| الملخص: | <p>Against the backdrop of trade and media liberalisation following the end of the Cold War, this dissertation examines visual self-fashioning among young Bamileke women struggling to attain social adulthood in Yaoundé, Cameroon. It asks why young women living in precarious conditions invest in beauty, dress and photographs of themselves to the extent they do. In order to answer this question, the thesis, moves beyond semiotic understandings of consumption and analyses self-fashioning in embodied and material terms. From this perspective, investments in beauty, dress and photographs not only index dreams and imaginations, but emerge as a set of skills and embodied knowledge that I propose to call “beauty work”. Each chapter examines different skills and collectively illustrate how, through their investments, young women can alter their social positions and create upward paths of social mobility. Thus, for young women beauty, dress and photographs became means by which to fashion and refashion social adulthood in a social, economic and political context where other paths—as employment and education—are compromised. </p>
<p>In developing the notion of beauty work, this thesis contributes to the anthropological and Africanist literature on consumption, gender and hope. First, it challenges understanding of consumption as imitation in semiotic terms and argues for an understanding of imitation as valued skills and embodied knowledge in relation to notions of personhood. Second, insofar as beauty work encompasses skills, it reveals women as industrious. Thus, this thesis challenges understandings of beauty work in terms of empowerment versus resistance and instead discusses how female aesthetic subjectivities through beauty work are being made. The discussion foregrounds notion of femininity as a skill for crafting surface and in doing so illustrates how beauty work defies patriarchal and colonial regimes of recognition. Third, insofar as beauty work relies on newness, it redirects the temporality of embodied knowledge to the not-yet. Thus, this thesis argues, visual self-fashioning is performative of embodied hope when young women dress and photograph themselves to fashion social adulthood. Together the three arguments by drawing out the key role of the body, skills and the senses offer a new approach to understanding of investments in consumer capitalism for young women from Western Africa in particular, and in doing so illuminate workings of aesthetic capitalism in general.</p>
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