Approval Sheet "Brown Skin Is Half of Beauty": Representations of Beauty and the Construction of Race in Contemporary Cairo Público
Poole, Maurita (2011)
Published
Abstract
"Brown Skin Is Half of Beauty": Representations of Beauty and the Construction of Race in Contemporary Cairo
Twenty-first century Egypt is a postcolonial Islamic nation-state where the notion of race is not recognized or explicitly discussed in everyday life. Egyptians from various ethnic and religious groups, and of different hues, confidently assert that race as both a biological and cultural construct is not a meaningful category of differentiation within their society. The significance of the concept of race, from their perspective, is a Western social problem. Nonetheless, racially intoned representations of darker-skinned people and stereotypical signifiers of Africa exist alongside the valorization of whiteness as an idealized physical attribute and sociopolitical category of identity in Cairo. In a cultural context such as the Egyptian one, where the local population neither acknowledges nor utilizes the term "race" as a legitimate labeling device, how can we evaluate seemingly racialized discourses and visual representations? This question serves as the basis of my dissertation research, which focuses on the ways that Egyptian folk categorizations of race and skin color are expressed and articulated in their discourses about physical beauty.
This study is based on thirteen months of fieldwork I carried out in Cairo between 2001 and 2006. In my research, I examine Egyptian descriptions, perceptions, and visual representations of beauty as a way to provide insight into how racial and gendered differences are constructed. The central premise of this work is that discourses of beauty in contemporary Cairo are racialized. These discourses not only signify desirable physical attributes, but also operate to mark inclusion and exclusion between different groups in Cairo's urban society. I focus on the meaning of Egyptians' desire to create distance between themselves and blackness as well as their rationale for valorizing specific forms of whiteness. In addition, I discuss competing cultural models of beauty among Egyptians (embodied in the phrase "Brown Skin is Half the Beauty") that praises the beauty of brown-skinned women as part of a larger aesthetic ideal that draws upon Islamic and Christian ideologies that emphasize the importance of physical features and the cultivation of an ethical disposition.
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures Preface 1
Introduction: Brown Skin Is Half the Beauty
8 Chapter One: Contemporary Cairo 27Chapter Two: Race and the Aesthetic Body
47Chapter Three: Constructing Race and Color in Contemporary Cairo
80Chapter Four: Representations of Ideal Womanhood in Egyptian National Thought and Popular Media
121Chapter Five: Aesthetic Ideals in Contemporary Cairo
160 Chapter Six: Regional Difference and Global Engagement 199Conclusion: Race Hidden in Plain Sight
234About this Dissertation
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