Maycock, Matthew

Dr., Senior Lecturer
Monash University (Australia)

There are a broad range of skin whitening products advertised on social media, TV, cinema and on the streets across South Asia. Over the last 10-15 years, multinational companies, including Procter & Gamble and Unilever, have begun to focus on a previously ‘untapped’ market of men and boys. Fair and Handsome has a reported market share of over 65% in the men’s ‘fairness’ cream category in India, this was widely available and was the skin whitening product of choice for the participants in this study. However, recently aspects of the marketing and wider discourse around skin whitening products have begun to shift. To a significant extent, Black Lives Matter Movement has brought a new criticality and renewed momentum in the critique of colourism, skin whitening practices and products. This has resulted in the removal of some of these products and the re-marketing of some of the currently available skin whitening products away from notions of ‘fairness’ to evocations of ‘glow’ and ‘radiance’. Building on feminist insights relating to the ways in which ‘body work’ is a form of control over women and constitutes a means of maintaining gendered hierarchies within the patriarchy, this paper considers the implications for subaltern masculinities of a specific manifestation of body work, in this instance the use of skin-whitening products. The focus on skin whitening products is contextualised by considering broader questions and ambiguities relating to ‘hard’ male bodies, sweat and ‘mastering’ pain, which emerge as formative considerations in the analysis of the ways that the young male rickshaw drivers in this study are navigating their lives on the streets of a town in far-west Nepal.