Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 3/4
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Tanning (Anglo-Australian) Whiteness / Elaine Laforteza
Keywords: Race and ethnicity, Visual Culture, Postcolonialism
Abstract: This paper is a response to comments on my paper “The Whitening of Brown Skins and the Darkening of Whiteness” published in Reconstruction Vol. 7, No. 1 2007, wherein I discuss skin-whitening practices within the Filipino diaspora. Many of these comments remarked that the practice of tanning one’s skin a darker colour was diametrically opposed to the practice of whitening one’s skin with cosmetic lotions and soaps. This paper challenges the idea that tanning runs counter to hegemonic ideals about whiteness. In fact, it does the opposite to mark how whiteness shapes how tanning is embodied. Consequently, the paper demonstrates that in attempting to darken one’s skin, those who tan themselves imbricate themselves within systems of white privilege.
<1> I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!
Second stanza of “My Country” by Dorothea Mackellar
<2> Dorothea Mackellar was a third generation Australian of Scottish heritage. When travelling in England in the 19th century with her family, she wrote the poem “My Country”. In doing so, she separated herself from the majority of white migrants to Australia and articulated her connection to the British colony rather than to Britain itself. During this time, most white Australians expressed what is known as “cultural cringe” which involved feeling ashamed of anything that expressed Australia’s difference from the English “motherland”. Some of these differences included Australia’s convict heritage and the supposed “wild” terrain of the Australian geography.
<3> In light of these differences, Mackellar’s blatant patriotism for Australia challenged the bounds of such a cultural cringe as it embraced what was seen as inferior. Mackellar phrased the Australian landscape as uncultivated (“ragged”), expansive (“horizons”, “wide” “sweeping”), inconsistent (“droughts and flooding rains”) and burnished (“sunburnt”, “brown”). In doing so, she emphasised the brown coloured tones of the Australian soil and landscape. These brown contours of the Australian land also reflected the bodies which populated the nation. Mackellar proudly wrote about her love of the “sunburnt country” and therefore of its sunburnt people. Such a sentiment lay in stark contrast to the ways in which white Australians would attempt to stave off the effects of sunburn and its consequences of getting darker. For instance, women would use parasols and bonnets to cover their faces and wear gloves to maintain their white complexions. The spate of advertisements by Pears, a popular soap brand, also demonstrated this cultivation of whiteness. Anne McClintock’s chapter, “Soft-Soaping Empire” in Imperial Leather examines how Pears soap demonstrated how “Victorian cleaning rituals were peddled globally as the God-given sign of Britain’s evolutionary superiority, and soap was invested with magical, fetish powers” (McClintock 207).
<4> These “magical, fetish powers” were encapsulated through the supposed power of the soap to erase “the very stigma of racial and class degeneration” (McClintock 214). In doing so, the idea of whiteness as the means through which progress could occur was affirmed. For example, one Pears soap advertisement declares:
The first step to lightening the White Man’s Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. Pears’ Soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilisation advances, while amongst the cultured of all nations it holds the highest place – it is the ideal toilet soap (cited in Wade 2010).
Introducing Pears’ soap to the natives of European colonies thus becomes a civilising mission which attempts to “save” the natives from themselves. By using Pears’ soap as the beacon of health and hygiene, the “dark corners of the earth” become clean, not simply in terms of bodily function and appearance, but in terms of morality.
<5> Drawing on Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden”, this advertisement tries to capture the allure of empire and the imperial power the poem tried to evoke. Originally, Kipling wrote the poem to advice the USA to “take on the burden” of empire in their relationship with the Philippines, their newly acquired territory during the late 1890s. In the poem, Kipling notes that the USA has the duty (as a colonial power) to save their colonial subjects. This same civilising imperative is embraced by Pears through this advertisement and its reference to Kipling’s assertions of colonial duty, power and obligation.
<6> Gesturing towards the USA’s role as coloniser positions Australian viewers of the advertisement within a shared lexicon of white colonial power and responsibility; a responsibility phrased as a “white burden” to civilise and educate non-whites. However, Pears’ soap was not simply presented as a tool for “brightening” non-white people, but was also used to maintain the whiteness of white subjects. For example, another advertisement depicts a blonde pale-skinned woman with the words “Matchless for the Complexion” written across the lower part of her body. The use of a blonde pale-skinned woman juxtaposed against a black background serves to distinguish her pale “clean” skin and makes it more apparent/whiter. As Kathleen Connellan specifies, “White in this sense becomes the one upright against which all else is peripheral” (1).
<7> There are of course a range of differences within the categories of “whiteness” and “non-whiteness”, but within the Pears’ soap advertisements, a homogenous type of whiteness is presented against the backdrop of hordes of different non-white others. It is this stable white identity that becomes “matchless” as using Pears’ soaps can supposedly ensure that white individuals retain their light complexions. Consequently, even though Anglo-Australian women lived within a “sunburnt” and “brown” land, they could still maintain a distinction from the “sunburnt” “brown” Australian land, if they used Pears soap.
<8> However, Dorothea Mackellar’s “love” of the non-white characteristics of Australia appears to oppose such ideas of whiteness. Instead of separating herself from the brownness of the land, she embodies it and makes it her own. She phrases this brownness as “my country”, joyously writing, “the wide brown land for me”. However, it is this very sense of possession that points towards a similar stance that the Pears’ soap advertisements outlined. Mackellar employs a “possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty” in Aileen-Moreton Robinson’s terms (1).
<9> This possessiveness demonstrates that people and their histories become legitimate only when they can be qualified in terms of whiteness, or as Edward Said writes, the “White Man” becomes “the maker of contemporary history” (238). This gendered specification points to the patriarchal logic of whiteness, but does not mean that only men espouse such a logic, as can be evidenced through the ways Mackellar takes up the space around her and composes it as her own. Further, Mackellar’s possessive claim of the brown land and its “far horizons” does not position her as brown or as thinking beyond the horizons of her whiteness. Her use of the word “sunburnt” shows that her attachment to the brownness of the country occurs through the sun-kissed skin of a white woman.
<10> Traditionally, the word “sunburnt” is used for white individuals and points towards the ability of white skin to be “burnt”. It is this maintenance of whiteness through its relationship with brownness that positions Mackellar within a specific history of white settler colonialism which comprises the parameters of the Australian nation. In light of this, Mackellar’s admiration of Australia’s “far horizons” indicate a limited stretch wherein Australia is composed in and through white authority and possession.
<11> I draw on the practice of tanning in Australia as a way to think through the racialised horizons constituted by Anglo-Australian whiteness. By naming Australia as a “sunburnt” country, Mackellar intimates the tanning of white skins and phrases this in terms of something that can be loved. In more contemporary times, Australians understand tanning as a symbol of health, beauty and attractiveness. For instance, in Who Magazine’s “Sexiest People” edition of 2010, Australian actress, Esther Anderson was included among the bevy of “beauties”. When asked to complete the sentence: “I feel sexiest when...”. Anderson replies that she feels sexiest when she had “a spray tan and [has] that great glow happening” (84).
<12> The connection of sexiness with tanned skin is not rare within Australia as the plethora of tanning products, solariums, and sunbathing bodies on beaches demonstrate. In my experience, Anglo-Australians have remarked on how “lucky” I am to “already be dark” so that I do not have to tan. Additionally, some of my Anglo-Australian friends feel proud when they compare their skin to mine and realise that they are darker than me because of their exposure to the sun. Such attitudes appear to idealise tanned skin to the point that it begins to function like a fetish, “an object which seems ‘alienated’ and abstracted from the everyday material world and which therefore holds a connection to the ‘mystery’ of truth” (Schirato and Webb 118-119).
<13> Solariums are also named as the search for and acquiring the fetish that is tanned skin. For instance, “Tan Fetish” is the name for solarium/tanning centres in Mackenzie, Queensland. Skin tanning products such as “Ultimate Fixation Fetish Moderately Teasing Tingle Tanning Lotion” also package tanning as a fetish. An advertisement for their lotion specifies, “This pulse racing, moderately teasing, tingle lotion will assure that your tan radiates in one tanning session” (TanForLess 1).
<14> This naming of tanning as a fetish specifies that striving to embody brownness for oneself by white individuals is something that needs to be done as it is “outside” their normative ways of being. It becomes something that can elevate white skin, to the point that the chromatic surfaces of the flesh are not the only spaces being changed, but sensation, heart-beat, and emotions in general become energised. Acquiring tanned skin also becomes a way to present oneself as exciting and beautiful. To become beautiful and exciting implies that one is not either; therefore becoming tanned connotes the possession and embodiment of characteristics that make one better. This begs the question: better than what?
<15> The University of Queensland researcher, Liane McDermott, of the Centre for Health Promotion and Cancer Research, specified that her research has shown that: “Although adolescents were concerned about skin cancer, they were also concerned about self-image and looking beautiful due to culture pressures of today‘s society. Their stereotypical image of beauty, although magazines presented models with a variety of hair colours and skin shades, was still of a blonde, tanned woman” (1). In this context, Australian beauty is predominantly conceptualised as blonde and tanned. The emphasis here is not simply on being tanned but also on having blonde hair. In this case, it is not necessarily being brown that is lauded, but being browned, as this connotes that it is whiteness (or blondeness) that is the “original” foundation for one’s skin-colour. Perhaps this is why the lotion mentioned earlier, “Ultimate Fixation Fetish Moderately Teasing Tingle Tanning Lotion”, has the word “moderately” amongst other descriptors which are the very opposite to moderation: “ultimate”, “fixation” “tingle”, and “teasing”.
<16> Users of this product can experience all these heightened sensations while knowing that one does not lose touch with whiteness. They are able to modify themselves, but only in moderation and within the parameters of whiteness. In this case, adulation for browned skin does not demonstrate a loss of whiteness. This is because to change the colour of one’s skin, but to be able to moderate it implies a sense of control. In this context, brownness is what is consumed in terms of whiteness. Flannery O’ Connor’s description of Nelson, a white American southern boy, and his attraction to a “coloured” woman, articulates the evocation of such a desire, and its consequent suppression:
He stood drinking in every detail of her…He suddenly wanted her to reach down and pick him up and draw him against her…Nelson would have collapsed at her feet if Mr Head [his white guardian for the day] had not pulled him roughly away…They hurried down the street and Nelson did not look back at the woman. He pushed his hat sharply forward over his face which was already burning with shame (cited in Thandeka 25).
<17> Nelson’s desire to make physical contact with the woman is suppressed by his “white guardian”, and by the shame he felt in wanting to become intimate with non-whiteness. However, Nelson affirms his place within a collective white identity as he turns his back on the woman. His rejection of the woman demonstrates his submission to a white authority and his literacy in understanding the normative codes of his “white” space; that is, to be disciplined enough to maintain a distinction to non-whiteness while still being in its presence.
<18> In the Australian context, such a distinction was enforced through the violence of terra nullius. Mackellar’s use of the descriptor “far horizons” points towards a scene of openness, emptiness; a blankness that is not possessed and filled by human life. The arrival of white settlers to Australian shores brought the fiction of terra nullius to the land and everything and everyone within it. Terra nullius is the Latin term which means “land belonging to nobody”. As a legal doctrine, terra nullius enabled the attempts to eradicate Indigenous people from the face of the continent and encouraged the notion that Indigenous people were little more than flora and fauna, less than human. This colonial legality thus allowed an illegal theft of Indigenous land and livelihoods, therefore, an effacement based on a colonial, imperialistic Euro-centric logic was constituted. This determined that since the land the white settlers landed on was not structured according to a European standard (for example, there were no visibly recognisable churches), the people who were living there could not be recognised as human beings. This was because they supposedly did not demonstrate the capacity and capability to establish “human” (meaning European) civilisation.
<19> Even in more contemporary times, as relations between Indigenous-Australians and white Australians appear to erode the fiction of terra nullius, whiteness remains the fundamental point. For instance, key events in the 1990s revolved around the constitution of Australia in relation to its white and black inhabitants. For example, the Keating government’s 1993 Land Rights Act supported the 1992 High Court Mabo decision which engendered three specific movements. These consisted of the dismissal of Australia as a terra nullius, the decision that early white settlers had illegally annexed the land from its original inhabitants, and the ruling that Eddie Mabo’s family were entitled to own the land they were living on because they had lived continuously on it. This meant that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who could prove that they were living continuously on their land could not have the land taken away from them. The Land Rights Act thus instigated Indigenous land rights legislation and encouraged the process of reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. Yet, it is through white technologies and institutions of power that both Indigenous and Anglo identity, space, and movement is legalised. In this respect, whiteness and Indigeneity are defined in terms of “white” power and the security of one’s position in relation to the access (or lack of access) to this power. It is also white institutions of law that determine the conditions through which Indigenous “continuous living” on land can be justified. The effects of terra nullius thus continue to shape how Australian citizens feel at home or not at home within the Australian nation. A cultural lag pervades wherein the doctrine has been eradicated, but the feelings, actions and frameworks of knowledge-power that enabled such a doctrine continue to exert its influence over the population.
<20> The contemporary effects of this can be evidenced through a conversation with colonial historian, Sue Stanton, a Kungarakan - Gurindji woman, who noted that she did not feel Australian even though she is a First Australian with a passport that verifies her legal status as an Australian citizen. She felt trapped by the colonialist categorisation of “Australia” and the Indigenous dispossession that term and the nation that bears it continues to sanction. Here, Stanton indicates the paradoxical relationship of being at home while simultaneously feeling displaced from it. Such uncertainty stems from the type of Indigenous body she embodies and the spaces of enforced non-Indigeneity sponsored and developed by the Australian nation. Consequently, how can Stanton feel “Australian” if Australia processes her as “other” to dominant Australian cultures and politics? As a nation that privileges a dominant Anglo identity, Indigenous sovereignty becomes an embodied disembodiment, a being that is felt, but not dominantly perceived as representing the legitimate character of Australian society and culture. Irene Watson specifies: “Australia is a place taken without the consent of the ‘natives’ - with no treaty or agreements ever signed - where terra nullius filled a lawless void, is now hungry to construe our consent to the theft of our lands and the genocide of our peoples” (1).
<21> Watson argues that to constitute the current Australian nation-state, its citizens must continually efface Indigenous sovereignty. In light of this, Stanton’s sense of being in Australia while being effaced of her Australianness speaks of the ongoing terra nullius Watson attacks.
Tanning as touristic capital
<22> Stanton’s “feeling out of place” and Watson’s articulation of being moved, forcibly, from one’s place, becomes resignified through tanning white skin. Instead of feeling displaced, tanning animates a sense of place and belonging to a certain zone of (white) beauty. Here, tanning is not about being classified as “other” and therefore as abhorrent, but entails capturing the “unknown” and experiencing/embodying otherness. This type of experience can be seen in the ways travel is depicted as a cosmopolitan achievement for Australians. The term cosmopolitan has the connotation of being worldly, therefore such knowledge becomes cultural capital as it packages the person who acquires this knowledge as learned, cultured and civilized through their interactions beyond the borders of their own home. Travelling, in this sense becomes a way in which individuals can “self- test” their personal limitations and show strength in character to be willing to challenge their normative comfort zones (Phipps 81). Such understandings of travel are built upon rendering experience as an “epistemological privilege”, “a kind of pristine contact between the subject and the reality in which this subject is immersed” (Robbins 83).
<23> This sense of travelling as epistemological privilege can be evidenced in the celebrated notion of “experience” that frames tourist discourses. Peter Phipps suggests that the aim of the tourist is to experience the “everyday life of the Other”, and that the extent of this experience is an indicator of status “in the travel subculture” (79, 84). He stresses that experience is packaged as a commodity that can be materially acquired through the collection of photographs, correspondence and anecdotes (79, 75). Like material commodities, Phipps suggests that there are a number of criteria that determine the value of experience. He notes that these criteria vary between travel subcultures, but focuses on the criteria that constitute the backpacker’s experiences as valuable. Within these he includes “their lack of availability to the mass tourist, their relative danger or lack of certainty or outcome and the sincerely non-commercial nature of the [experience] exchange” (Phipps 84). Similarly, Claudio Minca points out that discourses of tourism belonging to the most affluent stream of tourists depend upon the same ideas of experience. However, they do not refer to the same set of criteria to determine the value of experience. He points out that within this particular tourist discourse, emphasis is placed on recreation and relaxation derived by cultural enrichment (389). Minca argues that within the affluent travel subculture, tourism is caught up with the concept of the “holiday”, which, he maintains, depends upon “the opportunity to change or shift spatial context, to reach destinations that differ from one’s (familiar) place of origin” (390).
<24> Correspondingly, tanning aligns with both tourist subcultures in its fixation on otherness as a source for experience and knowledge. Yet, it differs to the backpacker experience in that tanning is produced and organised through commercial channels. The plethora of commercial products and the attachment of these products and their consequences to celebrities demonstrate that tanning is not divorced from the commercial nature of the experience. Rather, as Phipps relays through his analysis on travelling, “experience” can be a commodity that can be materially gained. In the same manner, tanning is commodified to the point that it is linked to particular products. These products all have a market value and correspond to expectations of how well they can tan the skin. The notion of tanning as fetish is relevant here again, but this time in terms of commodity fetishism wherein “the belief that by buying a certain object, the consumer can change his or her life in some important way” is produced (Mirzoeff 157). For instance, in Courtney Hutchison’s article “A Healthy Tan: Darker Skin Rated More Attractive”, she cites the experiences of Lauren Kafka, a user of a tanning bed. Kafka uses the tanning bed three times a week in order to boost her confidence (1). Her belief that the tanning bed will make her confident (and indeed makes her feel confident) connotes this belief in the object and practice of tanning as something talismanic, as something that can lift her beyond the bounds of low self-esteem.
<25> The idea of the holiday is relevant here as it showcases the point Minca was making about reaching a space that is different to one’s own. However, this is a type of traveling that ensures that no one becomes the other. Instead, people can enjoy otherness through their separation from it. Tanned skin evokes romanticised ideas of the holiday as can be evidenced on the Facebook group, “Damn you, Australia!” This group was created by a New Zealand user of the online network to share their disappointment over the incongruity they experienced through watching Tourism Australia advertisements in New Zealand and the reality they faced when they arrived on Australian shores. This Facebook User explains that the Tourism Australia advertisements portrayed “beautiful, tanned people, lounging on beautiful sunny beaches, having a great time” (1). The user’s experience contradicted these images as the weather proved anything but sunny and pelted down with rain. Frustration thus ensued, motivating the user to vent: “Our plans were once again brutally foiled by appalling weather today. Seriously Australia. All I want is a tan” (1). In this person’s view, tanning is not only the source for the holiday to Australia, but the tan itself becomes the measure of the holiday. The tan becomes the holiday as it presents a different experience, a foray into otherness which enables the traveler to escape their everyday environment.
<26> Yet there are those that have questioned this idealistic and utopian rendition of escape and travel. In his book, Tristes tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss mourns the loss of a romanticised notion of European travel untrammeled by the detritus of its history (which includes colonial violence). He specifies:
Now that the Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete…when the whole of Asia is beginning to look like a dingy suburb, when shanty towns are spreading across Africa, when civil and military aircraft blight the primeval innocence of the American or Melanesian forests even before destroying their virginity, what else can the so-called escapism of travelling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history? The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our filth, thrown into the face of mankind (43).
Travelling, in this context exposes the underbelly of colonialism’s credo of the “white man’s burden” which sought to civilise and educate in order to “save” non-white natives. While Lévi-Strauss gestures towards the ways in which urbanisation, capitalism and globalization impact on the supposedly pristine nature of otherness, he also intimates the constitutive force of colonialism as (in)forming the loss of the European journey that was “full of dreamlike promises” (37). In this context, current European travels become construed as always-already fraught with tension, contaminated by the evidence of past travels and geopolitical exchanges.
<27> The holiday “vibe” which tanning connotes does not attach itself to such an idea of travel, but instead focuses on the idealistic adventure lamented by Lévi-Strauss as lost. Tanning, in this context, becomes a way to acquire otherness without the threat of contamination. Otherness becomes something that can be possessed without fear of negative consequence.
<28> Yet, tanning connotes that skin-cells are being destroyed. The continual loop of advertisements on Australian print, radio and audio-visual media attest to the fact that tanning is in fact unhealthy. In 1981, the Cancer Council of Australia launched their “Slip, Slop, Slap” campaign to remind Australians to “Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen and slap on a hat” in order to prevent skin-cancer. The approach in this campaign was to directly arm Australians with the knowledge to prevent skin-cancer. But later campaigns and advertisements slightly shifted focus and discussed tanning as a practice that needed to stop. For instance, the Australian government backed a four year National Skin Cancer Awareness campaign which ended on 29 January 2010. This campaign was created to educate Australian teenagers about how to protect themselves from the sun, as well as to make them aware of how serious sun damage was in terms of skin cancer. Advertisements were also designed to promote the same message. For example, an advertisement developed by Wilson Everard Advertising received a lot of coverage on commercial and non-commercial television channels. It showed the stomach of a young white woman etched with a tattoo of the sun which transfigures into different consequences of tanning: “premature ageing”, “skin cancer melanomas” and the “ugly scarring caused by skin cancer removal” (2008). Yet, despite these warnings, tanning either safely or unsafely occurs and the tanned look continues to appeal to many people as beautiful.
Conclusion
<29> In her article “The Color of Permission: Ritual, Race, and the Tanning Transformation”, Mary Elizabeth Adams asks why tanning is idealised despite these known dangers? Drawing on the context of white American women, she writes that despite the known dangers of sun-beds, these women still use them as way to cross the “ethnic divide”. Adams argues that there is a perceived sexual freedom and liberation associated with African-American women that white American women wish to embody through tanning their skin. Here, Adams insinuates that these white women desire blackness, not as a means to dominate it, but to become blackness, to embody it for themselves and as their own body. She says: “They were seeking a complete reversal of whiteness and the shortcomings they associate with it…This transformation [tanning] offers young women permission to become another or, in this case, ‘the Other.’” (2008).
<30> However, does this “complete reversal of whiteness” really entail a switch from being conceptualised as a white person to becoming recognised as a black one? Adams offers the example of university themed parties of “Pimps and Hos” wherein students (mostly white, but some black) acted out their ideas of “stereotypical ghetto life” (2008). She writes that the white students who went to these parties demonstrate their “desire to make contact” with the Other through role-playing, a performance (in)formed by white youths’ celebration of “rap culture” and its portrayal of the ghetto (2008). In this case, Adams makes the assumption that the ghetto is simply and solely a black space, thus discounting the variety of races that compose these spaces.
<31> In the USA, Latinos, white individuals and newly arrived migrants of various ethnicities also comprise the “ghettos” of the USA. However, in Adam’s analysis, the ghetto is narrativised as solely a Black space, an idea that is replicated in the “Pimps and Hos” parties. The perceived commonalities between the two construct blackness as synonymous with a “wild”, dangerous sexuality, which influences “the white female gaze [to construct] the black female body [as] a symbol of uninhibited sexuality (Adams 2008). Here, Adams states that while this may appear to show the white woman’s desire to dominate over and appropriate blackness, what it instead demonstrates is an appreciation of blackness. This appreciation removes guilt, “convincing the white students that they are acting within the realm of acceptable behaviour” (2008).” What is revealed here is the desire to be with otherness in a way that is not tinged with the baggage of history. Such a position allows white individuals to be white without consequence.
<32> This central focus on whiteness is evident in the practice of white tanning and white attendance to “black” themed parties wherein white people still surround themselves primarily with other white people and do an activity that mostly white people do. If these white individuals really wanted to be “the other” and appreciate “the other”, why do they do so within white zones, filled with white people? Would it not make more sense to participate with others on their own terms? “Black” parties and tanning, in this case, become events chiefly for white subjects, moments primarily involved with their concerns and their desires. Consequently, while tanning appears to shift away from whiteness, what this paper reveals is that it maintains whiteness as the normative standard. In this case, tanning is not really about becoming brown, but is concerned on re-asserting hegemonic whiteness.
Works Cited
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