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Dr Katie
https://www.goodreads.com/katie_newstead
“The Virgin Mary is the supreme exemplar of this feminine whiteness. Her fair hair 20 and complexion, often white robes and association with lilies and doves all constitute her undisputed virtue in terms of white hue and skin (cf. Bernard 1987, Kovachevski 1991). Mary is an image of motherhood without intercourse (thus unstained by sex). She is never seen pregnant. She goes even further than the most refined white lady: she reproduces without sex. The case of Mary discloses what is at the heart of the conception of whiteness as virtue, namely absence. This”
― White: Essays on Race and Culture
― White: Essays on Race and Culture
“The history of representations of Cleopatra provides one of the clearest instances of the conviction that whiteness is the pinnacle of human beauty. Cleopatra became a byword for feminine beauty in European culture, but in the process she had to be represented as white. As”
― White: Essays on Race and Culture
― White: Essays on Race and Culture
“They glow rather than shine. The light within or from above appears to suffuse the body. Shine, on the other hand, is light bouncing back off the surface of the skin. It is the mirror effect of sweat, itself connoting physicality, the emissions of the body and unladylike labour, in the sense of both work and parturition. In a well-known Victorian saw, animals sweated, and even gentlemen perspired, but ladies merely glowed. Dark”
― White: Essays on Race and Culture
― White: Essays on Race and Culture
“The development of an image of the glowing human being can be traced in European art. One index of it is the means for representing haloes. In medieval art, these are gold, very material, silhouetting the head; since the Renaissance, they have seemed to radiate from the head, in turn suffusing it with a glow. Rudolph”
― White: Essays on Race and Culture
― White: Essays on Race and Culture
“The ideal of whiteness makes a strong appeal. It flatters white people by associating them with (what they define as) the best in human beauty and virtue. The very idea of a best and of striving towards it accords with the aspirational structure of whiteness. There is an ecstasy to be felt in the luminescent representation discussed in the next chapter, a luminescence that makes sense in the context of the idea of whiteness as transcendence, dissolution into pure spirit and no-thing-ness. Equally, the ideal of white as absence may be confounded with the wider representational mode discussed above: being nothing at all may readily be felt as being nothing in particular, the representative human, the subject without properties.”
― White: Essays on Race and Culture
― White: Essays on Race and Culture
Dr Katie’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Dr Katie’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
817 books
|
1,884 friends
1,462 books
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183 friends
219 books
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3,583 friends
788 books
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4,951 friends
496 books
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133 friends
983 books
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2,092 friends
4,044 books
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4,611 friends
112 books
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1,057 friends
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