Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia

5. Malu: Coloring Shame and Shaming the Color of Beauty

In the prior chapter, I examined advertisements for skin-whitening products in the Indonesian Cosmo. The analysis brings to light the transnational meanings of whiteness in the early twenty-first century. But what of the products themselves? And what are we to make of their popularity? In Indonesia, skinwhiteningproductsarerankedhighestamongallrevenue -generatingproductsin the cosmetics industry. Unilever Indonesia spent IDR 97 billion ($10.4 million) in 2003 advertising just one of its Pond’s skin-whitening products (Clay 2005). This sum is larger than the estimated IDR 72 billion spent on advertising antidandruff shampoo—the top product in the hair care industry.1 Indonesia is not anomalous in this regard: transnational corporations such as Unilever, L’Oreal, and Shiseido have aggressively marketed their skin-whitening products throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and America (Glenn 2008). Skin-whitening products are available worldwide in Indonesia, the Philippines,2 Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, China, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Mexico, Malawi, Ivory Coast, the Gambia, Tanzania, Senegal, Mali, Togo, Ghana, Canada, and the United States. Even in countries where they have been banned for medical or political reasons, such as in South Africa,3 Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Kenya, skin-whitening products continue to be circulated underground (Glenn 2009, 171). Many skin-whitening products have been deemed medically dangerous4 becausetheycontainillegalingredientssuchasmercuryorhydroquinonebeyond the allowable 2 percent limit. Mercury can cause black spots, skin irritation, and in high dosages can cause brain and kidney damage, fetal problems, lung failure, Malu ColoringShameandShaming theColorofBeauty 5 Coloring Shame and Shaming the Color of Beauty : 109 andcancer;hydroquinoneisknowntocauseskinirritation,nephropathy(kidney disease), leukemia, hepatocellular adenoma, and ochronosis (adverse pigmentation ). And yet, despite warnings that the chemicals in these products may cause harm, women, who are the target market and primary consumers of these products , continue to use them. If these products are known to be harmful, why are they so popular? I am not the first to pose this question. Existing studies on the popularity of skinlightening creams tend to focus on the political and racial meanings of these products within the context of colonialism and/or transnationalism. In recent articles, both ethnic studies scholar Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2009) and anthropologist Jemima Pierre (2008) emphasize the need to situate the complexity of whitening practices within global racial formations. Historian Timothy Burke (1996) highlights the lack of agreement on the significance of skin-lightening practices in modern Zimbabwe where local activists and traditionalists perceive it as a sign of the “colonization of the self,” while others dismiss the relationship between colonialism and skin whitening by justifying the practice as an aspect of local tradition. In discussing South Africa, where skin-lightening products have been banned since 1991, historian Lynn Thomas argues that transnationally circulated anti-racist values in twentieth-century South Africa framed skin lighteners as “immoral technologies of the self ” (2009, 209). These debates are echoedthroughoutAfrican-American,Mexican-American,andAsian-American communities.5 Other studies, as mentioned in previous chapters, focus on media representations of skin-lightening creams and, less frequently, reference biological or psychological perspectives. Nancy Etcoff, from biological and psychological perspectives, suggests that a preference for lighter-skinned women may reveal the working of a “fecundity detector” (1999, 105–106). Prospective mates detect women’s fecundity by looking at their skin color believing that young and ovulating women have lighter skin. She is not oblivious, of course, to the fact that women’s skin-whitening practices are also related to racism. I offer a different approach. Although I shall also situate whitening practices within a transnational context and query their political and racial meanings, I have turned to the users themselves to ask why they use whitening creams and how they understand their meanings. What would we learn if we relied on women ’s representation of themselves as they make sense of skin-whitening practices? In 2005 I pursued this question through in-depth interviews of forty-six Indonesian women; they ranged across many occupations, and their median age was twenty-nine years.6 Indonesia is a particularly interesting site to carry out such an exploration, with its highly variegated demography: the country claims over three hundred ethnic groups. The two cities where I conducted my interviews, 110 : Chapter 5 Jakarta and Balikpapan, are the most transnational in their populations: my interviewees included women with Indian, Malay, Chinese, European, and Arab backgrounds.7 Moreover,althoughthefocusofthischapterisonwomenlivingin Indonesia, it also attends to the ways in which women’s...