercer 1994; Banks 2000; Craig 2002; Taylor 2000; Tate 2005). This is linked to the fact that âwithin racismâs bipolar codification of human worth, black peopleâs hair has been historically devalued as the most visible stigmata of blackness, second only to skinâ (Mercer 1994a, 101). If one doesnât already have the straight, flowing locks of whiteness which can be flicked like the sleeves of a cardigan, one must strive to produce it in order to be recognized as beautiful. This speaks to various beauty desires and longings, which again haunt the wisdom/rule of conduct of âbeauty comes from withinâ and makes us wonder, âwell, does it really?â The effect of the norm of âthe straight hair ruleâ also makes âbeauty is only skin deepâ into a very powerful saying as its meaning becomes visible. Beauty is attainable, often at significant cost, but at the same time we must also be wary of the entrapments of artifice in order to avoid accusations of vanity. Vanity is part of the sub-text of âbeauty comes from withinâ that keeps us within its thrall, and makes us subject to its repetitions. âBeauty is only skin deepâ which could be seen to be the opposite of âbeauty comes from withinâ,2 makes the whole question of beauty open to interpretation as a practice of/on the body. It relates beauty to outsideness, to the surface, to the skin, to a being made visible for âthe eye of the beholderâ. âThe beholderâ then judges this beauty in terms of Ideals of perfection according to Kant and this in turn produces feelings in the subject.
2 Beauty as skin deep belittles beauty and it is a warning to beware the artifice of beauty because it hides an ugliness of character and good character is highly valued. âBeauty comes from withinâ valorizes that beauty which reflects a âbeautiful personâ especially if that person has a beauty flaw but it can also be a way of demeaning undue vanity. If we continue with the subject of hair and what Lorna tells us, we can see that beauty clearly doesnât come from within but has to be inscribed onto the surface of the body. We also see that we can place ourselves in the position of âthe beholderâ of our own beauty.
The first time I was a bridesmaid I was about 7 or 8 years old and I remember the first time I ever had my hair straightened. In those days I had it done with the hot comb, they didnât have tongs. They straightened it with the hot comb that they heated on a paraffin stove and then I had it ringletted. I couldnât stop looking at myself in the mirror because my head felt so light and I just thought, oh doesnât it look beautiful? I couldnât stop touching it. It felt so nice.
Her memory of beauty at age seven or eight that she looked back on as a 38-year-old woman makes us notice several things. First, beauty is about racialization and performativity. Second, beauty is about labour. Third, beauty is also about creating difference through artifice and the work of fantasy. Last, this difference creates beauty value and affect. I want to deal first with fantasy and then affect.
According to Butler (2004a, 28) the
embodied relation to the norm exercises a transformative potential. To posit possibilities beyond the norm itself, is part of the work of fantasy when we understand fantasy as taking the body as a point of departure for an articulation that is not always constrained by the body as it is.3
3 My emphasis. The hotcomb provides such an articulation which gives a different reality to the possibility for beauty and challenges the limits of âwhite girls as beautifulâ. The effect of the fantasy produced by the hotcomb is that it brings âthe elsewhereâ4 of beauty home to the surface of the Black body. This âhomingâ releases affective beauty value even though here it is within the parameters of âthe straight hair ruleâ. By affect I mean the obvious pleasure she speaks about in touching, feeling and seeing her newly-straightened and ringletted hair, which now had value because beauty had been inscribed onto it. Her pleasure emerges from the touch and feel of her now beautiful hair, which for the young Lorna was related to how closely it approximated the white ideal. What is also interesting here is that her âhead felt so lightâ that she kept looking in the mirror. The heaviness of her natural hair was removed by the labour of artifice (straightening) thus introducing a lightness of body. The feeling of beauty â both through touch and vision â induces pleasure. Being beautiful is clearly about pleasure in seeing, touching and feeling differences on the bodyâs surface which make us recognizable within beauty norms. This recognition is important because without it we are excluded from the possibility of beauty.
4 Butler (2004a, 29). This extract from Lorna shows us that beauty is about labour, racialization, artifice, value, affect but it also demonstrates that beauty has performative potentiality at the level of identification. Lorna identified her hair as beautiful in that moment of seeing its transformation and therefore as beauty was inscribed onto her seven-or eight-year-old body, she herself became beautiful. She was interpellated into the position of beautiful through her straightened, ringletted hair. I would also like to suggest at this point that Lornaâs talk also makes us pause to notice the performative potentiality of the sayings âbeauty comes from withinâ, âbeauty is only skin deepâ and âbeauty is in the eye of the beholderâ in terms of subjectivation and agency and this is what I will look at in the rest of the chapter.
However, before doing this, I would like to make one further point based on Lornaâs account. That is, the prevalence of beauty expectations, norms and subject positions that sayings like âbeauty comes from withinâ, âbeauty is only skin deepâ and âbeauty is in the eye of the beholderâ serve to make opaque. These beauty expectations, norms and subject positions are opaque only until we fall outside of hegemonic norms and expectations at which point we become âthe otherâ to beauty. An other who is the object of derision. Sharonâs childhood was lived within the context of âthe straight hair ruleâ. When she decided to stop straightening her hair and to instead plait it because of the emphasis within Black politics in the 1970s on ânatural hairâ, this put her in the position of the âotherâ to beauty. For her, the only possible outcome in her majority white high school was derision, even though ânaturalâ hair (like the afro and combing your hair back) was the current fashion in Black community. Sharon says,
I stopped hot combing my hair and I thought I am going to plait it because it was all afro or combing it back, you know? I plaited it and I was so embarrassed at school I had to put a scarf on my head. I was told to take off my scarf in Assembly. Everyone looked at me like I was some sort of, like I had something sort of wrong, like I had gone out of my head.
Her refusal to straighten her hair but leave it natural and plait it, put her beyondâthe normalâ expectations of Black beauty comportment. The white gaze positioned her as someone who had gone out of her head, as someone who was further marginalized by her refusal of the norm. This judgement was based on the unacceptability, unexpectedness and unrecognizability of literally what was on her head.
What Sharon reminds us of here is the governmentality of the beauty gaze where there can be severe consequences for stepping outside of the boundaries of acceptability. The sayingâbeauty is in the eye of the beholderâ makes sense here as we apply the beauty gaze to ourselves. We constantly monitor ourselves because racialized beauty norms work in such a way that the beauty gaze is an âinspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end up by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over and against himselfâ (Foucault 1980, 154â55). For Sharon, her initial embarrassment at stepping outside the norm led to her wearing a scarf ...