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Title: Designing a ‘vibrant, attractive and sustainable city’: feminist approaches to beautification in Kampala, Uganda
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1951585
PAR ID:
10554896
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Routledge
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Gender, Place & Culture
Volume:
x
Issue:
x
ISSN:
0966-369X
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 22
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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