Beauty marks

Beauty marks
By:Holly Lynn Grout,The University of Wisconsin - Madison
Published on 2008 by ProQuest

The dissertation examines how women manipulated France's modern beauty culture---its businesses, products, rituals, and discourses---to challenge gender norms and to forge new identities between 1880 and 1939. Throughout the thesis I argue that beauty figured prominently in assumptions about womanhood. By exploring how a woman's relationship to beauty both reinforced and challenged French gender norms, the thesis suggests that France's consumer beauty culture functioned as a site of both gender construction and contestation. On the one hand, the institutions (salons, department stores, and cosmetology schools), discourses (ads, guides, images) and products of France's consumer beauty culture supported normative assumptions about femininity. These venues provided woman with the tools and strategies for enacting conventional femininity and in so doing reinforced the idea that a woman was |naturally| inclined toward corporeal adornment. On the other hand, French beauty culture opened spaces for subversive female behavior. Beauty businesses, products, and discourses enabled women to imagine and perform new selves. Moreover, by normalizing artifice, commercial beauty culture exposed the myriad ways that the female body could be manipulated, disguised, and reconfigured. The large-scale introduction of cosmetics into mainstream French society thus challenged the prevailing natural beauty aesthetic and opened the way to a modernist aesthetic that correlated external, even artificial, beauty and selfhood. Women, in turn, used commercially-available beauty products, services, and discourses to denaturalize gender identity and to reveal femininity as a cultural performance rather than a biological destiny. Ultimately, by exploring woman's contradictory relationship to French beauty culture, this dissertation demonstrates how and why the languages, goods, and rituals of beauty became central to French gender performance between 1880 and 1939.

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