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Erschienen in:

2017 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

14. How to Do Feminist Mothering in Urban India? Some Reflections on the Politics of Beauty and Body Shapes

verfasst von : Shilpa Phadke

Erschienen in: Aesthetic Labour

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK

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Abstract

This chapter examines some negotiations that self-identified feminist women with daughters engage in the process of mothering. It draws on research conducted in the early 21st century among educated, upper middle class, urban women and asks what it means to be a feminist mother in post-globalisation India. The chapter is based on narratives that engage both feminism and the act of mothering in relation to concerns about body hair, size and colour. I attempt to think through the inevitable contradictions that arise when a feminist politics encounters the fashion-beauty complex in the context of mothering.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Seriously Stylish: Academic Femininities and the Politics of Feminism and Fashion in Academia

Nächstes Kapitel ‘I’m Beautiful the Way I Am’: Empowerment, Beauty, and Aesthetic Labour

All names have been changed.

This number adds up to thirteen as I have counted the woman with two children separately for her two daughters.

As Talukdar and Linders (2013) argue concerns about body shape and size are overwhelmingly located among those women for whom liberalisation had opened up career and other opportunities and for which the symbolic value of a fit, often read as healthy and active body, were a distinct advantage.

In the USA, Breanne Fahs’ (2011) pedagogic experiment with her students—where the women stopped removing body hair and men shaved theirs—also pointed to the complex cultural nuances in which body hair is located, including the colour of the skin, the colour of the hair, the thickness of the hair and the visibility of the hair.

See: http://www.mid-day.com/articles/now-vaginal-whitening-cream-that-promises-fairness-within-4-weeks/183036

More information on this campaign is available at: http://darkisbeautiful.blogspot.in/p/about-us.html

An explication of what this stretching of the imagination might mean for the ways we envisage our bodies is beyond the scope of this chapter, as well as my own current imagination.

One way to enter into this debate but one well beyond the mandate of this chapter is to begin an enquiry into the incendiary politics of self-care articulated in a variety of different ways by feminists.

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Titel: How to Do Feminist Mothering in Urban India? Some Reflections on the Politics of Beauty and Body Shapes
verfasst von: Shilpa Phadke
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Buch: Aesthetic Labour
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-47764-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-47765-1

Copyright-Jahr: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47765-1_14