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Race, beauty, and the tangled knot of a guilty pleasure

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Maxine Leeds Craig California State University, East Bay

Feminist Theory Copyright 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) vol. 7(2): 159177. 14647001 DOI: 10.1177/1464700106064414 http://fty.sagepub.com

Abstract Recent feminist theory has attempted to bring considerations of womens agency into analyses of the meaning and consequence of beauty norms in womens lives. This article argues that these works have often been limited by their use of individualist frameworks or by their neglect of considerations of race and class. In this article I draw upon examples of African-American utilization of beauty discourse and practices in collective efforts to resist racism. I argue that there is no singular beauty standard enforced by a unied male gaze. Instead, we should conceive of elds in which differently located individuals and groups invest in and promote particular ways of seeing beauty, producing both penalties and pleasures in womens lives. keywords African-Americans, beauty, class, racial rearticulation,
racism, representation

In 1968 inside the convention centre in Atlantic City, fty women competed to be crowned Miss America. On the boardwalk outside of the hall, another group of women dumped bras, girdles, and false eyelashes into a trash bin to protest the degrading mindless-boob-girlie symbol (Morgan, 1970: 5856). The Womens Liberation protest at the Miss America pageant attracted extensive news coverage and brought the second wave of the feminist movement into the awareness of a broader public. Many women appreciated the demonstration, which, regardless of its use of theatrical techniques, took seriously the ways in which beauty standards were oppressive to women. For others, the demonstration suggested that the womens movement was out of touch with womens ambivalence regarding beauty. The protesters did not seem to see that, despite the coercive pressures of beauty standards, women derive pleasure from beauty. The meaning of beauty in womens lives continues to be a problem for feminist theory. Feminist scholarship remains caught between two competing analyses of beauty. One frames beauty as part of a structure of oppression. The other describes beauty as a potentially pleasurable instrument of female agency. Perhaps feminist theory remains stalled in this dichotomy because it has been asking the wrong questions about beauty. Michel Foucault raised new questions about the guilty pleasures of sex

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when he theorized sex as a product of disciplinary institutions and knowledge regimes. He encouraged his readers to ask of any specic discourse on sex . . . appearing historically and in specic places . . . what were the most immediate, the most local power relations at work (Foucault, 1990: 97). This paper examines several specic instances of the deployment of beauty. It asks which women claimed beauty for themselves, who proclaimed the beauty of others, and what was at stake when beauty was claimed. As I explore the deployment of beauty, I will put race at the centre of my analysis. I do this with the understanding that race is co-constructed with gender and class. Thus, to write accurately about race, I also write about gender and class. The difculty of theorizing beauty is that any body which might possibly be characterized as beautiful exists at a congested crossroads of forces. Bodies provide us with a principal means of expression, yet our bodies are read in ways that defy our intentions. We act on others through our bodies, but nonetheless our bodies are the sites of the embodiment of social controls. The body is the locus of our pleasures and it is the vehicle through which we consume. Our bodies are the targets and the subjects of advertisements. Our bodies mark us in ways that place us in social categories and these categories may form the bases of political solidarities. Each of these uses and meanings of the body can involve beauty. The meeting of these diverse forces in our bodies confounds broad generalizations we might make about the meaning of beauty in womens lives. I suggest that we look at beauty as a gendered, racialized, and contested symbolic resource. Since beauty is contested, at any given moment there will be multiple standards of beauty in circulation. By thinking about competing beauty standards and their uses by men and women in particular social locations, we can ask about the local power relations at work in discourses and practices of beauty and examine the penalties or pleasures they produce. If we take this approach, oppression and the production of pleasure, domination and resistance no longer exclude each other. Our dichotomies will collapse. My analysis builds on decades of feminist theorizing and feminist activism relating to beauty. The rst section of this paper explores the place of race in feminist work on beauty. The second and third sections consider how recent feminist analyses of beauty have attempted to complicate earlier feminist theory by bringing womens experiences of pleasure into the analysis. In the fourth and fth sections I bring these two bodies of work together by thinking about African-American experiences of the interconnections of race, class, gender and beauty.

Race and studies of beauty

Discourses of race and beauty are often intertwined. Racist ideologies commonly promote the appearance of the dominant group against the purported ugliness of a subordinate group. When, in his Notes on the State of Virginia Thomas Jefferson sought to defend a continued separation of

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the races, he pointed to what he considered the self-evident beauty of whites (Jefferson, 1975: 187). Likewise, Nazis used assertions of superior Aryan beauty to build anti-Semitism (Mosse, 1985: 139). Claims of beauty have also been central to anti-racist resistance. When Marcus Garvey built a mass African-American movement in the early 20th century, he implored black people to take down the pictures of white women from your walls. Elevate your own women to that place of honor (Garvey, 1968: 29). In Garveys nationalist rhetoric, racial pride began with an appreciation of the beauty of black women. Despite the close connections between discourses of beauty and racial politics, race has often been left out of feminist analyses of beauty. If we take the 1968 Miss America pageant protest as a historical beginning point for second wave feminist activist critiques of beauty regimes in the United States, we can see that an analysis of the interpenetration of racism and beauty regimes was present at the beginning. The organizers of the 1968 Miss America contest protest decried the racial exclusivity of the pageant, noting that there had never been a black nalist nor a single Puerto Rican, Alaskan, Hawaiian or Mexican-American winner (Morgan, 1970: 586). Though early activists found and critiqued racism and sexism in institutions of beauty, an analysis of race escaped some of the most widely read academic feminist writing on beauty that followed. This section traces the presence, absence and reappearance of race in feminist theories of beauty. My account cannot be strictly chronological, as in some cases early writers and activists had greater sensitivity to issues of race than writers who followed them. In this narrative, I organize the works considered into those that are foundational, those that engaged in a project of specifying differences in womens experiences of beauty, and those that complicated existing theory by addressing questions of agency. Given the wealth of feminist writing relating to beauty, this survey is necessarily incomplete and will inevitably omit important work. Works are included here because they articulate central tendencies within the literature. Lois Banners 1983 American Beauty laid important historical groundwork for subsequent feminist scholarship on beauty. By chronicling the transformation of beauty standards in the United States, Banner demonstrated the constructed and historically specic character of ideals of beauty. As written by Banner, however, beautys American history is a white womens history. Joan Jacobs Brumbergs study of decades of young womens diaries documents the way that the expansion of marketing to young women increased womens self-consciousness regarding their bodies. Given that women who have enjoyed certain privileges are more likely to keep diaries and have them collected by archives, the experience documented in Brumbergs study was primarily that lived by white middle- and upper-class women. Nonetheless, Brumbergs 1997 The Body Project importantly challenged the common assumption that young women have always been anxious about the appearance of their bodies. Young womens diaries written in the 19th century were less focused on outer beauty. As the reach of marketing increased throughout the 20th

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century, young women were more likely to write about their bodies in their diaries and more frequently expressed dissatisfaction with their shapes and weight. Published in the 1980s, essays by Iris Marion Young and Sandra Lee Bartky were also foundational.1 Young and Bartky articulated feminist analyses of womens beauty work as a disciplinary practice policed by the force of a coercive and pervasive male gaze. These works were indispensable for later feminist writing and practice relating to beauty, yet the woman who was their subject was a racially unmarked, implicitly heterosexual woman of an unspecied class. In Youngs essay Throwing Like a Girl, the essence of the female experience is a physical passivity caused by the ever-present possibility that one will be gazed upon as a mere body, as shape and esh that presents itself as the potential object of another subjects intentions and manipulations, rather than as a living manifestation of action and intention (Young, 1980: 154). Women take up the view of themselves as things looked at and acted upon, and use cosmetics, diets, and other disciplinary practices in attempts to craft themselves into more beautiful things (Young, 1980: 148). In this argument, a woman sees herself as men see her, and the embodied actions a woman takes are usurped by male intentions. She acts upon herself to realize the will of a generalized male gaze. From the present vantage point, Youngs argument appears not incorrect but incomplete. Youngs essay vividly describes and explains the selfconsciousness regarding appearance that male domination imposes on women. Whether measured by the grossly disproportionate amounts of money spent by women on beauty care or the higher rates of eating disorders and cosmetic surgery use among women, it is clear that women, as a group, work to change their appearance more than men do. The feelings of inadequacy produced by the presence of beauty standards in womens lives are, arguably, among the most personal manifestations of gender inequality in our lives. That being said, the essential woman she describes is that racially unmarked, implicitly heterosexual woman, of unspecied class. Connected to no community, she stands alone under the male gaze. The gazing male is similarly unspecied. What happens if we rethink the argument, with the understanding that the woman under the gaze has a race, a sexual identity, an age, abilities, and more or less wealth? Does she still stand alone in relation to the gaze? Which techniques of transformation are available to her, which are impossible, and what are the meanings of those techniques within her community? When, and if, she sees herself through the eyes of a male, what is his race and how does his race affect her assumptions about what he sees? Is he also the target of an objectifying gaze? Sandra Lee Bartky similarly describes beauty work as a product of the female self-surveillance that arises from the male gaze. Yet she describes the beautifying woman as active rather than passive. According to Bartky, women actively construct feminine selves, the only selves that patriarchal regimes support, or risk the annihilation that awaits those who refuse

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to embrace socially acceptable subjectivities (Bartky, 1988: 78). Bartkys self-monitoring women, like Youngs, are generalized women who stand alone. Each woman, because she is not envisioned as a member of any social group based on race, class, age, sexuality, or ability, is equally alone, and subject to a generalized male gaze. Beginning in the 1980s, and continuing to the present, a sizeable group of scholars has engaged in a project of specifying, in various ways, womens experiences of beauty standards. These works document and analyse the racism inherent in dominant beauty standards (Banet-Weiser, 1999; Banks, 2000; Bordo, 1993; Candelario, 2000; Chapkis, 1986; Craig, 2002; DuCille, 1996; Espiritu, 1997; Gilman, 1985; Hobson, 2003; Kaw, 2003; Lakoff and Scherr, 1984; Peiss, 1998; Weitz, 2004). Focusing on the diverse and particular ways that dominant beauty standards positioned white, black, and Asian women, these scholars argue that beauty standards maintained racial inequality as well as gender inequality. Much of this scholarship addressed the polarized positions of black women and white women in dominant beauty regimes. Dominant beauty standards that idealized fair skin, small noses and lips, and long owing hair dened black womens dark skin colour, facial features, and tightly curled, short hair as ugly. In many, but not all representations, black womens bodies were also stigmatized as hypersexual, a characterization that positioned black women as the moral opposites of pure white women. The ordeal of Saartjie Baartman, the black South African woman who was transported to London and Paris in 1810 and exhibited barely clothed as an entertaining spectacle, is emblematic of the abusive representation of black women as the hypersexual other (Gilman, 1985). Saartjie Baartman was dubbed the Hottentot Venus, a name that identied her as a stigmatizing symbol of beauty for a defamed group within a colonial context (Hobson, 2003). The exclusion of non-white women, or their marginalization within representations of beauty, supported the place of white women within beauty regimes. That is, racists dened white and chaste beauty in opposition to the imputed ugliness and hypersexuality of other, racially marked, groups of women (Collins, 2004; hooks, 1992; Omolade, 1983). Writers who have considered the position of contemporary non-white women in beauty regimes have variously found categorical exclusion of women of colour, appreciation of the beauty of women of colour to the extent that they approached the appearance of whiteness, or the inclusion of a changing spectrum of women of colour in the marginalized and marked position of the exotic beauty. A shifting economic and geopolitical context underlies these alternative and unstable positions of women of colour in beauty regimes. Asian women were portrayed as monstrous in 19th-century caricatures drawn by whites engaged in nativist politics. In later periods, when exclusionary immigration laws removed Asian workers from competition with American workers, Asian women were represented as exotic beauties (Espiritu, 1997). African-American women, who were categorically excluded from representations of beauty prior to the Civil Rights Movement, have, within the past forty years, along with the emergence of a sizeable black middle class, gained inclusion in fashion

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industry and cinematic representations of beauty, albeit often in ways that continue to mark them as exotic (DuCille, 1996). Among these authors Susan Bordo provides the broadest theoretical basis for understanding how beauty regimes locate women in specic valued or devalued positions. She argues that representations of beauty produce norms for women, against which the self continually measures, judges, disciplines, and corrects itself (Bordo, 1993: 25). Her argument was more than a restatement of that advanced by Bartky and Young, because of Bordos sustained consideration of the ways that race matters in womens experience of dominant beauty standards. Racism and sexism intertwine in the form of a normalizing discourse that marks women of colour as abnormal and thus awed.

Guilty pleasures: complicating the analysis of beauty

The theorists considered to this point largely continue a line of thought that can be traced to the feminist activism of the 1968 Miss America protest. These writers have described the dominating force of a racist and sexist beauty regime that disciplines and ranks women. The 1968 protesters asked women to join them in throwing their bras and girdles into the freedom trash can. Decades later, their daughters and younger sisters have replaced their mothers girdles with a succession of tness regimes, the disciplinary practices of a generation striving to have the toned bodies demanded by the aesthetics of what has been called the post-feminist era. Young black women can see black women occasionally win national beauty contests. They can watch soft-pornographic images of black women celebrated throughout popular culture in a post-Civil Rights Movement era and aspire to the wealth, fame, and apparent freedom given to female hiphop stars who achieve the ideal hypersexual look. New images of beauty have generated new disciplinary practices and new guilty pleasures. These new images, disciplines, and pleasures have added complexity to the gap between analyses of beauty as a component of a structure of oppression and analyses of beauty as an instrument of female agency. Bordos work challenged theorists who characterized beauty work as the exercise of female agency and she indicated a way to bridge the gap. Bordo argued that discoveries of agency in womens beauty practices tell us little (Bordo, 1993: 31). A disciplinary regime can shape our choices. It can tolerate and even produce our pleasures. Bordos argument, however, did not satisfy numerous writers who were troubled by an analysis that implied that women were cultural dupes. These writers took up the project of complicating feminist theory by writing accounts that placed in the forefront womens subjective experiences of beauty and beauty work. Debra Gimlins 2002 Body Work is characteristic of theory engaged in this project. Gimlin opens Body Work by noting the domination versus pleasure dichotomy, and offers to write a more complicated and sympathetic portrait of women who work to transform their bodies. I nd it implausible, she argues, that the millions of women who engage in body work blindly submit to such control or choose

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to make their bodies physical manifestations of their own subordination. Her work, in many ways, echoes the controversial stands taken by Kathy Davis regarding plastic surgery (Davis, 1995). Both argue that women who engage in body transformation do so to feel normal, rather than beautiful, and both ask readers to interpret womens body work as identity work rather than beautication. Davis and Gimlin both stand on the pleasure side of the domination versus pleasure dichotomy because they view body transformation as an expression of free will. Women who, these accounts briey note, are white, middle class, and heterosexual, use technologies of beautication or normalization strategically. They know what they are doing, they achieve some physical or psychological results, and they are not dupes. Ann J. Cahill addresses the problem of agency by distinguishing between beauty as a thing produced and the process of beautication (Cahill, 2003). In a case study of women preparing for a wedding, Cahill describes the process of beautication as positive when it is engaged in by a group of women who perform beauty work for a singular occasion. This suggests that routine body work, especially when carried out in isolation, is a conformist chore performed by women who view their un-worked bodies as awed. By contrast, occasional dressing-up, when done in the company of other women, is creative play. While earlier scholars have noted the pleasures of dressing-up and the camaraderie found in beauty parlours (Bettie, 2003: 64; Candelario, 2000; Furman, 1997; Rooks, 1996: 5; Skeggs, 1997: 105), Cahills distinction between product and process is clarifying and her attentiveness to collective practices is instructive. Gimlin, Davis, and Cahill thus complicate analyses of beauty by bringing in the experiences of women who derive various forms of personal satisfaction from body work. Dressing-up and making-up can be creative and social activities. Through beauty work, some women win the privileges that come with male patronage. Body work allows others to escape stigma. Women who successfully engage in body work ironically win a momentary freedom to forget their bodies. I will argue, however, that by neglecting the social locations of their subjects, these authors produce incomplete accounts of the experience of beauty in womens lives. The authors note the white race, middle class, and heterosexuality of their subjects, but proceed with their analyses as if these social characteristics did not matter. They complicate analyses of beauty, but not enough.

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Thicker complications: specifying the metaphor of negotiation

I place myself among the complicators, but will argue that we cannot untangle the knots of womens engagement in the guilty pleasures of beauty work without incorporating the lessons of theorists who have specied and attended to the social locations of the women whose lives they study. The word negotiation has had an increasing presence in scholarship that attempts to explain womens experiences of beauty work (Banet-Weiser, 1999: 69; Davis, 2003: 84; Gimlin, 2002). Gimlin, for example, concludes that women who perform body work are savvy cultural negotiators

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(Gimlin, 2002: 106). The appeal of the word arises from the activity it implies. Negotiation provides an image, perhaps, of women successfully traversing difcult terrain, negotiating beauty standards like drivers rounding tight turns on mountain roadways. Yet the beauty standards women negotiate are not xed like the topography of mountains. They are, instead, changeable congurations of discourse and practice. If we use the metaphor of negotiation to describe womens beauty work, perhaps labour/management contract negotiations provide a more apt image. Contract negotiations take place in unstable elds of power shaped by inequalities. Anyone who enters contract negotiations is stronger if she is part of a collectivity. Many writers who use the negotiating image seem to imagine, however, the lone woman driving around a tight corner. They frame womens negotiations in individualistic terms and address the oppression versus pleasure dichotomy from within a discourse of autonomy and free choice. Writers who use an individualistic approach to theorizing womens negotiations of beauty standards encourage readers to think about women as they stand alone in relation to seemingly universal beauty standards.2 For example, Gimlin observed women in exercise classes and beauty shops and argues that through body work in these collective spaces, women diminish the place of aesthetic concerns in their lives. By exercising, women can remove the stigma of laziness associated with fat bodies. By getting simpler haircuts than the ones suggested by their haircutters, women resist the demands of beauty ideology (Gimlin, 2002: 47). Women make choices when they engage in body work, but do their choices constitute resistance? To answer the question we must begin with a richer description of beauty ideology. Gimlins eldwork suggests that rather than a coherent and universal beauty ideology, women face a complicated and contradictory set of expectations that are fragmented by class. Middle-class white women are expected to appear thin, young, and well-groomed while conforming to class-laden, moral expectations that they be natural and unconcerned about their looks. In the context of such contradictory demands, a womans refusal of a beauticians styling suggestion represents something more complicated than resistance. The evidence presented in Gimlins study suggests that her subjects actively submitted to racialized, class norms, dened in opposition to the marginalized femininities of poorer women or women of colour. White middle-class women resist forms of femininity that are associated with poor women and women of colour by adopting alternatives that are associated with the dominant race and class. Women negotiate a sense of self through beauty work and in relation to beauty standards, but they do so as socially located women positioning themselves in relation to socially located beauty standards. Beverley Skeggs and Paula Black have made important contributions to feminist understandings of beauty in work that is closely attentive to the role of class in womens lives. In her study of white, working-class women, Skeggs argues that these women manage their appearance through clothing and cosmetics in order to shield themselves from the particular stigmas

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attached to working-class femininity (Skeggs, 1997). Their tastes are cultivated and rehearsed through collective experiences, such as shopping excursions with friends, whose similar class location burdens them with similar vulnerabilities. Paula Black, in a study of white women in beauty salons, develops the concept of appropriateness as a term that allows class, age, ethnicity, sexuality to enter the discussion (Black, 2004: 51). She shows women who use beauty practices to position themselves as classed and racialized subjects of a particular age. Their use of beauty work is too embedded within structures of inequality to be characterized as acts of resistance or liberation. Skeggs and Blacks work recognizes that women exist amid and contribute to reshaping multiple and changing beauty standards that are structured by, among other things, racial identity and class location. In an environment of shifting and multiple standards, which are linked to structures of inequality, it is impossible to declare easily a womans victory over beauty standards merely because she refuses a particular beauty practice. Instead of a single standard of beauty, there are competing standards that have distinct consequences and meanings in the lives of different women. Though public gures and mass media may promote narrow denitions of beauty, a variety of standards of beauty compete for dominance within everyday life. Much of the scholarship that has specied the experiences of non-white women in relation to beauty has considered these women only in relation to dominant beauty ideals. Yet standards of beauty circulating within non-white communities have been neither monolithic nor identical with dominant standards. They have taken shape in dialogue with dominant standards, challenging some aspects of dominant ideals and incorporating others.

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Race, sex, and beauty: dominant and African-American representations

In an analysis of cosmetic surgery undertaken to eliminate or diminish racial characteristics, Kathy Davis wrote that the study of embodiment involves examining the intersection of the persons experiences with his/her body as well as the cultural meanings attached to the body and body practices (Davis, 2003: 85). This section will consider the public meanings of black bodies as a necessary preface to a discussion of AfricanAmerican deployments of beauty discourse and practices. I will begin by discussing dominant representations of blacks, that is, representations produced by or following the patterns of those produced by whites. Social meanings of the black body are produced within what Gilman has described as race and gender systems of representation (Gilman, 1999: 220). Sex, and its projection onto particular bodies, is at the core of the interconnections between representations of race and representations of gender. In gendered systems of representation, women are dened by beauty. Women who lack beauty are awed as women. These gendered systems of representation have arisen in the context of societies, structured in gender

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inequality and heterosexism, in which men have sought to control womens sexuality. Beauty can be a basis of sexual appeal, yet within gendered systems of representation, sexually active female beauties are awed beauties. The unmarried, virginal Miss America is a symbol that has long served to embody and sustain the separation of beauty and sex. Dominant racialized and gendered systems of representation placed black women, in a variety of ways, outside of the beauty category. When she was represented as the mammy gure, the black womans appearance and bearing was the opposite of what was valorized in dominant standards as beautiful. She was obese in a culture that favoured slenderness, darkskinned in a culture that favoured light skin, and servile in a culture in which the beautiful had leisure. The love she supposedly received and returned was the familial, rather than personal, love that exists between a benevolent owners or employers family and its devoted nursemaid. The image of the black nursemaid of white children has, for the most part, passed from contemporary popular culture, yet the image continues to live in contemporary cinematic and televised representations of the large, maternal black woman who provides emotional support to white women. She gives and receives the non-exclusive affection of female friendship. She is the beautys friend, but is not the beauty. Representations of hypersexual black women, which were related to but distinct from the mammy gure, also excluded black women from being considered beautiful. Black women were frequently depicted in caricatures that emphasized large breasts (Gilman, 1999: 221) and buttocks (Hobson, 2003) in ways that signied sexuality of grotesque proportions. Even when not represented as grotesque gures, black women, in historical and contemporary popular representations, have nonetheless been portrayed as hypersexual (Collins, 2004; hooks, 1992; Omolade, 1983). Thus, black women were excluded from the beauty category on moral grounds. They lacked the innocence of true beauties. Dominant systems of representation have positioned the supposedly excessive bodies of black women outside of emphasized femininity precisely by casting them as hyperfeminine. In these hypersexual representations, black female bodies are the objects of white repulsion and desire. In her study of the cosmetics industry, Kathy Peiss documents the ways that advertisers expanded the denition of beauty to include a range of women who could be categorized as white (Peiss, 1998: 149). Advertisers frequently described beauty in terms of types and sold make-up to Jewish, southern European and Latin American women, who were represented as embodying forms of exotic beauty. Through the 1950s, the mainstream cosmetics industrys types of beauty did not expand widely enough to include black women. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, African-American demands for inclusion and growing corporate awareness of the prot to be gained by marketing to black customers led to the inclusion of AfricanAmericans in fashion magazines (Haidarali, 2005). Since the 1960s, brownskinned models have appeared with increasing frequency in mainstream magazines. The brown-skinned model Naomi Sims appeared on the cover of the New York Times fashion supplement in 1967, Ladies Home Journal

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in 1968, and in the same year was photographed by Irving Penn for an interior article in Vogue. In 1969 British Vogue published Patrick Lichelds photograph of Marsha Hunt, who appears nude except for arm and ankle bands and her grand round Afro. This image conformed to an emerging fashion industry pattern of featuring black models associated with signiers of the primitive, wildness, or exotica. The exoticization of black women in dominant representations corresponds, to some degree, to popular portrayals of black men. In Youngs as well as Bartkys work, women and men are in very different positions in relation to the male gaze. Women are the self-conscious and vulnerable objects of the gaze, men are the seers, whose power shields their bodies from being the objects of anothers judgemental and eroticizing gaze. Yet contemporary black men do not have the privilege of escaping the gaze. Given the prevalence of residential segregation, media images of black male bodies as sports gures, hip-hop stars, and menacing criminals have exceptional power to dene the broader public meaning of the black male body. In these images, black men exist as ideal, erotic, and terrifying objects under a white gaze. In this regard, contemporary black men have an experience that is characteristic of women; they are dened by their bodies. Like black women in particular, black men are characterized in dominant representations as hypersexual and are the objects of white repulsion and desire (Collins, 2004).3 Standards of beauty that circulated within African-American communities were never identical with beauty standards held by whites. For example, while dominant standards position thin women as beauty ideals, African-Americans have appreciated the beauty of heavier women (Lovejoy, 2001). On the broadest level, black people have often valued, loved, and respected each other, when whites found them worthless, monstrous, or hypersexual. Nonetheless, numerous writers have documented the inuence of white standards of beauty on the ways blacks evaluated themselves. Scholars frequently cite African-American preferences for light skin colour and norms that required black women to straighten their hair as evidence of Eurocentric tendencies within AfricanAmerican beauty standards (Collins, 2000: 8992; Hill, 2002). Yet the African-American discourse of beauty has never been monolithic and has changed over time (Craig, 2002). When I studied records of late 19th- and early 20th-century African-American beauty contests, I found preferences for light-skinned women alongside protests in favour of their dark-skinned competitors. Straightening hair was a normative practice, but it was a practice that was steadily criticized by advocates of racial pride. A general consciousness of race and racism framed African-American discourses and practices of beauty. Racism is, as George Mosse explains, a visually centered ideology (Mosse, 1985: 134). When African-Americans celebrated the beauty of a light-skinned woman or a brown-skinned woman, they did so with an awareness of the consequences of skin colour in a society structured by racial inequality. When a black woman engaged in or refused to engage in the beauty practice of hair straightening, she positioned herself in relation to the many white and black meanings of tightly

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curled hair. The meanings were shaped not only by aesthetic concerns, but by black political projects.

Beauty and racial rearticulation

Against this background of meanings, I will look at the ways in which African-American men and women engaged with beauty discourse and practice. What local power relations were at work? How were AfricanAmerican beauty standards coercive, and what pleasures did they produce? Michael Omi and Howard Winant have described a process of racial rearticulation in which the meaning of racial categories is reconstituted through the recombination of familiar ideas and values in hitherto unrecognized ways (Omi and Winant, 1994: 163). Racial rearticulation proceeds through racial projects. African-American struggles against racism have included efforts to recast cultural representations of the race. Struggles over representation took the form of individual and collective projects of racial rearticulation. Black communities have always contained a small but inuential middle class whose history of engagement in racial projects is better documented than that of the poor. Middle-class black women who simply wished to present themselves in ways that would garner respect, and middle-class political activists, deployed beauty discourse and practices against a backdrop of white repulsion and desire. From the end of the 19th through the middle of the 20th century, the black middle class proclaimed the beauty of black women in ways that simultaneously proclaimed their virtue. In what Darlene Clark Hine has described as a culture of dissemblance and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has called a politics of respectability, many black women fought characterizations of hypersexuality by playing down the presence of sexuality altogether (Hine, 1989; Higginbotham, 1993: 1415). In dominant gendered and racialized systems of representation, true women were beautiful, white, and pure. Middle-class blacks worked to claim similar positions of beauty and purity for black women and thus restructure racial systems of representation. A 1904 book of portraits of African-American women was typical of this sort of project. African-American artist John H. Adams, Jr. published a book of ideal images of faces of Negro women. Underneath each portrait, a caption described the subjects cultivated tastes (Gates, 1988: 1412). The caption under a portrait of Gussie noted that she was a homemaker who wrote, played violin, and appreciated literature in her free time. Middle-class black deployment of beauty discourse in this period tried to expand the racialized and gendered structure of representation to include a limited number of cultivated black women. Adams portrait of Gussie makes visible the importance of considering race and class in attempts to understand the meaning of beauty in womens lives. As a representation of beauty, Gussies image contributed to a collective anti-racist project by claiming positions for black women that they were denied in racist systems of representation. Yet by portraying the beauty ideal as a cultivated, married, and leisured woman, Gussies

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image left unchanged the continued stigmatization of the majority of black women. Without violin lessons or adequate leisure time, however, many poor and working-class women, nonetheless, took up the racial project of beauty as their own, in their own ways. In the early 20th century, many urban black women whose race caused them to be excluded from or relegated to the bottom rungs of most forms of employment became beauty entrepreneurs, providing hair care services to other black women (Rooks, 1996). These small businesses provided essential economic opportunities for black women and their families and often were infused with a strivers ethic of self-improvement. In these women-owned businesses, black women obtained hairstyles that secured for them a measure of respect within their own communities. Women who could not afford commercial treatments turned to female relatives who used heated metal combs in the ames of a kitchen stove to press and shape their hair. Numerous authors have described the affection and friendship present in black womens home hair care and beauty shops (Banks, 2000: 1303; Rooks, 1996). Black womens hair care practices, which continue to include straightening techniques but have expanded to include braids, dreadlocks, and the use of hair extensions, remain accessible vehicles for black female entrepreneurship, sites of camaraderie, and ways of producing a locally valued female appearance. The record we have of early to mid-20th-century projects of racial rearticulation is largely that left behind by the middle classes. We can view a small number of printed representations of beauty drawn by blacks from the period. We can see the portraits of light-skinned African-American beauties published in black newspapers. These records show that middleclass black men and women celebrated the beauty of black women but only saw beauty in prosperous, desexualized, light-skinned women. In between the lines of this record, there are glimpses of competing African-American standards of beauty. Here and there it is possible to nd a letter to the editor that proclaims the beauty of dark skin. Black nationalist leaders of the period often celebrated the beauty of African as opposed to European types in their speeches and essays. This tension surfaced more frequently in the mid-to-late 1960s with the emergence of the Black Power Movement, when black activists of a new generation deployed beauty in the service of racial rearticulation. Prior to the 1960s, black women straightened their hair as part of good grooming. Hair straightening was a beauty technique used by black women as they made the transition from rural poverty to urban promise. Straightened and styled hair, shaped into immaculate styles, was worn as a symbol of self-care and urban sophistication to claim the dignity that whites would deny black women.4 It was an embodied project of upward mobility. The meaning of straightened hair radically changed within black communities in the early 1960s. African-Americans developed new techniques for creating unstraightened hairstyles as the Afro emerged as a new symbol of racial pride. Dichotomous questions about oppression versus autonomy are too narrow to encompass the array of meanings of hair practices that circulated within black communities.

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The rst black women who wore the unstraightened hairstyles, which later were known as naturals, or Afros, were women afliated with the Civil Rights Movement in social movement organizations or on historically black college campuses. I interviewed Mary ONeal, who in 1960, as a student at Howard University, was among the early group of black women who stopped straightening their hair. She had entered Howard University as a fashion-conscious young woman who followed the conventions for black female grooming and straightened her hair. As a student she became involved in civil rights activities, participated in demonstrations and landed briey in jail. ONeal became friends with a fellow campus activist, Stokely Carmichael, who encouraged her to cut her hair and stop straightening it. He presented her with a new way of seeing her hair. In his view, unstraightened hair was not the mark of a poorly groomed woman. Instead, it was a symbol of racial pride. With his encouragement, she stopped straightening her hair but quickly became the target of ridicule on campus. ONeals refusal to straighten her hair was incomprehensible to most of her peers. The sharp criticism she received was balanced by the praise given by men she knew in the Civil Rights Movement, who told her that her unstraightened hair made her more beautiful. Though activist men told her she was beautiful, she wanted the support of other women. Mary ONeal entreated another female student activist, Muriel Tillinghast, to stop straightening her own hair so that she would not feel so alone. Tillinghast recalled the day she got her rst natural hairstyle.
There was a girl in SNCC [Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee] at that time Stokelys girlfriend, whose hair was natural. I never really paid much attention to it, but one day she came up to me and said, Muriel, dont get your hair straightened anymore. I need somebody to be with me in this. And I said, Well what are you in? What is the problem? She explained it to me. So when I went to the hairdresser that day, after she washed my hair, I said, Dont press my hair. And that just sent a boomerang around the hairdressing parlor.5

Black women who wore Afros used beauty practices (regular hair cuts, raising the texture of the hair with Afro picks, employing products to add lustre to the hairs surface) to conform to an emerging but hotly contested beauty norm. The norms of beauty that circulated on the Howard University campus in 1960 were not generalized norms enforced by a generalized male gaze. Instead they were norms linked to class and racial projects. The transformation of the meaning of black female unstraightened hair was shaped by a broader black re-conceptualization of American black identity as an ethnic identity with cultural connections to Africa. It was also shaped by an emerging national and generational criticism of artice and a concurrent valorization of practices that were considered natural. The comparatively privileged women at Howard University had more leeway to experiment with unconventional styles than the majority of black women. As college students, their social standing was relatively secure. By wearing an unstraightened style, ONeal complied with new beauty norms by resisting others. The meaning of her beauty work was simultaneously an attempt to be beautiful according to the very local

Craig: Race, beauty, and guilty pleasure

standards held by some of the men around her and an expression of a newly congured and politicized sense of racial identity. In 1966, Ebony, a popular black magazine dedicated to representing African-American achievement, printed what the editors probably assumed would be an innocuous feature story entitled, Are Negro Girls Getting Prettier? The article, illustrated with photographs of light-skinned black women, represented Negro prettiness as a delightful product of a better way of life. One reader agreed and penned a letter to the editors explaining that more Negro girls are rising to the middle class and they are therefore more beautiful. Other readers disagreed. A group of black women picketed Ebonys headquarters to protest the Eurocentric standards promoted by the article. One carried a sign that asked Are Negro Girls Getting Whiter? This demonstration signalled a continued shift in AfricanAmerican deployments of beauty in projects of racial rearticulation. A new generation of activists saw systems of representation as part of the structure of racism. Their project quickly gained economical expression in the phrase black is beautiful. Between 1960, when an American black woman wearing unstraightened hair was an oddity, and 1968, Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activists transformed the meaning of unstraightened hair. I interviewed women who had been involved in or associated with civil rights activism in the United States as youths regarding the feeling of wearing an Afro in the late 1960s. The pleasure they described went beyond personal vanity. Unstraightened hair signied the politicized racial pride of a stigmatized group. A woman recalled the warm greeting she was given by a total stranger when she walked out of a beauty shop wearing an Afro for the rst time:
There was a place in Harlem called Black Rose. It was on 125th street. I heard about it and took the subway up there and got off, went in, and cut my hair off. And as I walked out, there was a little black man, on the sidewalk, and he said, Sister youre looking good! I remember putting my head up and just . . . I was shocked. But I mean literally he said it as soon as I stepped outside the beauty parlor.6

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Through body work, she engaged in the collective racial project of the politics of representation. Her Afro made her beautiful under a specically African-American rather than generalized male gaze. The Afro was a sign through which African-American women who shared similar political orientations could recognize each other. One woman who wore an Afro in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s recalled an exhilarating feeling of community among black women:
There was a part of it that felt so magical and so true and honest . . . There was community in the beauty standard. It wasnt like it was one person who was doing this. It was a whole community of people who were embracing these standards. You could look around a room and see fteen, twenty other women with an Afro.7

Though the Afro produced feelings of unity, it could still function to rank women. During the late 1960s, within black communities, women with larger Afros frequently were seen as more beautiful than women with

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close-cropped hair. Larger Afros required longer hair, a conventional feminine attribute. Gendered systems of representation, which require the proliferation of sex differences, resurfaced within the newly rearticulated public meaning of unstraightened black hair. The Afro existed at a congested crossroads of forces. It provided black women with an accessible means of expressing identication with other black women and a way of expressing a political orientation. The heightened political signicance of black womens hairstyles, however, made their bodies more subject to public judgement. Though the style was purportedly a celebration of a natural appearance, it did not equally value every black womans hair texture. Beauty is a resource used by collectivities and individuals to claim worth, yet it is an unstable good, whose association with women and with sex, and its dependence upon ever-changing systems of representation, put its bearer at constant risk of seeing the value of her inherent beauty or beauty work evaporate. If beauty is ever capital, it is a somewhat stigmatized capital. It must appear unearned if it is to be authentic, as opposed to purchased, beauty. Nonetheless it is a suspect form of capital because it is unearned. It is bodily amid a culture that places the body below the mind. Black women successfully claimed beauty, yet nd themselves today celebrated for their sexuality. Claiming beauty was a risky yet necessary strategy for black women, who as women and as blacks were already seen primarily as bodies. Identied by and disparaged because of their bodies, black women had to claim beauty or, to put it in terms used by Sandra Lee Bartky, be annihilated. What we can learn through a close look at instances of African-American deployment of beauty discourse and practice is that there is no singular beauty standard enforced by a unied male gaze. Instead, we should conceive of elds in which differently located individuals and groups invest in and promote particular ways of seeing beauty. We can ask who invests in which standards and why. We can study instances when beauty standards align, producing beauty hegemonies, and when they diverge and create space for the appreciation of difference.

Notes
I thank Jessica Fields and the editors of this special issue for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. 1. Naomi Wolfs 1992 The Beauty Myth brought feminist critiques of the place of beauty in womens lives to a wider audience. 2. Cahill (2003: 43) similarly critiques the individualist orientation of much of feminist theory on beauty. However in her work, the collectivity studied is a single nuclear family. She does not extend the argument to consider larger social bases of solidarity. 3. For an early 20th century example of the erotic objectication of black men, see Hazel Carbys (1998: 4583) analysis of the use of Paul Robesons body as a modernist symbol of ideal black masculinity. 4. In a study of contemporary US immigrants from the Dominican Republic,

Craig: Race, beauty, and guilty pleasure

Candelario (2000) describes hair straightening as an effort made by racially ambiguous Dominican women to become white. Within the US racial system, Dominican womens Spanish language and national origins opened exible possibilities for racial classication. Non-immigrant black women in the United States cannot become white through using hair practices. My argument is that by straightening their hair black women attempted to re-position the race as a collectivity. 5. These accounts and quotations are drawn from the authors interviews with Muriel Tillinghast and Mary ONeal in 1993 and 1994. 6. Author interview with Sala Steinbach, 1992. 7. Anonymous interview.

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Maxine Leeds Craig is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology and Social

Services Department at California State University, East Bay. She is the author of Aint I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2002). She is currently writing a history of Miss Bronze, a 1960s California beauty pageant for black women, and conducting a study of contemporary womens tness clubs.

Address: Sociology and Social Service Department, California State

University, East Bay, 25800 Carlos Bee Blvd, Hayward, CA 94542, USA. Email: maxine.craig@csueastbay.edu