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Full-Text Articles in Anthropology
“Nails Done, Hair Done, Everything Did!”: Consumption And The Creation Of Black Feminine Selves, Simone Reid
“Nails Done, Hair Done, Everything Did!”: Consumption And The Creation Of Black Feminine Selves, Simone Reid
Honors Theses
This thesis examines how race and gender shape the meaning that Black women associate with their beauty consumption practices and spending. Much of the existing feminist scholarship on beauty has been postfeminist, privileging the concept of agency and empowerment over structural realities. However, the materialist feminist frame has more utility to address how beauty operates within the lives of Black women as a form of distinct gendered racial oppression. The concept of aesthetic capital emerges from the materialist feminist perspective and suggests that beauty demands the investment of considerable economic resources and can deliver economic returns. Despite this, aesthetic capital …
Whose Expectation? Ideal Beauty And The Cultural Construction Of The American Woman, Ameliea Rose Dulaney
Whose Expectation? Ideal Beauty And The Cultural Construction Of The American Woman, Ameliea Rose Dulaney
Honors Theses
My research project “Whose Expectation? Ideal Beauty and the Cultural Construction of the American Woman” explores the cultural and political climate of American society over the last four centuries, analyzing how ideal beauty standards have worked in the lives of American women over the years, examining (1) how they have been negotiated by women at different times of cultural and political flux, (2) how, although beauty has long been an integral aspect of feminine identity, it has become even more so with the introduction of new technologies (advertising, tv, makeup, etc.), and (3) how as a result, the definition of …