Essay On Heterosexual Femininity

Denying who they really are to be socially acceptable?

Heterosexual femininity is clearly racialised and portrayed differently for different targeted audience. Sanger’s (2009) article discusses the ways in which these constructions of heterosexual femininities are racialised, mainly through advertisements, in three different magazines, namely, Fair lady, Femina and True love. In his article, Sangers makes use of the term ‘hypersexuality’ to refer to black female sexuality as well as white female sexuality. Magazines have much influence on a person’s socialisation, whereby we learn how we are expected to behave . We will thus see the ways in which white and black femininity is portrayed in those magazines as well as the difference between the two types of femininity.

While True love represents their models and celebrities as black African, Fair lady represents white models and celebrities. Despite the fact that the criteria of the women in both magazines are

Moreover, it has been highly noticeable that the pop star’s skin colour has become drastically fairer over time. This change in skin shade, from dark skin tone to a fairer skin tone suggests that both women from the black community as well as women from the white community will be able to identify themselves with Beyonce. This process of skin lightening has been criticised in the dailymail: “Not only does it imprint upon every impressionable young woman of colour the message that she is not good enough as she is, it also suggests that, despite her meteroic success, Queen Bee thinks she must alter the very fabric of her being to make herself more palatable to the masses.” The website also reported the alarming expansion of the skin-lightening industry, whereby, in 2012, the Global Industry Analysts reported it to be worth $10 billion worldwide that same year