The Nationalization of the Global Indian Woman

This article examines various image‐texts of Indian female beauty in Femina, India's most widely circulating English‐language women's magazine. It argues that in Femina, race (calibrated through whiteness, brownness and even Indianness) and gender (calibrated through normative femininity) intervene in certain epistemologies about India, the West and ‘the world’. In order to posit these ‘geographies of beauty,’ the first part of this article shows that Femina maps the Indian woman's body within nation‐space, that is, as definitively ‘Indian’. The second part of the article turns to the re‐articulation of the nation through and against the ‘West’ as a geography that must be designated and disavowed in order to claim the globality of this Indian body. In Femina, ‘beauty’ is more than a physical attribute; it is a telos toward which the female subject, transformed into a consumer subject and also essentially Indian, moves through these decades of globalisation and national chauvinism.