ABSTRACT
The Ethnic Origins of Beauty (EOB) is a multimedia project claiming to represent the ethnic diversity of the entire world through women’s beauty. This chapter unpacks how ethnic diversity functions within EOB with two broader critical goals in mind: (1) to nuance the imaginary of transnational feminisms by explicitly including post-socialist differences in the conversations on racialization and (2) to critically examine relations of power within post-Soviet constructions of diversity exemplified by EOB. The author interrogates the workings of ethnic diversity within EOB on two interrelated planes. Building upon critical diversity studies, Yangeldina demonstrates how EOB’s rhetoric of global diversity built on visuality, presents ethnicities as fixed and homogenized entities, reinforces folkloristic difference, and invites racist readings. Through gendered symbolism, EOB’s vision of global diversity is smoothed over and acquires conservative meanings. One way to repoliticize EOB is to localize it by rooting the project within the context of its production, that of post-Soviet multi-ethnic diversity. The author focuses on a selection of EOB video interviews conducted in Russian in 2014 in Moscow. Placing excerpts from these interviews against the context of weakening federalism and Russian nation-building projects, the author identifies racialization, ethnic hierarchies, and language politics as three sites of contention that confound the rhetoric of beautiful diversity advocated by EOB.
