Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures

4. E-Race-ing Color: Gender and Transnational Visual Economies of Beauty in India

68 4 E-Race-ing Color Gender and Transnational Visual Economies of Beauty in India Radhika Parameswaran News Release Pond’s Launches White Beauty Detox Range July 11, 2007, New Delhi Dia Mirza, the beauty from Bollywood was recently in the capital to launch “White Beauty,” the new range of skin lightening products from the house of Pond’s. Enriched with detoxifying vitamins, White Beauty is not only popular for whitening the skin, but to neutralize the effects of darkness causing elements in today’s harsh environment. The range consists of White Beauty Detox Cleanser, White Beauty Detox Toner, White Beauty Skin-Lightening Cream and White Beauty Detox Lotion, to give you the radiance you’ve always wanted.1 Pond’s proposition: White = Beautiful/Recoverable Purity Dark = Ugly/Accumulated Poison Pond’s = Cure/Detoxifying Agent Pond’s medicalized and mystical representation of the Indian female body in this news release as filled with dark poison that can be extracted in order to restore white purity belongs in a larger constellation of proliferating discourses on beauty in globalizing India. Extending Pond’s equation of whitening with purifying to Newsweek’s March 2006 cover portrait, a slim and light-skinned Padma Lakshmi (international supermodel and celebrity chef) captures the glowing purity of “The New India,” a promising emerging-market nation that is detoxifying itself of the poison of an undesirable socialist “third world” past. Bathed in golden yellow light, Padma Lakshmi’s Orientalized costume—deepred sequined fabric wrapped around her torso and floating high above her shoulder—and her hands folded in the signature Indian“namaste” gesture insert her light-skinned body within the semiotics of non-Western “brown” ethnic tradition. In contrast to her pale luminosity in Newsweek, the very same Padma Lakshmi displays a tanned and darker-skinned body on the cover of Nirvana, a fashion magazine for “affluent, dynamic, and upscale Indian-American women.”2 The aesthetics of global high fashion’s primitive “African queen”—black wooden bangles on her raised forearms, strips of cloth decorating her bare shoulders, 69 E-Race-ing Color and her direct bold stare—darken Padma Lakshmi’s body even further for the whitened gaze of upper-class Indian American consumers. The unstable epidermal surfaces of morphing white, light, fair, olive, dusky, tanned, wheatish brown, dark, and black bodies that populate India’s transforming semio-sphere of the past decade bear the forensic traces of competing and colluding signifying forces—racism, individualism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism , and commodity feminism.3 This chapter’s critique of beauty’s supple visual economy tracks the polysemic meanings of corporeal lightness and darkness that circulate in India’s recently altered public sphere, meanings that are always articulated within and against historical and transnational matrices of power. While foregrounding the orchestration of gendered meanings and subject positions that Fig. 4.1. Global celebrity Padma Lakshmi represents the transformed global nation. (Newsweek, March 6, 2006, cover photo) 70 Radhika Parameswaran unfolds in the cultural terrain of India, the chapter’s analytic circuit takes seriously Radha Hegde’s imperative in the introduction to deploy the transnational as a frame to engage the“dynamic interrelationality” of seemingly disparate media worlds and“capture the layering of social, political, economic, and mediated processes that exceed conventional boundaries.”4 The empirical and narrative architecture of the chapter thus works against methodological purity and conceptions of pristine or hermetic national spaces, media technologies, aesthetic genres, and gendered subjectivities. Dipping into and migrating across economic, ethnographic, and visual-textual data, I trace the genealogy of beauty’s troubled relations with the epidermis in entangled geographic spaces that speak to each other, even as I stage India as the main protagonist. Cultural representations of the body in film, television, print, and online texts inhabit the media ecosystem I reconstruct here in order to deconstruct fantasies of the body’s mutability. I sometimes take unexpected detours that shadow ethnographic moments, as in the analytic route I follow from a young woman in India to stories of her celebrity idol, Michael Jackson. Mining visual configurations of femininity and masculinity and positioning them alongside unequal global material relations, the chapter juxtaposes, connects, and disconnects chains of epidermal significations, thus illuminating the “scattered hegemonies”5 that regulate cultural and economic imaginations of the body. The Physiognomy of Transformation Madhur Bhandarkar’s award-winning 2007 film Traffic Signal takes viewers into the intriguing underworld of poverty and profit that has sprung up along...