The recent commercial boom in women's skin-lightening or “fairness” cosmetics in India is part of the larger context of escalating lifestyle consumerism in Asia's emerging market nations. This monograph examines the cultural politics of gender, nation, beauty and skin color in the persuasive narratives of Indian magazine advertisements and television commercials for fairness cosmetics and personal care products. We situate advertising's compact stories of ideal femininity within the sociology of colorism's transnational links to hierarchies of race, gender, caste, ethnicity and class and the rapid economic growth in the skin-lightening cosmetics sector in India over the past decade. Deconstructing advertising's visual and linguistic fields of meaning, our analysis dissects the rhetorical themes of bodily and personal transformation, modern and traditional science, and heterosexual romance that operate together to inflate the currency of light-skinned beauty. In conclusion, we outline recent challenges to the hegemony of colorism in India and suggest directions for future research that can build on this monograph's scrutiny of advertising's regulatory regimes of beauty.
This article is a self-reflexive account of one postcolonial feminist media scholar’s research among young middle-class women in urban India who read Western romance fiction. Urging feminist scholars to pay attention to the politics of representation of audiences in media studies, the article explores power imbalances in the field that arise due to social constructions of gender, ethnic, class, and sexual identities. The article reflects on failures, successes, and dilemmas experienced during the research process to show that feminist media ethnographies are embedded within discourses of power. By examining the multiple positionalities occupied by the researcher in relation to people encountered in the field, this account challenges binary distinctions between categories such as Self/Other, native/Westerner, and insider/outsider. In concluding, the article underscores the implications of research by non-Western feminist scholars in their own cultures for postcolonial feminist ethnography, feminist media ethnographies, and for media reception research on globalization in the cultural studies tradition.
In this study I took an ethnographic approach to examine the reception of imported Mills & Boon romance novels among women in postcolonial urban India. My approach included intensive interviews and participant observation among a group of young, middle-and upper-class women in Hyderabad, a city in South India. My analysis of young women's responses revealed the social construction of these Western romance novels as English-language media. Romance novels were pleasurable because they were an extension of Indian women's childhood English-language reading. Readers viewed romance novels as resources to improve English-language skills and used romance reading to bolster their identities as modern and cosmopolitan women. In conclusion, I consider the implications of the study for media globalization and ethnographic audience research.
millennium" issue interrogates the representational politics of the magazine's narratives on globalization. The essay's textual analysis, which is based in the insights of semiotic, feminist, and Marxist critiques of consumer culture, accounts for multiple media texts and historical contexts that filter the magazine's imagery. Drawing from postcolonial theories of gender, Orientalism, and nationalism, the analysis explores the disturbing ambivalence that permeates the Geographic's stories on global culture. Critiquing discourses of gender, the author shows that the magazine's interpretation of global culture is suffused with representations of femininity, masculinity, and race that subtly echo the Othering modalities of Euroamerican colonial discourses. This article undermines the Geographic's articulation of global culture, which addresses Asians only as modern consumers of global commodities, by questioning the invisibility of colonial history, labor, and global production in its narrative. The conclusion argues that the insights of postcolonial theories enable critics of globalization to challenge the subtle hegemony of modern neocolonial discursive regimes.
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