Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

Shirley Anne Tate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317174004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Previous work discussing Black beauty has tended to concentrate on Black women's search for white beauty as a consequence of racialization. Without denying either the continuation of such aesthetics or their enduring power, this book uncovers the cracks in this hegemonic Black beauty. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research amongst British women of Caribbean heritage, this volume pursues a broad discussion of beauty within the Black diaspora contexts of the Caribbean, the UK, the United States and Latin America through different historical periods to the present day. With a unique exploration of beauty, race and identity politics, the author reveals how Black women themselves speak about, negotiate, inhabit, work on and perform Black beauty. As such, it will appeal not only to sociologists, but anyone working in the fields of race, ethnicity and post-colonial thought, feminism and the sociology of the body.

1 ‘Beauty Comes From Within’ Or Does It?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315569444-1

Introduction

‘Beauty comes from within’. ‘Beauty is only skin deep’. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. All three are well known sayings that are part of our everyday culture. Interestingly they link with Kant’s ideas of beauty as a judgement of taste which is based on reflection and Plato’s view that beauty does not only relate to form. There is some innerness of beauty which is as seductive as its physicality. These sayings that almost go without saying have always made me wonder, ‘what do they tell us about beauty? What do they conceal? What do they exclude? What are they supposed to make “us” feel and do?’ I want to engage with the idea that ‘beauty comes from within’ in order to continue to look at the question of beauty itself. First, though, we should remember as I said earlier that beauty is not neutral. Rather, there is a continuing racialization of beauty in a society in which skin and hair continue to matter (Craig 2002; Carroll 2002; Banks 2000; Hobson 2005; Gilman 1985; Tate 2005; Tate 2007a). Through the words of Black British women¹ I explore the anatomical economy of Black beauty in order to show that, beauty is about outsideness, in a context in which beauty as visible, as inscribed on the body’s surface, matters. What this means is that considerable labour is involved in producing this surface, in performing a visible beauty which is recognized by the beauty gaze. The labour of inscribing beauty on the body produces difference from ‘beauty comes from within’ as beauty value. The performance of beauty as difference from ‘beauty comes from within’ leads us to begin to think about the play of seduction, societal melancholia and agency in women’s lives. What Black women’s words make us recall is that what counts as beauty is never settled once and for all but is constantly re-negotiated, re-fashioned and re-inscribed on the surface of the body. In other words, beauty has no within but is the fetishized outcome of the work of fantasy. The work of fantasy itself is impacted on by both beauty wisdom and racialization.

1 The material drawn on for this chapter is from face-to-face interviews in the late 1990s and the pilot questionnaire of a virtual ethnography which I did in June 2005 on three Black women’s health and beauty sites.

Beauty ‘wisdom’ and racialization

‘Beauty comes from within’, ‘beauty is only skin deep’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ are only sayings but do they betray other meanings? To call them sayings is very suggestive as a ‘saying’ is both ‘a piece of wisdom or rule of conduct’ and ‘only a saying’ – truth and fiction. Let’s take this a bit further in terms of ‘wisdom’/ ‘rule of conduct’. 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 ‘true’. 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 ‘beauty comes from within’ thus reveal themselves as very potent pieces of ‘wisdom’ and ‘rules of conduct’ 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 ‘beauty comes from within’ 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, ‘no, I’ve never wished I was white’. 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.

‘I always saw white girls as beautiful and I never saw anything beautiful about myself’. 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 ‘live up’ to this norm of ‘white girls as beautiful’. As a norm ‘white girls as beautiful’ 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 ‘white girls as beautiful’ ‘is 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 acts’ (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 ‘the beautiful’ because of the work of racialization so you have no beauty ‘in the eye of the beholder’. 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 ‘the visible’. If we recognize the beauty paradox produced by racialization and the ‘to be seen-ness’ of beauty then it makes us look at ‘beauty comes from within’ 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 – the skin deep beauty – which is validated by the look ‘of the beholder’. 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 don’t know if you’ve 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 didn’t 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 ‘truth’ is ‘the straight hair rule’ (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 ‘within racism’s bipolar codification of human worth, black people’s hair has been historically devalued as the most visible stigmata of blackness, second only to skin’ (Mercer 1994a, 101). If one doesn’t 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 ‘beauty comes from within’ and makes us wonder, ‘well, does it really?’ The effect of the norm of ‘the straight hair rule’ also makes ‘beauty is only skin deep’ 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 ‘beauty comes from within’ that keeps us within its thrall, and makes us subject to its repetitions. ‘Beauty is only skin deep’ which could be seen to be the opposite of ‘beauty comes from within’,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 ‘the eye of the beholder’. ‘The beholder’ 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. ‘Beauty comes from within’ valorizes that beauty which reflects a ‘beautiful person’ 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 doesn’t 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 ‘the beholder’ 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 didn’t have tongs. They straightened it with the hot comb that they heated on a paraffin stove and then I had it ringletted. I couldn’t stop looking at myself in the mirror because my head felt so light and I just thought, oh doesn’t it look beautiful? I couldn’t 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 ‘white girls as beautiful’. The effect of the fantasy produced by the hotcomb is that it brings ‘the elsewhere’⁴ of beauty home to the surface of the Black body. This ‘homing’ releases affective beauty value even though here it is within the parameters of ‘the straight hair rule’. 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 ‘head felt so light’ 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 – both through touch and vision – induces pleasure. Being beautiful is clearly about pleasure in seeing, touching and feeling differences on the body’s 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 Lorna’s talk also makes us pause to notice the performative potentiality of the sayings ‘beauty comes from within’, ‘beauty is only skin deep’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ 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 Lorna’s account. That is, the prevalence of beauty expectations, norms and subject positions that sayings like ‘beauty comes from within’, ‘beauty is only skin deep’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ 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 ‘the other’ to beauty. An other who is the object of derision. Sharon’s childhood was lived within the context of ‘the straight hair rule’. When she decided to stop straightening her hair and to instead plait it because of the emphasis within Black politics in the 1970s on ‘natural hair’, this put her in the position of the ‘other’ to beauty. For her, the only possible outcome in her majority white high school was derision, even though ‘natural’ 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 beyond‘the normal’ 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 saying‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ 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 ‘inspecting 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 himself’ (Foucault 1980, 154–55). For Sharon, her initial embarrassment at stepping outside the norm led to her wearing a scarf ...