Fashioning Postfeminism expresses the performativity of spectacularly feminine style in Lagos. It shows how the terms proffered by medialized femininity and fashion – by which I mean media-shaped processes of cultural change and negotiation – influence women occupying a high socio-economic milieu in Lagos, Nigeria.
It is worrisome that spectacularly feminine fashion registers hatred for black hair, as Simidele Dosekun reveals, thereby making Nigeria a prime market for foreign hair and hair products, while also discrediting the expertise of local hair groomers and the space they offer for feminine conversations.Footnote 1 Possibly more disheartening is how ‘feminism’ (movement, activism, scholarship) has practically transformed into a ‘popular feminism’ of fashion and fad. In light of its individualistic, consumerist and stereotypical nature, the author argues that post-feminism falls short of a more progressive feminist agenda.
Dosekun discusses how fashion is autochthonous yet fluid in Nigeria (p. 27) and notes the growing moral and cultural contradictions surrounding women's bodies. Through this, she expounds post-feminist discourse using fashion as a framework that embodies the economy and politics of a fragile state.
Drawing her samples from the elite class of women in Lagos, Dosekun presents a set of women whose lifestyle is largely guided by transnational fashion involving the use of ‘weaves, towering heels, false nails, and everything else, in the same genre that we also see on women in London and New York but also Johannesburg, Mexico City, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, and places in between’ (p. 30).
Noting the concept of ‘femininity’ as presented by Azuonye,Footnote 2 in what way does the spectacularly feminine woman described by Dosekun qualify as feminist? Dosekun notes how feminine beauty becomes attainable, ‘thoroughly technologized and commodified, a matter of lining up and deploying the right tools’ (p. 43). By this, she makes reference to how post-feminism is ‘rendered transnational culture readily and easily via the media, commodity, consumer, migratory, and other connectivities that today crisscross the world more widely, more densely, and more rapidly than ever before’. She consequently notes that, ‘[f]rom “Beyoncé” to “boob jobs” to “Brazilian waxes,” it sells around the world’ (p.14). With the peculiarity of Lagos as a space where women luxuriate in fashion, how does this open up possibilities to lower-class women who equally struggle to attain spectacularly feminine style, although their lack of exposure to an elite lifestyle makes it difficult to attain? How may this, as ‘ko si arugbo ni Lagos’ (no old lady in Lagos) and ‘sisi eko’ (Lagos lady), be understood within the post-feminist feminine beauty discourse? Perhaps a comparative analysis of the hustling grass-roots Lagos women who, in their own way, ‘fashion postfeminism’ would have enriched the work.
The book raises the possibility that post-feminism renders women emancipated from socio-cultural expectations that previously suppressed their expressions of self. However, Dosekun avows that the majority of her research participants have taken the ‘wrong way’ and are in no way cosmopolitan, having lost discernment ‘in the quest to follow the new and foreign’ (p. 110). With one of her respondents stating ‘I just like them … I think I prefer them’ about her long nails (p. 44), where does this lead for the women? For women who base their fashion sense on ‘self-confidence’, their confidence is often burst by their lack of corresponding financial capacity. This brings to mind how Lagbaja (a popular Nigerian artiste) revealed the vanity of spectacular feminine style when he exposed the content of a lady's bag in one of his musical videos. The bag fell open while she was trying to demean a young man, and items including half-eaten maize, woodworking nails and other worthless things revealed her as feigning high-class status.
If Dosekun recognizes the hijab as ‘yet another type of dress in many an African repertoire that … also came to us via processes that included imperial conquest and religious conversion’, why did she propose that Western dress be called ‘global dress’ (p. 30)? With an increasing number of Muslim women wearing the hijab in Nigeria, can we still regard the West as the ‘Dominant particular’?
Responding to an earlier assertion that ‘women's contemporary hairstyling in Africa is under-researched’,Footnote 3 Dosekun pays attention to the burden of buying hair as ‘unhappy technology’ (p. 90). Would it be appropriate to regard post-feminist fashion (unhappy technology) as aesthetic labour, the work involved in looking good?Footnote 4 However, if post-feminism sells ‘guilt-free consumerism’ to women, it sustains rifts between elites and grass-roots women, as I observed in my work on hairiness and hairlessness.Footnote 5 I highlighted how elite women have grown too busy to offer support for grass-roots development.
Most relieving is the author's conclusion that ‘postfeminism is and tells a lie … [and that] in the “real world,” postfeminism does not do what it says’ (p. 143). Does it then mean that post-feminism is hopeless for Nigeria (and by extension other parts of Africa too)? Can post-feminism be redefined to reclaim feminism or is this mere utopia? I suppose it should also be interesting to see what post-feminism exhibits among women of other social backgrounds in Lagos, if it exists among them at all.
Overall, the book opens up new frontiers in research, although beginners and general readers might become exasperated while figuring out multiple concepts such as ‘postfeminist feminine beauty’, ‘postfeminist power femininity’, ‘spectacularly postfeminist feminine beauty’, and so on. Conclusively, Dosekun's description of beauty as social capital pushes scholarship to redefine and prescribe how social capital, reformulated as ‘psychic capital’, may become the basis for moral capital to address the void and vanity of spectacularly feminized styles.
