Feminist Africa Issue 21 (2016) : The Politics of Fashion and Beauty in Africa

From wigs and weaves to skin-bleaching to the clothes that we use to cover or reveal our bodies, fashion and beauty are complex structural considerations for women in Africa, and at the same time immensely personal. Occupying diverse socio-cultural positions, we exercise different degrees of practical choice over how we dress and adorn ourselves, limited by sheer material means and the market forces and asymmetric commodity flows of globalisation, as well as by the host of norms of embodied appearance to which we actively subscribe or with which we are expected or made to comply. Constantly shifting, often conflicting, these norms are at once local and global; racial, ethnic and national; new, old, and much more. To cite Esi Dogbe, in Africa it is necessarily the case that we fashion and beautify ourselves “in the interstices of multiple cultural and socioeconomic grammars—colonial, local, global, and neocolonial. These grammars refract the very issue of ‘choice’”

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