Skin: Post-feminist Bleaching Culture and the Political Vulnerability of Blackness

Abstract

Skin bleaching/lightening/toning, a transracial multi-billion-dollar global enterprise, involves transnational pharmaceutical/cosmetics companies and local entrepreneurs. About 15 % of the world’s population consumed skin lighteners in 2014, with sales projected at US 19.8 billion dollars by 2018 (Neilson 2014). Japan is the largest market and pills, potions, creams, soaps, lotions, suppositories, injections, lasers and intravenous drips are global lightening technologies. Irrespective of its globality and transraciality, skin bleaching/lightening/toning as pathological sticks to African and African descent women’s skins whether poor ‘bleacher’ or ‘celebrity lightener/toner’ because of colourism and post-enslavement’s skin colour preferences for lightness/whiteness. As consumers, women enter the global market in lightness in a beauty culture which negates the racialised gender power relations and social structuration of colourism, positioning bleached skin as ‘post-Black feminist’. Specifically bleached skin counters second-wave Black feminism’s embrace of Black anti-racist aesthetics’ ideology of ‘naturalness’. This epistemological break challenges hegemonic Black feminist aesthetics as well as denoting a new racialised aesthetic sensibility in the contested ‘post-race’ afterlife of 1970s Black feminism as it comes up against neoliberal discourses on individualism, choice and empowerment (Gill and Scharff 2011). For some, going beyond the politics of ‘natural skin’ reproduces post-feminist Blackness as a site of political vulnerability when skin is devalued by bleaching/lightening/toning. However, I will argue that bleachers’ readings of the global skin trade do not mean that they have fallen prey to white supremacy as they ‘shade shift’. Instead, this change is a critique of existing pigmentocracy enabled by their post-Black feminist self-positionings.