I recently had the opportunity to read Simidele Dosekun’s book Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture as part of a panel discussion at the 2021 Lagos Studies Association Conference. Reading Simidele’s book excited me largely because my current project on youth and labour is in conversation with the insights she makes about moving beyond the market/consumerism as sites of liberation. After the conference, Simidele Dosekun and I engaged in a conversation about the book on Africa is a Country.
I also did a video review of her book and the transcript of it is available below.
Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture, by Simidele Doesekun, is a refreshingly brilliant book that is also exciting because it moves away from the predominant scholarship on low-income class African women and the “informality” of African cities. Dosekun begins by making a well-articulated case for the relevance of postfeminism in the Nigerian context. Using Kaplan and Grewal’s work on transnational feminism, Dosekun argues that postfeminism and its subjects are scattered and we cannot limit them to specific boundaries and borders; as such, it is then possible for us to think about women in similar contexts in different geographical spaces. Dosekun points out that her research participants have a postfeminist sense of self in that they see themselves as already empowered; and this is significant because in mainstream scholarship, we’re often inundated by the supposed African woman who needs to be “empowered”. We rarely read about the ultra-privileged women who are “already empowered”, particularly through consumerism and its accompanied ‘freedoms and choices’ – and Fashioning Postfeminism brings us into their world to better understand the implications of embracing a post-feminist lifestyle of spectacular femininity.
I am however intrigued by the implicit, perhaps unintentional, statement in Dosekun’s introductory chapter: that is, “postfeminism is only for wealthy Nigerian women.” I wonder about the non-wealthy women in Nigeria’s new economy and low-income women who are also influenced by transnational culture and engage in practices of the spectacular feminine (though not expending as much as Dosekun’s participants). It is perhaps worth researching not just the ‘empowered already’ but also the “empowered almost” – those who embody the aspirational and imagine their future selves as fully “empowered”.
The book’s first major topic uses a poststructuralist lens to adeptly point out the cruelty of technologies of feminine beauty and the performativity of gender which can be repetitive stylized acts that are painful and fail to deliver on their promise of happiness. Dosekun argues that women who think they are performing spectacular femininity for themselves forget that things do not occur in a vacuum; meaning that the choices women make are not really of their choosing but imbued with power that only further entrench heteronormative patriarchy. I really enjoyed Dosekun’s argument that postfeminism cruelly promises happiness (p. 42). For example, the promise of empowerment via self-confidence is a cruel lie – as Dosekun points out, to feel self-confident, requires that they choose normative femininity or be policed (p. 53) – thus women’s freedom to make choices is not free of patriarchal oppression. The cruelty of postfeminism is also encapsulated by the pain and loss that accompanies feminine beauty – such as the pain of wearing heels or hairline loss from wearing weaves. Cognizant of their attachment to cruel feminine beauty technologies, Dosekun’s participants engage in the beauty practice of aesthetic vigilance and take aesthetic rest (such as a make-up free day, taking a break from wearing a weave) –to mitigate further damage.
While reading, I kept on wondering about elite queer and trans Lagosian women – who do not appear to be part of Dosekun’s research demography. Is it possible for some of them to be postfeminist subjects? Which technologies of feminine beauty do they employ and what do these technologies promise for them? How do they navigate transnational culture vis-à-vis
the negotiation of local power and culture in Nigeria? Dosekun’s Fashioning Postfeminism offers a solid groundwork to expand her research questions to a different segment of Nigeria’s population.
Dosekun also discusses the topic of participant entitlement to spectacular consumption. She illustrates that the women justify this consumption as something they have attained independently, and in this vein, it was important to signal that their spectacular feminine consumption was not financed by transactional sex. They clearly articulated their desire not to be misrecognized as a runs girl (a slang for someone who engages in transactional sexual/romantic relationships – p.77). They were too “empowered” for this. They also embraced sexual propriety and respectability when it came to distancing themselves from transactional sex. I am curious about the possibility of considering this embrace of sexual propriety and respectability as cruel attachments too. More so, I wonder why these seemingly maligned runs girls who also spectacularly consume fashion and beauty were excluded from consideration/investigation as postfeminist subjects – for these “runs girls, may very much consider themselves “empowered already” as well.
My favourite topic was Dosekun’s insightful and nuanced analysis of weaves and wigs as unhappy technologies of spectacular femininity. Using Ahmed’s definition of unhappy objects as those that ‘embody the persistence of histories that cannot be wished away by happiness’, Dosekun points out that her participant’s postfeminist claims and affects, for instance could not resolve or even mask the melancholy and painful histories of their hair choices and stories (p. 101). As such, Dosekun brings into view the history of white supremacy and antiblack racism that excludes Black hair from normative beauty – p. 96) – but cautions that we must not see weaves and wigs as mimicking or desiring whiteness (p.90). Dosekun posits that when in “commodity form technologies of the self are inherently fluid and performative [and] it is it is precisely this that makes it possible for the subject racialized and called black to do blackness through hair irrespective of whether it comes in a bag or it straight natty or loosely curled black brown or blonde. (92) – they are technologies of black femininity (p. 101).
I also enjoyed this discussion because of its explicit engagement with race/racialization – while the other chapters allude to race/racialization, there seems to be a taken for granted assumption that all readers are aware of the intersectional politics of race, gender and beauty.
Overall, Dosekun argues for a politics of the unfashionable in a book about fashion by urging us to look beyond the market/consumerism for liberation. In a moment when global white supremacist capitalist patriarchy pervades our daily lives, Dosekun insists that we be killjoys, circumvent ‘happiness’ and zero in on uncomfortable questions around justice and magnify the need for liberation from structural inequalities.
As an urban feminist geographer especially one who is also interested in Black Geographies, this book is a welcome read and also provides much needed content about globally black cosmopolitan African women in neoliberal urban Africa. Most importantly, Dosekun inadvertently addresses the call to create “room for an engagement with the African continent, as well as the relationship between Africa and the wider Black diaspora, in Black Geographies” (Hawthorne, 2019, p. 8). The persistent division between “African Studies” and “Black Studies” in academia—which often rests on the questionable assumption that, with the exception of South Africa, “race” and “Blackness” are not relevant categories on the African continent—has been well documented (Hawthorne, 2019, p. 8). This intellectual division of labor, which is far too often taken for granted, has been productively challenged by Dosekun.