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1	Bleaching To Reach: Skin Bleaching as a Performance of Embodied Resistance in Jamaican Dancehall Culture Harris, Treviene A 14 January 2014 (has links) This thesis examines how skin bleaching can be understood within the cultural context of Jamaican dancehall. I argue that as a cultural practice, skin bleaching can be viewed as a critique of the concomitant structural inequalities precipitated by colorism, which is a by-product of racism. In proposing skin bleaching as a queer performance of color, I attempt to illustrate the manner in which the lightening of the skin exposes the instability of racism and colorism as socially constructed, discursive regimes. If race and skin color are biological and embodied facts dictated by social reality, then bodies, which are racially marked and colored subjects, can be used to project counter discourses that challenge these specific regimes. The space of discursive limit imposed on the racialized or colored body-subject is a space from which critiques of dominant discourses can be projected, and bleaching does precisely that. I conclude therefore, that skin bleaching is performed resistance which challenges the dominating discourses on race by first destabilizing the notion that skin color is an immutable biological fact, and second by contesting subsequent discourses that are contingent on the “facts” of color and race. English Cultural Studies Skin Bleaching Jamaica Reggae Studies Reggae Dancehall Colorism Queer Postcolonial Colonial Performance Culture Community-Based Research Critical and Cultural Studies Dance Esthetics Ethnomusicology Inequality and Stratification Other English Language and Literature Other International and Area Studies Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Performance Studies Politics and Social Change Social and Cultural Anthropology

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Bleaching To Reach: Skin Bleaching as a Performance of Embodied Resistance in Jamaican Dancehall Culture