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Abstract
Beauty, as an aesthetic ideal and intrinsically power-laden paradigm, is central to urban development projects. Yet there remains limited critical work that interrogates the colonial underpinnings, violent outcomes, and negotiations of beauty politics in urban beautification programs. In our article, we approach urban beautification campaigns in downtown Kampala, Uganda via an explicitly African, and Black feminist analytic of beauty. Specifically, we center the experiences of women market vendors as they navigate city greening initiatives and development plans which promise to ‘transform’ Kampala and re-brand it once again as the ‘Garden City of Africa’. We argue that pairing urban beautification and Black and African scholarship around beauty offers generative insights as it understands such spatial programs as always embodied, contested, and inseparable from intersectional power hierarchies. In turn, we take seriously and carefully examine discourses around beautification: by tracing its colonial and gendered foundations and its visceral impacts as it is internalized and renegotiated by low-income women operating in downtown markets in Kampala. As such, our focus on beauty situates beautification as a disciplining and displacing practice and as mentally and physically violent. Finally, it reveals how women try to envision their own beautiful Kampala.
Acknowledgements
This work would not have been possible without our broader research team both in Texas and Kampala. As such we thank our archivist, Kasfah Birungi, our collaborator, Faridah Nanyonga, and faculty and staff at the Department of Forestry, Biodiversity, and Tourism at Makerere University. We also thank Suzanne Nimoh, Pavithra Vasudevan, Bjørn Sletto, and members of the Feminist Geography Collective at UT for all the formative discussions and their feedback on earlier versions of this piece. Finally, thank you to all the traders and research participants who shared their time, experiences, and visions for the future with us.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Notes on contributors
Dominica Whitesell
Dominica Whitesell University of Texas at Austin. Austin, TX, USA. Whitesell received her PhD in Geography from UT Austin in May 2024. Her research examines the gendered and colonial dimensions of neoliberal urban development via the secondhand clothing industry in Kampala, Uganda.
Caroline Faria
Caroline Faria University of Texas at Austin. Austin, TX, USA. Dr. Faria is an Associate Professor in the Geography Department at UT Austin. She draws on feminist, critical race, and postcolonial perspectives to interrogate the contemporary workings of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Her current NSF-funded project examines the role of global retail capital in driving urban development and displacement.
Brenda Boonabaana
Brenda Boonabaana University of Texas at Austin. Austin, TX, USA. Dr. Boonabaana is an Assistant Professor in the Geography Department at UT Austin. Her work examines sustainability and tourism development, with expertise in feminist theory, gender-responsive research methods, and participatory and qualitative methodologies.
Jasper Bakeiha Ankunda
Jasper Bakeiha Ankunda Makerere University. Kampala, Uganda. Ankunda is an Environment and Development Specialist from Makerere University. Also trained in Women and Gender Studies, her work is grounded in understanding how gender intersects with the environment and impacts human-environmental relations both in urban and rural settings.
Jovah Katushabe
Jovah Katushabe CRIMM Research Centre. Kampala, Uganda. Katushabe is the Executive Director at CRIMM Research Centre, a research associate at the Centre for Basic Research, and a dynamic gender activist. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences and a Master of Arts in Gender Studies from Makerere University, Kampala. She is involved in research and consultancy around feminist geography, women’s land rights and political participation, and economic geography. Her work has advocated for gender equality and transformation approaches.
Phiona Tumuhaise
Phiona Tumuhaise Makerere University. Kampala, Uganda. Tumuhaise is a current MA student in the Gender and Women’s Studies program at Makerere University. Her research examines gendered health issues in Ugandan households.