Over a long-standing history, India has been ruled by fair-skinned people – the Aryans in the early and Europeans in later years (BBC News, 2005). Thus, fair skin has come to index a specific social meaning such as... [ view full abstract ]
Over a long-standing history, India has been ruled by fair-skinned people – the Aryans in the early and Europeans in later years (BBC News, 2005). Thus, fair skin has come to index a specific social meaning such as superiority, power, and wealth. Moreover, besides being a marker for social class, fair skin is also associated with beauty. Therefore it comes as no surprise that most Indians are obsessed with fair skin. Consequently skin-lightening products have been in strong demand. These products first became popular in 1970s with Unilever’s Fair and Lovely, a female product that was covertly used by male consumers. Later, armed with new market data and marketing strategies, skin-lightening products aimed at male consumers were launched in the early 2000s.
Our study investigates discursive practices of masculinity found in the advertisements for Indian male skin-lightening/fairness products. Indian society is characterized by a strong patriarchal hierarchy, and feminization of men is formidably stigmatized. Therefore, these male-targeted skincare products need to construct a convincing masculine discourse in order to avoid the social stigma for men to use cosmetic products. A goal of this study is to find out how a persuasive discourse of masculinity is negotiated in advertisements of traditionally feminine products. By doing so, we attempt to reveal both hegemonic and cultural-specific ideology of masculinity in modern India.
Our data come from 9 prints and 13 videos advertisements (representing 8 different brands). We employed the three semiotic processes suggested by Irvine and Gal (2000) - iconization, recursivity, and erasure - to observe how fair-skinned men are idealized as model male by corresponding to the traditional male-centered gender ideology. Our findings suggest that such gender ideology is constructed by rejection of femininity via highlighting desirable masculine attributes such as (1) toughness, (2) intelligence, and (3) physicality. All in all, we conclude that fair skin in India still powerfully indexes the conventional social meanings such as superiority, power, and wealth. These meanings have been combined with an idea of beauty for both women and men. Furthermore, fair-skinned men in our data are semiotically enregistered as epitomes of modern and desirable figures.
