The politics of fashion and beauty in Africa

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vi | Feminist Africa 21 Profiles ‘Keep Your Eyes off My Thighs’: A Feminist Analysis of Uganda’s ‘Miniskirt Law’ – by Sylvia Tamale 83 Reviews Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul – by Kabura Nganga 91 Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Postapartheid – by Sa’diyya Shaikh 94 The Remaking of Social Contracts: Feminists in a Fierce New World – by Sehin Teferra 98 Tribute Hajiya Bilkisu Yusuf and Her ‘Jihad’ of the Heart – by Maryam Uwais MFR 101 Contributors 103
Editorial | 1 Editorial: The politics of fashion and beauty in Africa Simidele Dosekun 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’” (2003: 382). But even when we are choosing from the given options, acting agentically and self-reflexively on what we consider subjective preference or taste, our very sense of what looks and feels and signifies best is also thoroughly conditioned. I heard this quite clearly, for instance, in my research on young Nigerian women who almost exclusively wear weaves or hair extensions. One after the other, the women asserted that they simply, individually and therefore unproblematically preferred how they looked with weaves than with their own hair. Yet this preference is not individual or idiosyncratic, and not apolitical. However much felt, the fact is that it is rooted in “discourses on [black feminine] beauty and ugliness and the embodied practices of beauty which sediment in our structures of feeling over centuries” (Tate, 2009: 4). Critics may react to these women’s negative feelings about their own hair, perhaps casting them as victims of what in Nigeria we call ‘colo-mentality’ (i.e. an internalised colonial mentality). For the fashioned and beautified
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Page 31 and 32: Feature article | 23 Contesting Bea
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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
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Page 53 and 54: Feature article | 45 Eurocentric te
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Feature article | 51 O’Shaughness
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Feature article | 53 Awards’ Afro
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Feature article | 55 and hence skim
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Feature article | 57 emphasises sex
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Feature article | 59 relations with
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Feature article | 61 Bakare-Yusuf,
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Standpoint | 63 The weave as an ‘
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and essentialises blackness and its
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Overall but also in direct relation
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Standpoint | 69 Craig, Maxine. 1997
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I saw this as an opportunity to pre
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Standpoint | 73 hand as well. I str
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In Conversation | 75 Doing Beauty a
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In Conversation | 77 the waxing lad
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In Conversation | 79 but there is a
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In Conversation | 81 But on the oth
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Profile | 83 Profile: ‘Keep Your
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Integrity during the drafting and p
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even a case in which a magistrate s
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Profile | 89 “Policing Sexuality
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Review | 91 Liberated Threads: Blac
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Biko is also arguably misread to fi
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compelling for a scholar of religio
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dishes, claimed by the dominant Afr
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and biodiversity, while ‘investme
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Tribute | 101 Tribute: Hajiya Bilki
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Contributors 21 | 103 Contributors
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Contributors 21 | 105 Yewande Omoto
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A publication of the African Gender
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The politics of fashion and beauty in Africa

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