Why Beauty Matters to the Postcolonial Nation's Masters: Reading Narratives of Female Beauty in Pramoedya's Buru Tetralogy

Studies on beauty culture tend to focus on women. Some highlight women's meaningful engagements with beauty culture as they negotiate various beauty norms in their lives, while others detail the ways in which women's bodies become the resilient sites of (oftentimes contradicting) articulations of the gendered nations. The article shifts this emphasis on women in beauty culture by instead focusing on how and why women's beauty matters to men. Here, the article refers not to men as individuals—this is not a study based on interviews—but rather it employs a postcolonial feminist perspective in closely reading a series of novels, the Buru tetralogy, by one of Indonesia's greatest male authors, the late Pramoedya Ananta Toer, to demonstrate that narratives of female beauty are important for male nationalists as they reclaim their masculinity as the new masters of the postcolonial nation. The article argues that the construction of masculinity relies on processes of signification and regulation of men's, as well as women's, bodies and therein lies its power.