Episode notes
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 ... ... Read moreKeywords
anthropologyromaniawhitebeautifulbaliwomenbeauty standards