Maxine Craig
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195152623
- eISBN:
- 9780199849345
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195152623.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This book is a study of black women as symbols, and as participants, in the reshaping of the meaning of black racial identity. The meanings and practices of racial identity are continually reshaped ...
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This book is a study of black women as symbols, and as participants, in the reshaping of the meaning of black racial identity. The meanings and practices of racial identity are continually reshaped as a result of the interplay of actions taken at the individual and institutional levels. In chapters that detail the history of pre-Civil Rights Movement black beauty pageants, later efforts to integrate beauty contests, and the transformation in beliefs and practices relating to black beauty in the 1960s, the book develops a model for understanding social processes of racial change. It places changing black hair practices and standards of beauty in historical context and shows the powerful role social movements have had in reshaping the texture of everyday life. The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements led a generation to question hair straightening and to establish a new standard of beauty that was summed up in the words “black is beautiful.” Through oral history interviews with Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activists and ordinary women, the book documents the meaning of these changes in black women's lives.Less
This book is a study of black women as symbols, and as participants, in the reshaping of the meaning of black racial identity. The meanings and practices of racial identity are continually reshaped as a result of the interplay of actions taken at the individual and institutional levels. In chapters that detail the history of pre-Civil Rights Movement black beauty pageants, later efforts to integrate beauty contests, and the transformation in beliefs and practices relating to black beauty in the 1960s, the book develops a model for understanding social processes of racial change. It places changing black hair practices and standards of beauty in historical context and shows the powerful role social movements have had in reshaping the texture of everyday life. The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements led a generation to question hair straightening and to establish a new standard of beauty that was summed up in the words “black is beautiful.” Through oral history interviews with Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activists and ordinary women, the book documents the meaning of these changes in black women's lives.
Susannah Walker
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813124339
- eISBN:
- 9780813134802
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813124339.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter discusses the attempts to create some form of African American consumer citizenship in order to prove the worth of black consumers to white-owned businesses. It looks at how beauty ...
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This chapter discusses the attempts to create some form of African American consumer citizenship in order to prove the worth of black consumers to white-owned businesses. It looks at how beauty culture both demonstrated the possibilities and showed the limits of black consumer citizenship in the context of segregation, racial discrimination, and economic inequality. The chapter also shows the importance of advertising in the commodification of the black beauty culture.Less
This chapter discusses the attempts to create some form of African American consumer citizenship in order to prove the worth of black consumers to white-owned businesses. It looks at how beauty culture both demonstrated the possibilities and showed the limits of black consumer citizenship in the context of segregation, racial discrimination, and economic inequality. The chapter also shows the importance of advertising in the commodification of the black beauty culture.
Diana Donald
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526115423
- eISBN:
- 9781526150479
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526115430.00010
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter brings into focus an underlying theme of the book – the structured antithesis between male and female attitudes to animals, which was induced by social conditioning; especially by the ...
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This chapter brings into focus an underlying theme of the book – the structured antithesis between male and female attitudes to animals, which was induced by social conditioning; especially by the values attaching to aggressive masculinity in the context of empire and, in contrast, the sequestered domesticity and gentleness expected of middle-class women. Sarah Stickney Ellis’s conduct books for women interpreted ‘separate spheres’ as including special female responsibilities for the protection of domestic animals, while Eliza Brightwen’s Wild Nature Won by Kindness and other titles elided domestic and religious ideals with the notion of taming and gentling wild creatures. The nationwide Band of Mercy movement for children promulgated this feminised ideal of tenderness towards animals, often in conflict with the pugnacious ethos in which boys were reared. However, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) transcended such gendered and class divides, as a work expressive of the Quaker ideal of sympathetic insight into the minds of animals as fellow-creatures of God.Less
This chapter brings into focus an underlying theme of the book – the structured antithesis between male and female attitudes to animals, which was induced by social conditioning; especially by the values attaching to aggressive masculinity in the context of empire and, in contrast, the sequestered domesticity and gentleness expected of middle-class women. Sarah Stickney Ellis’s conduct books for women interpreted ‘separate spheres’ as including special female responsibilities for the protection of domestic animals, while Eliza Brightwen’s Wild Nature Won by Kindness and other titles elided domestic and religious ideals with the notion of taming and gentling wild creatures. The nationwide Band of Mercy movement for children promulgated this feminised ideal of tenderness towards animals, often in conflict with the pugnacious ethos in which boys were reared. However, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) transcended such gendered and class divides, as a work expressive of the Quaker ideal of sympathetic insight into the minds of animals as fellow-creatures of God.
Oneka LaBennett
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814752470
- eISBN:
- 9780814765289
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814752470.003.0004
- Subject:
- Anthropology, American and Canadian Cultural Anthropology
This chapter analyzes the teens' conceptualizations of racial identity, obesity, body image, and gendered definitions of beauty as they surface in a group conversation about a popular television ...
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This chapter analyzes the teens' conceptualizations of racial identity, obesity, body image, and gendered definitions of beauty as they surface in a group conversation about a popular television program. Here, a fast-paced focus group discussion among boys and girls situates the youth as critical consumers of popular culture who cross-examine long-held stereotypes about Black female sexuality. The teens sound off on a variety of topics, including the use of West Indian accents as opposed to African American vernacular, religiosity, homophobia in West Indian and African American communities, and representations of Blackness on reality TV programs. These issues are explored in relation to notions of Black beauty and to public “role models” such as the model and TV producer Tyra Banks and First Lady Michelle Obama.Less
This chapter analyzes the teens' conceptualizations of racial identity, obesity, body image, and gendered definitions of beauty as they surface in a group conversation about a popular television program. Here, a fast-paced focus group discussion among boys and girls situates the youth as critical consumers of popular culture who cross-examine long-held stereotypes about Black female sexuality. The teens sound off on a variety of topics, including the use of West Indian accents as opposed to African American vernacular, religiosity, homophobia in West Indian and African American communities, and representations of Blackness on reality TV programs. These issues are explored in relation to notions of Black beauty and to public “role models” such as the model and TV producer Tyra Banks and First Lady Michelle Obama.
Simidele Dosekun
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043215
- eISBN:
- 9780252052095
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043215.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
The chapter concerns how the women position themselves as simultaneously and authentically black, Nigerian and cosmopolitan subjects. The first part of the chapter addresses the racial politics of ...
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The chapter concerns how the women position themselves as simultaneously and authentically black, Nigerian and cosmopolitan subjects. The first part of the chapter addresses the racial politics of the women’s habitual consumption of, and deep attachments to, weaves and wigs. It proposes a new theoretical understanding of these beauty technologies as “unhappy” for black women but not, therefore, centered on whiteness. The second part of the chapter argues that Lagos and Nigeria are not merely backdrops to the women’s spectacularly feminine self-stylization but rather enter into its very fabric and logics.Less
The chapter concerns how the women position themselves as simultaneously and authentically black, Nigerian and cosmopolitan subjects. The first part of the chapter addresses the racial politics of the women’s habitual consumption of, and deep attachments to, weaves and wigs. It proposes a new theoretical understanding of these beauty technologies as “unhappy” for black women but not, therefore, centered on whiteness. The second part of the chapter argues that Lagos and Nigeria are not merely backdrops to the women’s spectacularly feminine self-stylization but rather enter into its very fabric and logics.
Simidele Dosekun
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043215
- eISBN:
- 9780252052095
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043215.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This book concerns young, class-privileged women in the Nigerian city of Lagos who dress in a “spectacularly feminine” style characterised by the extravagant use and combination of normatively ...
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This book concerns young, class-privileged women in the Nigerian city of Lagos who dress in a “spectacularly feminine” style characterised by the extravagant use and combination of normatively feminine technologies of dress: cascading hair extensions, false eyelashes and nails, heavy and immaculate makeup, and so on. Based on interviews with such stylized women, the book offers a critical consideration of the kinds of feminine subjectivities that they are performing and desiring. Tracing the repertoires of individualist choice, pleasure, entitlement and “can do” that run through the women’s talk, it argues that they subscribe passionately to the notion, or what the book frames more specifically as the “postfeminist promise,” that immaculate and spectacularized feminine beauty now constitutes and signals feminine power. Seeing themselves as “already empowered,” then, what the women do not see is the need for cultural critique, nor for feminism in the form of collective political struggle. The first book on postfeminism both as a cultural formation in the global South and as it interpellates black women, the work offers a groundbreaking new understanding of the culture as performative and transnationally mobile, and a richly theorised account of how women live, embody, and to some extent suffer it, in the flesh.Less
This book concerns young, class-privileged women in the Nigerian city of Lagos who dress in a “spectacularly feminine” style characterised by the extravagant use and combination of normatively feminine technologies of dress: cascading hair extensions, false eyelashes and nails, heavy and immaculate makeup, and so on. Based on interviews with such stylized women, the book offers a critical consideration of the kinds of feminine subjectivities that they are performing and desiring. Tracing the repertoires of individualist choice, pleasure, entitlement and “can do” that run through the women’s talk, it argues that they subscribe passionately to the notion, or what the book frames more specifically as the “postfeminist promise,” that immaculate and spectacularized feminine beauty now constitutes and signals feminine power. Seeing themselves as “already empowered,” then, what the women do not see is the need for cultural critique, nor for feminism in the form of collective political struggle. The first book on postfeminism both as a cultural formation in the global South and as it interpellates black women, the work offers a groundbreaking new understanding of the culture as performative and transnationally mobile, and a richly theorised account of how women live, embody, and to some extent suffer it, in the flesh.
Diana Donald
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526115423
- eISBN:
- 9781526150479
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526115430
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This book explores for the first time women’s leading roles in animal protection in nineteenth-century Britain. Victorian women founded pioneering bodies such as the Battersea Dogs’ Home, the Royal ...
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This book explores for the first time women’s leading roles in animal protection in nineteenth-century Britain. Victorian women founded pioneering bodies such as the Battersea Dogs’ Home, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the first anti-vivisection society. They intervened directly to stop abuses, promoted animal welfare, and schooled the young in humane values via the Band of Mercy movement. They also published literature that, through strongly-argued polemic or through imaginative story-telling, notably in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, showed man’s unjustifiable cruelty to animals. In all these enterprises, they encountered opponents who sought to discredit and thwart their efforts by invoking age-old notions of female ‘sentimentality’ or ‘hysteria’, which supposedly needed to be checked by ‘masculine’ pragmatism, rationality and broadmindedness, especially where men’s field sports were concerned. To counter any public perception of extremism, conservative bodies such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for long excluded women from executive roles, despite their crucial importance as donors and grass-roots activists. However, women’s growing opportunities for public work in philanthropic projects and the development of militant feminism, running in parallel with campaigns for the vote, gave them greater boldness in expressing their distinctive view of animal-human relations, in defiance of patriarchy. In analysing all these historic factors, the book unites feminist perspectives, especially constructions of gender, with the fast-developing field of animal-human history.Less
This book explores for the first time women’s leading roles in animal protection in nineteenth-century Britain. Victorian women founded pioneering bodies such as the Battersea Dogs’ Home, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the first anti-vivisection society. They intervened directly to stop abuses, promoted animal welfare, and schooled the young in humane values via the Band of Mercy movement. They also published literature that, through strongly-argued polemic or through imaginative story-telling, notably in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, showed man’s unjustifiable cruelty to animals. In all these enterprises, they encountered opponents who sought to discredit and thwart their efforts by invoking age-old notions of female ‘sentimentality’ or ‘hysteria’, which supposedly needed to be checked by ‘masculine’ pragmatism, rationality and broadmindedness, especially where men’s field sports were concerned. To counter any public perception of extremism, conservative bodies such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for long excluded women from executive roles, despite their crucial importance as donors and grass-roots activists. However, women’s growing opportunities for public work in philanthropic projects and the development of militant feminism, running in parallel with campaigns for the vote, gave them greater boldness in expressing their distinctive view of animal-human relations, in defiance of patriarchy. In analysing all these historic factors, the book unites feminist perspectives, especially constructions of gender, with the fast-developing field of animal-human history.