The politics of fashion and beauty in Africa

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68 | Feminist Africa 21 For my research participants, young, fashion-conscious, educated career women in Lagos, the weave represented the most spectacular standard for doing black femininity and beauty. Hence the women positioned themselves as happily doing weaves. But as I have briefly shown, it was far from all happiness because the women’s views of the weave and deeply felt preferences for it were premised on and continued what we might call ‘unhappy’ histories of black hair. Ahmed theorises “unhappy objects” as those that “embody the persistence of histories that cannot be wished away by happiness” (2010: 159). With this, we can understand the weave as a most unhappy object for black women, understanding, though, that this does not render it any less a performative technology of black femininity but rather enters precisely and fundamentally into this performativity and all it promises. My standpoint, then, is to conceptualise the weave as an unhappy technology of black femininity. This standpoint allows us much. It allows us to admit the weave into black femininity; to depathologise and de-psychologise its place there; to decentre whiteness from this aspect of black women’s beauty practice; but, in all the foregoing, to not forget or wish away the fact that race is both founded in and a form of structural and symbolic violence. Understanding the weave as an unhappy black technology allows us to keep white supremacy firmly in view yet without reducing blackness and black subjectivity to it. It allows us to remember the much less than happy histories that render such a hairstyle especially desirable for many black women, but not collapse the present into this past or simply equate the two. Thus, most importantly, what the new conceptual view that I am proposing here allows is analytic recognition of and respect for the complexities of the fact that, as subjects who variously desire ‘beauty’ and style ourselves to achieve it, black women do so in a world certainly not of our choosing. Endnotes 1 See Dosekun 2015b for my argument about how and why it is possible to think in terms of ‘postfeminism’ in such a place as Nigeria. References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Berry, Esther. 2008. “The Zombie Commodity: Hair and the Politics of its Globalization”, Postcolonial Studies 11(1): 63–84.
Standpoint | 69 Craig, Maxine. 1997. “The Decline and Fall of the Conk; or, How to Read a Process”, Fashion Theory 1(4): 399–420. Craig, Maxine. 2006. “Race, Beauty, and the Tangled Knot of a Guilty Pleasure”, Feminist Theory 7(2): 159–177. Dosekun, Simidele. 2015a. “Fashioning Spectacular Nigerian Femininities: Postfeminism, Consumption and the Transnational”, Unpublished PhD thesis. King’s College London. Dosekun, Simidele. 2015b. “For Western Girls Only? Postfeminism as Transnational Culture”, Feminist Media Studies 15(6): 960–975. Hirsch, Afua. 2012. “The Weird World of the Hair Weave”, The Guardian, November 4. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/nov/04/hair-weavesghana-women. Hooks, Bell. 2001. “Straightening Our Hair”, in Johnson, P. and Harris, J. eds. Tenderheaded: A Comb-bending Collection of Hair Stories. New York: Pocket Books. Nyamnjoh, Francis and Fuh, Divine. 2014. “Africans Consuming Hair, Africans Consumed by Hair”, African Insight 44(1): 52–68. Sanger, Nadine. 2009. “New Women, Old Messages? Constructions of Femininities, Race and Hypersexualised Bodies in Selected South African Magazines, 2003– 2006”, Social Dynamics 35(1): 137–148. Tate, Shirley. 2009. Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics. Surrey: Ashgate. Tate, Shirley. 2012. “Not All the Women Want to Be White: Decolonizing Beauty Studies”, in Rodríguez, E.G., Boatca, M. and Costa, S., eds. Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Thompson, Cheryl. 2009. “Black Women, Beauty, and Hair as a Matter of Being”, Women’s Studies: An Inter-Disciplinary Journal 38(8): 831–856.
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Issue 21 | 2016 The politics of fas
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ii | Feminist Africa 21 Editorial p
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Feminist Africa 21 | v Contents Edi
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Editorial | 1 Editorial: The politi
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along with letters from their audie
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normative and restrictive categorie
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Feature article | 7 African Women D
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Feature article | 9 the ‘modern l
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Feature article | 11 our women” (
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Feature article | 13 for the ‘Wom
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Feature article | 15 “Our Women H
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Page 27 and 28: Feature article | 19 pride and cult
Page 29 and 30: Feature article | 21 References Ade
Page 31 and 32: Feature article | 23 Contesting Bea
Page 33 and 34: Feature article | 25 an organisatio
Page 35 and 36: Feature article | 27 of society. Of
Page 37 and 38: Feature article | 29 a small town i
Page 39 and 40: Feature article | 31 selection of t
Page 41 and 42: Feature article | 33 Reverend Thand
Page 43 and 44: Feature article | 35 Hansen, Karen
Page 45 and 46: Feature article | 37 “These Girls
Page 47 and 48: Feature article | 39 the domesticat
Page 49 and 50: Feature article | 41 routine readin
Page 51 and 52: Feature article | 43 or barely clot
Page 53 and 54: Feature article | 45 Eurocentric te
Page 55 and 56: Feature article | 47 what you have
Page 57 and 58: Feature article | 49 times, and ask
Page 59 and 60: Feature article | 51 O’Shaughness
Page 61 and 62: Feature article | 53 Awards’ Afro
Page 63 and 64: Feature article | 55 and hence skim
Page 65 and 66: Feature article | 57 emphasises sex
Page 67 and 68: Feature article | 59 relations with
Page 69 and 70: Feature article | 61 Bakare-Yusuf,
Page 71 and 72: Standpoint | 63 The weave as an ‘
Page 73 and 74: and essentialises blackness and its
Page 75: Overall but also in direct relation
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Page 81 and 82: Standpoint | 73 hand as well. I str
Page 83 and 84: In Conversation | 75 Doing Beauty a
Page 85 and 86: In Conversation | 77 the waxing lad
Page 87 and 88: In Conversation | 79 but there is a
Page 89 and 90: In Conversation | 81 But on the oth
Page 91 and 92: Profile | 83 Profile: ‘Keep Your
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Page 95 and 96: even a case in which a magistrate s
Page 97 and 98: Profile | 89 “Policing Sexuality
Page 99 and 100: Review | 91 Liberated Threads: Blac
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Page 109 and 110: Tribute | 101 Tribute: Hajiya Bilki
Page 111 and 112: Contributors 21 | 103 Contributors
Page 113 and 114: Contributors 21 | 105 Yewande Omoto
Page 116: A publication of the African Gender
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