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queeringperspectives
Oct 8, 20235 min read

#42 - Unpacking White Beauty Standards

In collaboration with SafeSpaceBTB

During our lively conversation with Kimmouy, Mouyheng, Kimheang, and Lihour this week, we compared notes on our different upbringings, and one thing we all seem to have experienced is our perceived inadequacy to the beauty standards imposed upon us, and how our first contact with this imposition usually came in the form of bullying by our peers, who tried to instill in us the idea that we would be unlovable because we did not perform our gender correctly, our skin was too dark, our eyes were too small, our bodies were too fat or too thin, and so on.

But there is more to this than a superficial judgment of how we look, for beauty standards are structurally and systematically maintained in our modern societies to condition the way we interact with each other. This is reflected in our social order, who gets what job opportunities, who is allowed to be a public figure or be represented in the media, and even who is deserving of love. Today we will briefly explore the origins of this system and how it affects our daily lives.

The perception of beauty is inherent to the way we experience the world, but its standardization into norms built into systems and structures that intersect with and reproduce social hierarchies is a recent development and one of the many strategies that emerged with colonialism to justify and secure the supremacy of white Europeans.

European standards of beauty were developed within Christian theology and have the characteristic of equating beauty with what's good, healthy and normal. This created a binary system that made all these words synonymous and their opposites interchangeable. Ugliness is then understood as a physical and moral failure and deserving of rejection. During the Renaissance, this was reinforced by a standard of physical characteristics inspired by ancient Greek art and its admiration for lean, white, fit, hairless, symmetrical, and mathematically proportioned bodies.


We can already see how much influence these aesthetic theories have had on the world, and how little they have changed in over 500 years. In part, this is because colonization and European modernity helped create political and economic systems that perpetuate these standards of beauty in the name of profit and social control.

As an ideology, colonization is based on the creation of the concept of race from an already hierarchical position in which Europeans justified their superiority and right to exploit, dispossess, enslave, and exterminate non-Europeans on the basis of a natural, biological difference.

Beauty, in its association with goodness, health, and normality, could then only be possessed by white bodies. The physical traits common to other races, especially black people, are seen as "proof" of their inferiority and savagery in what white Europeans perceived as traits closer to the animal. Thus, bodies of color are immediately perceived as not only ugly, but also defective, undeveloped, and immoral in comparison to white bodies, which are taken as the norm and ideal of what a human being should be and look like.

Colorism, or the discrimination against darker skin tones, is associated with racism, but colorism can be said to be more insidious because it works within non-white races and ethnicities to establish internal hierarchies.

It is true that colorism does not necessarily have its origins in European colonialism. Whiter skin tones have been especially revered as more beautiful in many cultures before, as a lack of exposure to sunlight was often a symbol of nobility. However, it was colonialism that transformed this into a systematic form of social organization, associating whiteness with civility and darkness with savagery.

This created fractures within communities in the Global South, which after colonization organized themselves around the barometer of whiteness to grant greater visibility to citizens who could phenotypically prove their white ancestry. In the post-colonial era, many countries launched "whitening" campaigns to "purify" bloodlines through marriages with whites in order to improve their national image in the eyes of global economic powers. In Latin America, for example, the phrase ‘to improve the race’, in the context of the preference for reproducing with whiter people, is still commonly used.

The creation of gender, similar to skin color, is another axis of domination that caused internal ruptures and forced the reorganization of colonized societies according to the parameters of the colonizers. Beauty, in particular, has been particularly effective in this area.

As we explored in the episode on fashion, beauty began to be associated with womanhood and used as one of the most effective tools of patriarchal oppression. In the modern era, women were expected to take care of the household and cultivate their beauty for male enjoyment. This also meant restrictions for those assigned male at birth, who could not show "weakness" by worrying about aesthetics.

This was a particularly effective means of disrupting indigenous social relations, as whatever public roles women may have previously had were taken away from them by the men in their own communities, who sought to adapt to the newfound power provided by patriarchal colonialism. Third-gender and gender non-conforming roles were persecuted, using the preoccupation with beauty in "men" or the lack thereof in "women" as further evidence of savagery.

Today, white beauty standards are reinforced by capitalist practices that profit on these insecurities, exemplified by the multimillion-dollar industry of skin-whitening products. But why do we conform to these practices when we are aware of their function and effects?

The answer is not so simple. We cannot simply blame the internalization of white beauty standards as the sole cause of their persistence in communities of color. But, as noted above, systems and structures work to reinforce certain patterns and limit access to jobs, opportunities, and public representation. So there is a very real, material incentive to conform to these standards in order to secure some success in the world. In India, for example, actors with darker skin tones are often turned down for lead roles in film and television, caught in a feedback loop between producers who want to hire actors with "fair skin" because it sells more, and audiences who are used to associating beauty with whiter skin tones due to a lack of other types of representation.

As we can see, the effects of white beauty standards must be addressed intersectionally, as they work simultaneously but differently through race and gender, but also class and physical fitness/ability. The concept of beauty itself circulates as a colonial regime, so any effort to combat its hold on the way we perceive ourselves and others must also be an effort to decolonize our structures and minds.

The first and most visible way of countering its effects is by promoting and defending the representation of different standards of beauty in public spaces, while combating the disproportionate importance given to beauty in this space.

In working with SafeSpaceBTB, we also recognize the importance of art in helping us to interrogate our aesthetic experiences. As Jamaican scholar Shirley Anne Tate aptly states:

“Beauty, like race, is socially constructed, and as colonialism has shown, once norms have been constructed, they are difficult to disassemble within social structures, national psyches and global aesthetic regimes (...)”
“Art can play a role in the questioning of such standards through performativity, as it locates us as subjects. As subjects, art makes us face our ideas of beauty and ugliness and our affective responses to these as socially constructed and subjectively instantiated through our orientations as we move away from ‘ugliness’ because of visceral aversion and towards ‘beauty’ because of fascination and pleasure.”

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