Celebrity Skin: Race, Gender and the Politics of Feminine Beauty in Celebrity Selfies

Abstract

This chapter explores a refraction of consumer culture as exercised by a cultural elite in global south consumer culture: celebrities. Focusing on black women celebrities and their self-portraiture in social media spaces, it theorizes commoditized beauty as the intersection of post-femininity and critical race studies. Celebrities are a fundamental component of consumer culture. Their public images are commodities in their own right, traded as they are for corporate sponsorship, endorsements and public appearances. Celebrities are also linked to a wide variety of products: those they endorse and advertise, and those they market and brand in connection with their own names. Celebrities wield huge cultural power, standing as icons of success and beauty to millions of people around the globe, who either aspire to be like them or treat them as screens onto which they can project their own hopes for wealth and success, or their sexual desires and fantasies. Taking a methodological approach that examines the role of visual communication, especially glossiness, in producing the aesthetic and semiotic power of celebrity (Iqani, 2012a, 2012b), this chapter explores the theme of celebrity portraits in the global south, showing how beauty is at once commoditized and globalized in complex ways.