Beauty as an "act of political warfare": Feminist Makeup Tutorials and Masquerades on You Tube

Abstract

Feminist makeup tutorial producers use cosmetic instructions as a means of interrogating gender norms and oppression. Their YouTube tutorials, reconfigured makeup names, and sly instructions indicate how feminism and beauty can be collaboratively deployed as a critical language. The producers thereby refute some feminists' assertions that makeup is inherently part of an objectifying system that normalizes women. Producers underscore how cosmetic applications are understood as masks and performances, and thus relate beauty practices to feminist analysis of the regulating and resistant aspects of masquerades. By deploying masquerades, feminist producers trouble women's position as image and establish a feminist beauty politics.

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