Putih, Bersih, Cantik (White, Clean, Beautiful). Tracing Beauty and Color among Women in Bali and Closer to Home (Romania) - Irina Savu Cristea

The desire to have a lighter skin color and the efforts to achieve it are rarely just purely individual choices based on personal style and preferences. Rather the ideal(ized) tones of women’s skin (in Bali and elsewhere) hint at social hierarchies and structures created through and perpetuated by skin color, both in the colonial past and nowadays. In this piece, I present the costs that young women in Bali pay to feel like meaningful beings in a global cultural context where the skin color they’re born with is frequently judged as “dirty” or associated with “backwardness.” Next, looking at my experience as a “white” woman in Bali (and at the consumer habits of Westerners who save money the entire year to get tanned on the beaches of places like Bali), I intend to show how the bodies of women who think of themselves as “modern,” are also subjected to beauty standards regarding skin color. As a closing reflection, I bring up the privilege of white Romanian women to be “cosmopolitan” and able to choose to exoticize their skin through vacations at the beach, tanning products, or tanning beds. Behind this privilege lie hierarchies and social inequalities generated by skin color. Many Romanian Roma women are judged and disadvantaged, similarly (to some extent) to the Balinese women, because they were born with darker skinRead by actress Katia Pascariu, with an illustration by Cristina Pîrvu, read by Katia Pascariuhttps://theanthro.art/putih-bersih-cantik-white-clean-beautiful-tracing-beauty-and-color-among-women-in-bali-and-closer-to-home-romania/