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Beauty, as an aesthetic ideal and intrinsically power-laden paradigm, is central to urban development projects. Yet there remains limited critical work that interrogates the colo- nial underpinnings, violent outcomes, and negotiations of beauty politics in urban beautification programs. In our arti- cle, we approach urban beautification campaigns in down- town Kampala, Uganda via an explicitly African, and Black feminist analytic of beauty. Specifically, we center the expe- riences of women market vendors as they navigate city greening initiatives and development plans which promise to ‘transform’ Kampala and re-brand it once again as the ‘Garden City of Africa’. We argue that pairing urban beautifi- cation and Black and African scholarship around beauty offers generative insights as it understands such spatial pro- grams as always embodied, contested, and inseparable from intersectional power hierarchies. In turn, we take seriously and carefully examine discourses around beautification: by tracing its colonial and gendered foundations and its visceral impacts as it is internalized and renegotiated by low-income women operating in downtown markets in Kampala. As such, our focus on beauty situates beautification as a disci- plining and displacing practice and as mentally and physi- cally violent. Finally, it reveals how women try to envision their own beautiful Kampala.
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“I want to … let my country shine”: Nationalism, development, and the geographies of beauty
There is little geographic work on beauty. Yet beauty offers important insights into spatial, geopolitical, and geoeconomic processes. In this article, we attend to the powerful role of beauty labor, norms, and practices in national development. We center the Miss Tourism Uganda beauty pageant, held annually since 2011, and the centerpiece of tourism-based development in Uganda. Designed to attract foreign visitors and investors and to promote a sense of nationalist pride among Ugandans, the pageant-as-development strategy is increasingly mirrored across the neoliberalized Global South. This approach relies on young women’s beauty labor: the work of self-improvement via intimate beauty technologies, and the intellectual work of learning and showcasing a beautiful, idealized, national imaginary. This labor is physically, emotionally, and financially demanding, and is largely unremunerated. Yet, it is lucratively exploited to promote local and international corporate brands, generate tourism revenue, and attract foreign investment. Despite this, pageant participants and organizers find creative and collaborative strategies to navigate these demands. As part of our efforts to fashion a “geographies of beauty”, this article argues that the power of beauty, and specifically the labor of beauty, is central to understanding contemporary tourism-centered development efforts.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1461686
- PAR ID:
- 10547289
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
- Volume:
- 38
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0263-7758
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 829-848
- Size(s):
- p. 829-848
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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