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In this paper I explore the practice of skin-bleaching whereby women (and some men) use highly dangerous chemical agents on their skin in order to achieve a lighter skin tone. Using medical literature from medical and dermatology journals, fashion magazine ads, website ads for skin-bleaching products, and critical literature on race, gender and representation, I seek to make sense of the health, social, political and cultural implications of this destructive practice.
Dans cet article, je remets en question la pratique du blanchiment de la peau selon laquelle, a l'aide de produits chimiques excessivement dangereux, les femmes (ainsi que certains hommes), parviennent a eclaircir leur peau. En me basant sur de la documentation provenant de revues medicales et dermatologiques, de publicites relevees de magazines de mo de ou de sites web, et sur de la documentation importante sur le racisme, le genre et la representation, je tente de comprendre l'ampleur des repercussions sociales, politiques et culturelles de cette pratique destructrice.
Introduction
The practice of skin-bleaching is the focus of this paper, a practice whereby women (and some men) use various chemical agents on their skin to achieve a lighter skin tone, or even to appear white if possible. Skin- bleaching, I argue, is linked to the ways in which whiteness historically has come to be viewed as the paradigm, the standard, the universal human body, while blackness is seen as deviant, degenerate and ugly. By presenting a variety of medical articles, I will show that the medical communities in the west and elsewhere have failed to intervene in the production and use of these highly poisonous chemicals. Western medical authorities consider skin-bleaching exclusively as a black problem and therefore give this destructive practice a low priority. I will also show that the enterprise of skin-bleaching is a big business which brings together members of the medical community, the pharmaceutical industry, the chemical industry into a global nexus of producers, distributors and dispensers of poisonous skin-bleaching chemicals for the purpose of making a profit.(f.1) Finally, I argue that skin-bleaching is a particular, albeit very destructive, attempt to gain respectability and social mobility within the white supremacist capitalist social and political order. Hence, everyone -- "white," "black," or "people of colour," -- is implicated and affected, often in...