Organizer and Chair: Bonnie Adrian, Yale University
Discussant: Richard Wilk, Indiana University
Beauty is an abstract, culturally relative concept, but "beauty industries" are actual places where beauty ideals are negotiated and produced in modern consumer societies. These papers offer a close look at four beauty industries in China, Taiwan, and Japan where norms of attractiveness and beautifying practices and technologies have rapidly changed in recent years. Presenting new research on beauty product advertising, bridal make-overs, fitness clubs, and body aesthetic salons as our case studies, the panel seeks to advance debate on theoretical issues such as globalization, consumption, and identity construction by focusing attention on the beauty industries that have become important in the region’s popular cultures.
Large breasts, fair skin, long legs, and "double" eyelids are among the popular pursuits institutionalized in the beauty industries studied here. How ought scholars understand the popularity of this form of consumption? What do seemingly "Western" norms of attractiveness mean in the context of local constructions of ethnicity, gender, and class?
The origins of these beauty industries relate closely to processes of globalization, including the export of American entertainment products (films, music, MTV) and the quest to "open markets" for Western beauty products and technologies in East Asia. The papers highlight relationships between globalization, late capitalist modes of consumption, and beauty ideals while emphasizing the processes of localization through which imported beauty regimes are rejected or modified and invested with new, locally salient meanings.
Beauty Up: Aesthetic Salons in Japan
Laura Miller, Loyola University of Chicago
One method through which women in Japan may display class status, character, and an ideal heterosexual persona is through the presentation of surfaces that are produced with the aid, real or spurious, of a type of business enterprise called the aesthetic salon. These salons are part of an estimated 400 trillion yen industry that provides services and products for transforming the body. Drawing on participant observation, interviews with salon aestheticians, and a reading of promotional literature, this paper will discuss the evolution of the aesthetic salon, how it differs from the beauty parlor or spa, the model of beauty it offers up for emulation, and those aspects of the body which are targeted for fixing. In some cases, salon treatments reflect the homogenization and normalization of Euroamerican beauty norms. For instance, now that American hypermammary fixation has spread to Japan through media such as film, TV, and pornography, salons provide a variety of non-surgical breast enhancement treatments. Yet the most popular service provided by salons relates to body hair removal, beauty work that has been prevalent in Japan for many centuries. Salons also offer numerous services derived from existing treatments found in traditional non-Western medicine, thereby linking beauty to issues of health and ethnicity. An example is cupping, non-needle stimulation of acupuncture points for purposes of weight loss or skin revitalization. Thus the aesthetic salon industry, while participating in a global market of goods, services and images, also reflects and creates domestic concepts of body and beauty.
Culture, Identity, and the Body: The Semiotics of Chinese Beauty Product Advertising
Perry Johansson, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen
This paper looks at the symbolic meanings being attached to certain beauty ideals in the context of contemporary China transforming from a closed socialist society to a globalized consumer culture. It unpacks the meanings of white skin and large breasts in beauty editorials and advertising of women’s magazines and shows how the Chinese female body comes to constitute a discourse on identity and culture.
Contemporary Chinese beauty ideals are not merely adaptations from the West. Instead, new, hybridized ideals are created based on the distinct Chinese cultural, social and historical context. A semiotics of the beauty ideals of fair skin and large breasts disclose a cluster of meanings grouped around dichotomies of Nature/Culture, China/West and Tradition/Modernity. Advertisements for skin care and skin whitening products portray a chaste, disciplined and anxious femininity fearful of nature. Ads for bust enhancers, however, picture narcissistic, pleasure-seeking women at ease in natural settings. While both categories appellate their reader as "Chinese" or "Oriental" and use only Asian models, the bust enhancer ads refer explicitly to the Western origin of not only the ideal of large breasts but also to a certain femininity here made to represent modernity and civilization. The female Chinese body then generates and fortifies a nationalist discourse on cultural identity and the West where Chinese women are pulled in two directions, to be the new, good-looking modern woman, but also to be the one who upholds and preserves Chinese culture and way of life.
Spinning—Is it the Newest Craze in Japanese Fitness Clubs?
Laura Ginsberg McGuinness, James Madison University
Spinning, imported from the United States, is the newest type of cardiovascular exercise to enter the Japanese market. Performed on sleek, high-tech exercise bicycles, Spinning classes are designed to simulate outdoor speed cycling. Relying on the power of suggestion and the imagination, the instructor helps the class to visualize a grueling trek up Mount Fuji or a race along the beaches of Hawaii. Down to the identical "energy" crystal worn around each and every instructor’s neck, the Japanese aerobics teachers have modeled their costumes, hand signals, and music after the Americans who introduced Spinning to Japan.
During my year of fieldwork at two popular Japanese fitness club chains, I witnessed the introduction of the much-awaited Spinning program. The management at these two fitness club chains invested a great sum of money in the purchase of expensive Spinning bikes and hyped the "Americanness" of the program to their members. Shockingly, the Spinning program was a complete failure in the suburban clubs. Given the management’s certainty that Spinning would succeed, coupled with the usual enthusiasm displayed for any new type of "American" aerobics, why did Spinning fail so utterly at the local clubs? In this paper, I will use the introduction of the Spinning program and its ultimate fate as a window through which to examine conflicting definitions of fitness between members and management, between local and downtown clubs and, transnationally, between Japan and the United States.
Once in a Lifetime Beauty: Make-overs in Taipei’s Bridal Industry
Bonnie Adrian, Yale University
It takes three hours for a woman to become a bride in the hands of professional stylists with false eyelashes glued on, eyelids taped up to create the folds of Caucasian "double" eyelids, eyebrows shaven and re-drawn, skin covered over with light make-up, facial structures repainted, hair masterfully sculpted, bra padded, and body zipped up into a Western gown. In 1990s Taiwan, most middle-class brides undergo this make-over regime in one of the island’s bridal salons, part of the lucrative, vast, transnational Chinese bridal industry that grew out of Taiwan’s "economic miracle."
Brides of the past, too, underwent beauty rituals, but women today are made into proper brides in the context of the Chinese bridal industry where this rite of passage is now a commercial exchange between groom, bride, and bridal salon staff. The industry produces beautiful brides as its prized commodity, and most brides, for their part, cherish this process as a "once in a lifetime" opportunity to be treated like a celebrity. The paper combines ethnographic description on the production of beautiful brides with analysis of bridal beauty ideals placed in historical and global perspective. Brides are key targets for Western-derived beauty norms and technologies for culturally-specific reasons. Modern Taiwanese constructions of gender, ethnicity, and class mobility intersect upon the body of the bride, making it a social requirement that she conform to these rigid beauty norms.