CAN WE STOP THIS FASHION TREND BEFORE IT STARTS PLEAAAAAAAASE
Folks, this is the essay everyone even vaguely entertaining this fashion trend needs to read:
http://makezine.enoughenough.org/indo.html
Namely:
Let me start by sharing a little from my own humble life. When I was four and living in some mostly white suburbs, my Indian mum sent her Indian daughter (me!) to day-care wearing a bindi— the kind painted on with traditional vermillion powder rather than the now-common sticker ones. At day-care, my “American” “care-giver” rubbed it off my face and made an example of me in front of the other little angels, saying I made up ridiculous stories about so-called customs to get away with wearing something weird on my face.
18 years later, in those same suburbs, I returned to wearing a bindi everyday— a plain, round, red sticker one— for personal, family, and religious reasons. Soon after, in 1996 (just as ethno-chic was surging back into style), I moved to Manhattan and was immediately stunned by everything new— for starters, the amount of racial and ethnic diversity in the city and, unrelatedly, the shocking amount of sexual harassment women sustain on the streets. For example, a man followed me 3 blocks through the garment district one day, shouting, “Hey India! Miss India!” “Miss India” became a common nick-name for me, used exclusively by men I’d never seen before: meant, perhaps, to make me feel like a beauty queen but more effective in making me feel ill. There was other harassment too. A woman squeezed onto a crowded elevator right in front of me and chose me (not any of the many Judeo-Christians surrounding me) to inform that God was dead. I thanked her for the information and wondered just what ethnically and nationally-specific presumptions made her feel entitled to speak to me. Did she maybe think she was liberating some passive Asian woman? or did she just not think at all? Months later, a man approached me by Washington Square, spit at me, pointed at my forehead, and told me to “go back.” (Tell me exactly what that means!) I stood there with tears of fury welling in my eyes and planning futile revenge. Since then, I’ve switched to a tiny, unobtrusive black bindi; and if I’m on the subways alone late at night, I don’t wear one at all…
I’m just a girl too, Gwen Stefani, and I want my cultural, religious, and social forms and choices to be normalised and respected. So, I do fucking hate that all these intricate bindi’s on non-Indian foreheads (and shoulders and necks and cheeks) around me look so interesting and delicate to people while my plain, red one on my plain brown forehead between my plain brown eyes marks me as unusual, alien, and problemmatic.
From “Indo-Chic” by Ananya Mukherjea
(Source: vanillaheroine)
