ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to the Routledge Gender and Digital Media Reader, by paying attention to Black hair politics as a way of providing insight into colonial knowledge production and scientific racism, systems which professed the inherent beauty of white Europeans. This history enables us to understand the role that ideologies of beauty have played in sustaining racialised hierarchies that privilege white beauty practices, and in the contemporary period, how the intersecting positions of race, beauty, and power continue to operate as existing racialised and gendered discourses on social media platforms.
The chapter discusses how virtual spaces, as sites of resistance, have afforded new forms of solidarity building and activism that resist and challenge oppressive regimes; surveillance, punishment, and cultural appropriation of Black hair practices by drawing on Patricia Hill Collins’ development of the concept of intersectionality. Intersectionality will be defined and utilised to examine the ways in which misogynoir and anti-blackness have been expressed in the tensions that exist for whiteness - in its reliance on Blackness as a source of cultural inspiration, specifically the style choices made by white female celebrities. The chapter concludes by emphasising the need for contextual understandings of cultural practices, to be able to examine incidents that have the appearance of simple style choices on social media. Laila Strachan’s contribution which follows this chapter provides a related example of contextual analysis of the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic, as it appears in popular digital media cultures.
