E-raceing Color: Gender and Transnational Visual Economies of Beauty in India - ERIC Top Paper.

Beauty has always had an enduring but troubled and complex relationship with the epidermisâ??its color, tone, texture, and its representations in a multitude of sites and media vehicles. 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 last decade bear the forensic traces of competing and colluding signifying forcesâ??racism, individualism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and commodity feminism. This paper's transnational feminist 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 matrices of power relations. The paper's analysis of gender, skin color, and global modernity in multiple connected and disconnected media sitesâ??representational and ethnographicâ??strives to account for power relations without sacrificing notions of audience agency. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]