Abstract
In a contemporary global beauty and health market increasingly marked by the biomedicalization of women’s bodies, aging bodies, and racialized bodies, Wellness in Whiteness, by Amina Mire provides key ideas, concepts, and analyses to help readers grapple with the social and ethical implications of the emergence of skin-whitening biotechnologies. Mire gives readers a context for this emerging biotechnology by situating its development within a history of colonial medicine which associates whiteness with recuperative wellness. She implicates the “scientificated deception” (2019:80), prevalent within the marketing of these products, in global dynamics that racialize, gender, and marginalize aging women’s bodies and skins and demonstrates how these dynamics serve to rearticulate “colonial era environmental determinism with respect to the Eurocentric notions of autochthonic whiteness” (2019:2).
Mire begins her analyses by linking contemporary discourses associating whiteness with recuperative wellness to nineteenth-century literature on colonial medicine, ecological imperialism, and environmental determinism that endorsed associations between temperate northern climate conditions and “regenerative” (alternatingly described as “recuperative”) whiteness. Mire unveils how the symbolic embodiments of northern coldness came to be associated with regenerative qualities and used to develop and deploy narratives of an autochthonic evolutionary process which affirmed whiteness as an ecological marker of evolutionary advantage associated with moral superiority and corporeal wellness. Mire then expounds on the contemporary corollaries of those narratives within current global trends toward pathologizing and subsequently biomedicalizing the process of aging, and the construction of “recuperative whiteness” as a marker of agelessness that has followed. Mire analyzes advertisements for anti-aging therapeutic whiteness through dynamics of science, ecology, gender, race, and class relations of power, insightfully outlining how these advertisements exploit white middle-class women’s constructed preoccupations with premature aging and the associated racial and gender degeneration implicated in that process.
Through her content analysis of the pseudo-scientific literature constituting much of the marketing for these skin-whitening technologies, she illustrates the conflation between premature aging and “excessive pigment accumulation” (2019:24) and the pseudo-disorders that follow from that conflation, including age spots, photo-aging, and hyper-pigmentation which skin-whitening technology seeks to treat. Throughout these analyses, Mire helps readers situate contemporary mobilizations of skin-whitening technology within anti-aging discourses that are extant embodiments of the erasures of the lived experiences of working-class women and women of color exemplified in nineteenth-century Victorian ideals. Mire exposes how the historical roots of the “feminine glow” as a “symbolic means of deleting greasy, stressed, underpaid and over worked . . . images of white women and the non-white immigrants” (2019:45) have been all but erased in a post-racial, neo-liberal commodification of whiteness.
Chapter 4 situates the globalization of skin-whitening biotechnology within a market driven by transnational corporations willing to further entrench color-, caste-, and race-based hierarchies in their ambition to profit from a market estimated to be worth up to US$300 billion. Through her broad content analysis, Mire exposes the blatantly racist images and ideas promoted within skin-whitening advertisements and marketing content, which use “neo-liberal imperatives of color-blind democracy and rational choice consumerism” (2019:59) to frame the consumption of whiteness as a choice with no racist or sexist implications. It is toward the end of this chapter, when Mire provides a critique of Mikiko Ashikari’s account of the contemporary rise in skin whitening among Japanese women, that readers are exposed to a specific local cultural site or case study for the application of these concepts.
In her final chapter, Mire continues her content analysis of skin-whitening promotional brochures and technical reports to chronicle the economic rise and exportation of global anti-aging skin-whitening technology as an “unregulated privatized health care industry” (2019:77) reflecting the growth of Nikolas Rose’s (2007) concept of bioeconomics, or the “dynamic relationship between economic interests of various actors in . . . molecular biology, genomics-oriented innovations and the emerging and largely privatized healthcare industry” (2019:98).
An undeniable strength of Mire’s work is her ability to bring into focus the symbolic and social narratives of the global racial and gender dynamics generating and generated by the pathologizing and racializing of aging, and the association of whiteness with wellness. Although Mire’s linguistic consistency in her theoretical framework and concepts is helpful, it can at times feel repetitive. In addition, this text would benefit from situating the themes and concepts locally in addition to globally, as readers might feel they are left with poignant considerations of transnational dynamics, but no reference to local manifestations of the global economic and social imperatives Mire describes. Nevertheless, Whiteness in Wellness is an illuminating read. I recommend that this book be assigned to and read by advanced undergraduates interested in the racialization and biomedicalization of aging bodies.