The Whitening of Brown Skins and the Darkening of Whiteness

This paper draws on the interrelation of whiteness and Orientalism to provide a framework for examining the use of skin-bleaching lotions and soaps by some Filipino men and women. Through this focus, I investigate the ways in which skin-bleaching negotiates the "threatening" existence of brown flesh upon the contours of Filipino bodies and within the corpus of western(ised) nations. These threats are negotiated through the skin wherein various chromatic inflections of the flesh become processed as a part of or a threat to normative comfort zones. Skin-colour is thus the site of and for discursive construction and a domain of material consequence. These characteristics of skin-colour and their deployment and resignification of whiteness and Orientalism are what I explore in this paper. For this, I divide the paper into three sections. The first maps how Spanish colonialism in the Philippines fostered an aesthetic hierarchy that privileges a mestiza/mestizo look. Further, I track how North American control of the Philippines deploys a geo-political hierarchy that promotes Americanised social systems. I argue that both hierarchical structures are fostered through the rubric of Orientalist whiteness. The second section complicates the cohesiveness of the authoritative position of Orientalist whiteness by showing that "non-whites" performatively enact whiteness through skin-bleaching. In the third section, the indeterminacy of skin lends itself as a tenuous means of totalising subject positions. Ultimately, this paper tracks the ways in which whiteness and Orientalism deploy specific racialising practices that package certain bodies/spaces as threats to normative individual, national and international social orders. While these strategies may push for a preference for whiteness and Orientalism to govern bodily practices, it simultaneously resignifies how whiteness and Orientalism are perceived.