Getting Under the Skin Trade: Towards a Global Sociology of Skin-Lightening Practices

Steve Garner and Somia Bibi
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Steve Garner: Texas A&M University, College Station, USA
Somia Bibi: Independent Researcher, UK

Sociological Research Online, 2023, vol. 28, issue 4, 1053-1070

Abstract: Skin lightening cuts across multiple and intersecting areas of interest to sociologists. These include consumerism, capital, the body, femininities, masculinities, the power of the media in shaping people’s imaginations, constructions of beauty, and racialised and gendered social relations and representations, with the legacies of colonial pasts playing out in the present. Here, we set out some key themes, patterns, and frames observed in the multidisciplinary work published on skin lightening, and advocate for the addition of other frames for strategic reasons, which we argue in the second half of the article. Foucault’s technologies of self is recommended as a platform for critiquing individualism and the framing of choice; a political economy approach would help establish that skin lightening is a global business and grasp industry-wide patterns. Finally, a shift to looking at discourse and counter-discourse would reframe women as active agents in cultural resistance and change, and not just the relatively passive dupes of the colonial legacy. We thus map out a broad research agenda that would transform skin lightening into an object of broad, sustained sociological research.

Keywords: beauty; gender; race; racial; skin lightening; Whiteness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socres:v:28:y:2023:i:4:p:1053-1070

DOI: 10.1177/13607804221104494

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