Fashioning Postfeminism

Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture

Simidele Dosekun

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780252052095
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Women in Lagos, Nigeria, practice a spectacularly feminine form of black beauty. From cascading hair extensions to immaculate makeup to high heels, their style permeates both day-to-day life and media representations of women not only in a swatch of Africa but across an increasingly globalized world.

Simidele Dosekun's interviews and critical analysis consider the female subjectivities these women are performing and desiring. She finds that the women embody the postfeminist idea that their unapologetically immaculate beauty signals—but also constitutes—feminine power. As empowered global consumers and media citizens, the women deny any need to critique their culture or to take part in feminism's collective political struggle. Throughout, Dosekun unearths evocative details around the practical challenges to attaining their style, examines the gap between how others view these women and how they view themselves, and engages with ideas about postfeminist self-fashioning and subjectivity across cultures and class.

Intellectually provocative and rich with theory, Fashioning Postfeminism reveals why women choose to live, embody, and even suffer for a fascinating performative culture.

1

CONTEXTUAL CROSSROADS

AFRICAN WOMEN IN THE WORLD OF THINGS

Picture a tube of red lipstick traveling from one young Nigerian woman living and working in London to another in Lagos. It is a picture of styles and technologies of femininity, and certain brands of feminism, in motion. It is an image of the forging of new transnational communities, subjects, and subjectivities, by capitalist consumer culture and diasporic movements.1 For the purposes of the present discussion, it is an instance of the central case to be made, which is that African femininities are necessarily worldly ones, made in and through connection, communication, exchange. The image comes from one of the women in this book, whom I call Bisi, pseudonymously.2 Recounting how she had gone from wearing no makeup at all to what was at the time of the interview a staple regime of black eyeliner, white face powder, and bright-red lipstick, Bisi explained the part that her sister based in London had played: “I didn’t use to wear makeup then along the way, okay. I started with black eyeliner and just clear lip gloss, and then, okay, the red lipstick craze started, and my sister is like (puts on, mocking, a falsetto or “girly” voice) ‘Oh, let me send you one, you might like it; if you don’t like it, don’t use it.’ (Resumes regular voice.) Then I used it, I’m like ‘Okay, it’s not bad …’”3 The particular route that Bisi’s first red lipstick had taken to reach her, from what could be glossed as center to periphery, begins to suggest the asymmetries, the structured topography, of the world in which African women live, desire, and come to self-fashion. Yet it would be too simple to conclude that what we do, or want, is determined by Western economic and cultural dominance. To continue to think with the lipstick, practically speaking the item did not have to come to Bisi via special delivery from London. Lipsticks of all colors are readily available for purchase in Lagos, if unlikely to have been produced locally—the Nigerian economy being centered around extraction as a matter of colonial design, legacy of structural adjustment policy, and failure of successive governments to broaden its base.4 Bisi’s lipstick also did not have to take the form of a gift, a remittance of sorts, from a relative earning a living abroad. The following chapters will show just how much more than a small makeup item is easily affordable for the women in this book. More ideologically, to take hold in Lagos, the taste for red lipstick did not have to be sparked from a fashion capital like London. Lagos is a city of style in its own right, and, like Bisi needing to see, to discern, for herself that the beauty product would suit her, not simply or automatically sold on its foreign provenance, Lagosians are not mimic women and men.

Bisi’s brief remarks do not tell the origins of the said red lipstick craze in fact, or its location when she came to join it. It could have been a new Lagos trend that she had mentioned to her sister, or a new passion in London that her sister wished to share with her, or both a Lagos and a London thing, or more. I would venture that questions of the origins, locations, and routes of her kind of look would have been utterly moot for a woman such as Bisi, who, like all the others whom I interviewed, saw and positioned herself as a “global consumer citizen.” African women are in the world of things, trends, ideas, and also politics; this should come as no surprise or require any defense. Yet surprise it often does, sometimes even seemingly offend. To paraphrase remarks made to me at research presentations about the appearance of the spectacularly feminine Lagos woman, when I have been showing images of the kind of subject and style about which I am talking: “Isn’t it sad that she is losing her traditional dress”; “She is not a real African woman”; “Looks like a case of Western imperialism.” In stubbornly predominant scholarly and popular visions, African and Africanist included, Africa and Africans continue to be “caught and imagined within a web of difference and absolute otherness.” Placing us apart, whether for presumed better or worse, but one effect of this mode of thinking and seeing is to deny us “the full spectrum of meanings and implications that other places and other human experiences enjoy, provoke, and inhabit.”5 Fashion, the changing of styles of clothing, beauty, and adornment as a practice and mark of distinction, desire, and creative self-making, is among the things that some would deny African women, imaginatively and conceptually but sometimes also physically, even violently. So, too, is feminism. Our long-standing realities of these things, and our fundamental—and frankly obvious—capacities for them, are the concern of this brief contextual chapter.

AFRICAN LOOKS

Fashion and self-fashioning are African traditions. I phrase this quite concertedly to refuse at once notions that fashion is unique and endogenous to Western capitalist modernity, counterposed to the “dress,” or “costume,” or “garb”—implying the “exotic,” “essential,” “premodern”—of the non-West.6 Africans have very long and deliberately produced, adopted, and adapted new ways of adorning and presenting ourselves: new looks, in short. In terms of what is deemed traditional dress in any particular African context, on inspection it becomes apparent that this is not changeless, timeless, or inherent, but rather fluid, syncretic, and contingent. It is invented. Textiles, beads, and other material goods from an array of external and shifting sources play a part in the fabrication of traditional dress, and new patterns, cuts, sensibilities, and values also continuously alter it.7 The new has been introduced via centuries-old trade across the continent, Sahara Desert, and Indian and Atlantic Oceans; via the spread of Islam and Christianity; via colonialism and, these days, globalization. The cloth commonly known as “African print” offers a well-known example of the wide-ranging roots and routes of what I will call “African looks.” It also reveals the performativity of this category of dress and appearance, being a vivid example of the fact that things of foreign origin may become African. African prints are factory-printed textiles developed and adapted by European companies in the nineteenth century, from Javanese batiks, for West African markets and, importantly, tastes.8 Exemplifying the colonial capitalist “intimacies of continents,” then,9 the cloth has gone on to be associated with Africa specifically: it has become cemented “as a quintessential marker of West African culture, and of African-ness more broadly.”10 Nina Sylvanus suggests that African prints became and continue to become African because they arrive as “raw material, thus providing the necessary space for the enactment of local logics of usage, interpretation and meaning attribution … , [for] the ascription to the fabric of a series of local significances.”11 The fabric also becomes and continues to “be” African for being reiteratively called, seen, understood, and variously valued and devalued, as such—for looking African. Hence, for instance, people not of African descent who wear African print risk accusations of cultural appropriation, such as in the miniscandal on the “black Internet” in 2017, on websites like “Curly Nikki,” about the appearance of the prints on British designer Stella McCartney’s catwalks.

The literature on dress in Africa is replete with other cases of the invention and authentication of Africa, and the assertion of African nationalisms, on and through the dressed body.12 These performative processes occur with and through the equally invented, and often readily essentialized, constructs of tradition, ethnicity, and blackness that centrally constitute that of Africa itself. It was in the name of both cultural and racial authenticité that Mobutu Sese Seko sought to define and impose a new Zairian dress code in the 1970s, for instance. It is because dress is a visual, material, and highly moralizable marker of identity, culture, propriety, and belonging, and an ostensible index of “civilization,” that it has been and remains integral to imagining and representing Africa and Africanness—and likewise other “difference from” the “Euro-modern.” Introducing modern European dress codes was central to the self-declared civilizing missions of colonialism and Christianity in Africa. Introducing modern European dress codes was central to the self-declared civilizing missions of colonialism and Christianity in Africa, such that for Africans, “returning” to putatively indigenous aesthetics, styles, and “model[s] of historicity and change” became acts of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial nation building.13 The case of the Nigerian anticolonial activist and feminist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti is quite instructive in this regard. In the 1940s, Ransome-Kuti famously discarded European attire for the traditional Yoruba style of iro ati buba (wrapper and blouse) and also began to speak only Yoruba in public. A clear symbolic rejection of colonialism and its cultural superiority complex, the more powerful coming from an elite, Christian, British-educated woman, for its recourse to tradition Ransome-Kuti’s dress practice was not therefore also a rejection of “modernity,” or of modernization as process.14 Ransome-Kuti was not advocating or demonstrating that Africans belonged or were better off in a precolonial past, however imagined. Rather, she was modeling a way of being African in the present, and indeed for “progress,” in non-Eurocentric African terms. She was fashioning a materially distinct African modernity by way of tradition, and in this embodied the postcolonial theoretical insight that tradition and modernity are not opposed, sequential, or teleological times and states, but mutually constitutive and simultaneous constructs and imaginaries of these, and of change—very much materially premised constructs and imaginaries, to be sure. Here again, the literature on dress in Africa provides numerous examples of Africans knowing and living out this complex theoretical position in practice.15

That the spectacularly feminine Lagos woman does not appear “distinctly African” is, of course, the starting point, and relative charge, of the earlier-cited comments made to me during research presentations. Here I will note that while it may not be her predominant style, this figure can and does also appear in traditional dress, such as at traditional weddings, and is equally “fabulous,” immaculately put together, in this look.16 Practically speaking, Africans dress in an array of styles, today and historically. This is ethnographically obvious and in everyday life on the continent quite unremarkable. What concerns me here therefore is to surface, so as to refute, the ontological, political, and moral underpinnings and what I will insist on calling the violence of any expectation that, to paraphrase Rey Chow, “the native ought to be faithful.”17 There is no authentic or a priori African subject to be recognized or found anywhere, no necessary or essential Africanness to which we must or even can be faithful. “African identity does not exist as a substance. It is constituted, in varying forms, through a series of practices, notably practices of the self. Neither the forms of this identity nor its idioms are always self-identical. Rather, these forms and idioms are mobile, reversible, and unstable.”18

One idiom and medium of African self-making that has been a changing constant for centuries now is “Western dress.” European companies were shipping not just textiles but ready-made clothing to the continent from as early as the 1600s. The since-continued inflow is an effect of persistent economic and trade imbalances, the cultural and symbolic dominance of the West that works to constitute its looks as universal and the modern standard, and in all this a product of colonial, imperialist, and capitalist forces. Succinctly put, it is an effect of power. In her ethnographic study of the contemporary market for secondhand Western dress in Zambia, for instance, Karen Hansen attributes the booming trade to a combination of consumerist excess in the West, the structural decline of Zambian manufacturing, and the delimited measure of the average Zambian’s budget. But the trade also meets and engenders active demands and desires on the ground. “People in Zambia also want well dressed bodies,” for which they purposely and skillfully browse the secondhand stalls to find, mix, and match items to create unique looks.19 These, too, are African looks, by which I mean quite simply ways of looking like an African. We see this if we understand power as productive and practices of self as constitutive, that “even” Western dress can be incorporated into the making and fashioning of the African. But surely we should also be able to see it without taking a poststructuralist view? If Western dress has now been in the African wardrobe for more than four hundred years, how can it still be deemed foreign to us? At what point would we be able to take it as also our own? Should we even be calling it Western dress? I propose “global dress” as now more apt, “global” meaning and indexing the “dominant particular.”20

To see the spectacularly feminine Lagos woman as “not a real African woman,” as I have already said was put to me once, is not only inconsistent with the poststructuralist theoretical premises of this book. It is also ahistorical and in short order boils down to the racist or nativist logics (or both) that I began to reject in the previous chapter, according to which Africans are indeed fundamentally different and so should ideally remain fixed (mired, perhaps) in said difference. Even if framing the spectacularly feminine Lagos woman as a victim of Western cultural imperialism, to recall another of the readings proposed to me, these kinds of claims and visions constitute a further imperialist violence themselves. They deny Africans’ agentic, self-reflexive, and desirous presence and participation in the flow of things, or what Achille Mbembe sums up as our “subjectivity as time.”21 They betray a postcolonial melancholia, a wishing for the times when the putative natives were nat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A New Style of Femininity
• 1 Contextual Crossroads: African Women in the World of Things
• 2 Choosing It All: From Pleasure to Self-Confidence to Pain
• 3 “I’m Working, You Know”: The Serious Business of Spectacularity
• 4 Globally Black, “Naija,” and Fabulous: Asserting Authentic Selves
• 5 “Not That Kinda Girl”: Resignifying Hyperfemininity for Postfeminist Times
• Conclusion: A New Fashion for Feminism?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover