ABSTRACT
After all these stories of display and narrative, it is time to return to the four women waiting patiently before the king. This, the first woman’s tale, is also a story of showing and telling. Here, we learn of changing ideas of beauty and ideal .femininity. We bear that even as dark flesh begins to gain value on the catwalk, the trappings of this high-glamour femininity are made by the undervalued and unseen labours of other dark sisters. The history which determines these ways of working turns out to be the same past which casts dark women everywhere as victims and beasts, beautiful only as objects of these particular f antasies.
