{"id":772,"date":"2025-06-05T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-05T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mena\/?p=772"},"modified":"2025-06-04T11:37:24","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T09:37:24","slug":"entrepreneurial-bodies-disciplined-subjects-race-gender-and-the-politics-of-whitening-in-tunisia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mena\/entrepreneurial-bodies-disciplined-subjects-race-gender-and-the-politics-of-whitening-in-tunisia\/","title":{"rendered":"Entrepreneurial Bodies, Disciplined Subjects: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Whitening in Tunisia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Download the Brief<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In Tunisia today, the widespread promotion and use of skin whitening products offer a critical lens into how economic, social, and political systems reproduce racial and gender inequality. These products are not merely cosmetic choices or consumer trends\u2014they are embedded in a broader landscape of social pressure, economic aspiration, and digital visibility. For many young Tunisian women, especially those from working-class or marginalized backgrounds, investing in skin whitening is framed as a strategy for economic and social advancement. The message is clear: lighter skin can increase one\u2019s chances of securing work, social approval, or romantic partnership. In this manner, skin whitening products help sustain unequal systems of power by translating deeply rooted racial and gender hierarchies into normalized personal aspirations. These dynamics are not new but have been intensified in the post-2011 period, fed by economic precarity, an expanding informal economy, and a tightening authoritarian grip on digital expression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing on insights from social reproduction theory, this paper examines how beauty labor\u2014and skin whitening in particular\u2014plays a central role in Tunisia\u2019s evolving political economy. Capitalism, as feminist theorists have shown, does not function in a vacuum. It depends on the unpaid and underpaid labor of women, the maintenance of racial hierarchies, and the constant reinforcement of social norms that sustain economic inequality. As Susan Ferguson has noted, \u201cwhile gender relations are shaped by patriarchal dynamics, they are also always concretely interconnected in the ongoing maintenance and reproduction of an overall capitalist social formation.\u201d[1]<\/a> In this context, skin whitening products are marketed as part of a broader logic of self-entrepreneurship, particularly in the digital space. On platforms like Instagram, Tunisian content creators promote whitening creams as essential elements of self-care and success\u2014tools to appear \u201cmore professional,\u201d \u201cmore desirable,\u201d or \u201cmore modern.\u201d This aesthetic labor is rarely recognized as work by the state, and those who engage in it, particularly from lower-income backgrounds, must often navigate legal ambiguity, moral policing, and even incarceration. At the same time, these women represent an increasingly visible segment of Tunisia\u2019s informal economy. By centering a seemingly \u201cprivate\u201d act like skin whitening within a larger political economy, this analysis helps ground and nuance policy discussions around informal labor, digital regulation, race, and gender in Tunisia. It also advocates for a policy framework that addresses the economic and social conditions that drive the demand for whitening products, rather than treating them as isolated cultural phenomena.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Skin Tone as Capital: Whitening Products and the Market Logic of Modern Femininity<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While much academic attention has been given to the agricultural labor of women in Tunisia, less explored are the emerging forms of gendered labor that unfold in the digital economy. One such phenomenon, particularly visible among young Tunisian women, is the rise of aesthetic self-entrepreneurship on social media\u2014especially through the promotion and sale of skin-whitening products. This shift not only redefines class mobility, beauty, and womanhood, but also exposes the intersection of neoliberalism, race, and postcolonial identity in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tunisia\u2019s adoption of the Licence-Master-Doctorat<\/em> (LMD) system in 2005 and its broader neoliberal turn have transformed higher education. Framed by the government and international financial institutions as a solution to graduate unemployment, the reform centered on aligning degree structures and shortening academic cycles. Materially, these changes neither mobilized resources to enhance the quality of education on offer in universities nor addressed the primary cause of joblessness amongst college graduates\u2014namely, weak levels of demand for labor. As such, the functional effects of reform were dual. On the one hand, they rendered universities into temporary holding pens for those who managed to make their way through (defunded) secondary schools. This was a far cry from Bourguiba\u2019s original vision of the university as a crucible for Tunisia\u2019s political, cultural, and economic elite. On the other, they accelerated the professionalization of higher education without improving employment prospects: Ever more Tunisians matriculated to institutions of higher learning, themselves strained by a lack of financial investment, only to depart with little chance of finding work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, Tunisia\u2019s restructured system of higher education encouraged students to become \u201cself-entrepreneurs\u201d responsible for cultivating their own value in a shrinking and increasingly competitive job market, as Corinna Mullin has deftly noted.[2]<\/a> And over the years, the imperatives of entrepreneurship spread beyond the classroom to become a logic of everyday life. In the Tunisia of 2025, the individual is called to invest in themselves aesthetically, physically, and socially to secure a better future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Entrepreneurialism\u2019s ascendance as a strategy of survival and mobility is observed most easily on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. For young women in particular, the business line attracting some of the most interest amongst aspiring self-starters is personal aesthetics. In a narrow sense, hawking beauty products offers some of these parties a viable if precarious form of income and social mobility. Seen more broadly, the same trade can be seen to enlist these entrepreneurs as proselytes of self-improvement. As such, these spaces offer considerable insight into Tunisia\u2019s evolving sociology and political economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Selling Whiteness<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Skin-whitening products are especially salient to our concerns. On social media, these goods are not only peddled by petty <\/em>entrepreneurs for their cosmetic effects, but as vital tools of self-improvement. The message is clear: lighter skin means more visibility, more desirability, and thus more value. The effect, then, is to make beauty a currency, and the body a site of economic speculation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, today, scrolling through Tunisian social media feeds reveals a flood of whitening products\u2014creams for the face, armpits, knees, elbows, and even intimate areas\u2014all marketed as necessary steps in a modern woman\u2019s self-care routine. Lady Samara serves as a brand ambassador for Laboratoire Trone\u2019s lightening products; Chaima Mansour endorses the Super White Skin line from Maeva Cosmetics; and Bella Emilye regularly promotes Laboratoire Peonies\u2019s lightening products, from deodorants to intimate-area creams. That this phenomenon exists in a supposedly \u201cpost-racial\u201d world reveals the ongoing centrality of whiteness within Tunisian aesthetic norms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amongst the online Tunisian influencers embodying aesthetic (and racialized) self-improvement, Lady Samara and Bella Emilye stand above the rest. Each has roughly one million followers on social. Often mocked for their language, clothing, or perceived vulgarity, both women are frequently labeled zarg\u0101<\/em> (plural zr\u00fbg<\/em>), a pejorative term in Tunisian Arabic describing women with \u201cthe wrong\u201d shade of brown skin\u2014a less desirable version of samr\u0101<\/em>, the ideal olive complexion. Rather than hailing from elite or culturally privileged backgrounds, the two women have each built their visibility and income from scratch. In many ways, their success derives from embracing their zarg\u0101<\/em> status while simultaneously distancing themselves from its stigma through the use of whitening products. In this manner, Lady Samara and Bella Emilye enact a complex negotiation of class, race, and gender. Unlike wealthier or more “respectable” influencers, they attempt to leverage marginality into a profitable brand via a form of self-cancelation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the backdrop to this, there is an economy. Just as the influencers themselves operate in the grey spaces of the informal digital economy, the whitening products Lady Samara, Bella Emilye and others sell often come from informal Tunisian laboratories operating solely online and without oversight. This is true of Maeva Cosmetics, Trone, and Laboratoire Peonies. Amidst Tunisia\u2019s long economic downturn, the influences and pharmacies alike try to secure a living through the extralegal commodification of whiteness\u2014through skirting regulatory and tax authorities while selling those on the periphery on a \u201cworkaround\u201d to the stigma of racial marginalization.[3]<\/a> Collectively, they render whiteness more than a standard of beauty, but a tool for upward mobility\u2014a socially sanctioned investment in one\u2019s self, whether to attract followers, land partnerships, or secure desirable marriage prospects. In ways overt and more subtle, Lady Samara has presented her marriage to a fair-skinned, well-off man as a reward for her physical and psychological self-development. The (spoken and unspoken) discourse is eerily reminiscent of the classic Indian brand Fair & Lovely ad, a product regularly advertised on Arab TV channels in the early 2000s, where personal success and romantic fulfillment were directly tied to achieving lighter skin.[4]<\/a> Appreciated in full, both the influencers and the laboratories with which they work have not only carved out a place within Tunisia\u2019s beauty economy: conscientiously or not, they also participate in the production of neoliberal, racialized constructions of modernity and Tunisianity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contests over modernity and the power relations contained therein are not new in Tunisia. The Bourguibian project, while often celebrated for its progressive legislation on women\u2019s rights, was fundamentally rooted in a Eurocentric vision of modernity. As such, it rooted Tunisia\u2019s national identity against an image of a patriarchal Arab-Muslim Other, embracing a form of Western universalism in which progress was synonymous with industrialization, urbanization, and whitening\u2014both symbolically and literally. Read against this history, it can be appreciated that skin whitening concerns more than beauty. It is at once a mode of survival, a means of asserting one\u2019s place in a neoliberal order that rewards self-discipline, visibility, and conformity to Eurocentric norms. Whether they are single students hoping to escape precariousness or married women seeking social respectability, these influencers demonstrate that whitening is not only a physical act but an ideological one\u2014wrapped in the language of self-care, productivity, and feminine ambition. It is this convergence of aesthetics, capitalism, and race that defines the current moment, and reveals the profound ways in which bodily practices continue to reflect and reproduce social hierarchies in postcolonial Tunisia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Self-Made to State-Policed: Content Creation, Censorship, and Precarity<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Tunisia currently lacks a formal legal framework governing online content creation and digital commerce. A bill backed by over 80 MPs aims to regulate marketing on websites and social media, protect against online fraud, and bring informal digital businesses into the formal economy to boost tax revenues. While the bill targets urgent gaps, it projects little confidence when it comes to enforcement. Monitoring millions of daily online transactions would require significant investment in advanced technologies and specialized personnel\u2014resources Tunisia currently lacks. AI could help detect fraud, but its cost and complexity pose further barriers. There\u2019s also the risk of overregulation: rigid enforcement could stifle digital entrepreneurship and push small creators into even more opaque spaces. This is especially problematic given that nearly 80% of e-transactions are still cash-based and largely untaxed, sustaining a parallel economy that undermines formal businesses.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the absence of regulations, to date, the state\u2019s primary tool for disciplining content creators has been Article 226 bis of the Penal Code, which criminalizes offenses against “public morals.” Under Ben Ali, the article was used to silence dissenting voices\u2014often under the guise of moral protection. Post-2011, it was used to target public figures and everyday people. Public displays of affection, carrying legally purchased alcohol, or expressing non-conforming gender presentation led to arrests and prosecutions under broadly defined morality laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The absence of a regulatory framework has produced an ambiguous space where influencers operate both as public figures and as informal workers\u2014vulnerable to the double bind of capitalist commodification and moralistic policing. The Tunisian state has launched several moral campaigns against content creators under the pretext of \u201catteintes aux bonnes m\u0153urs<\/em>\u201d (\u201caffront to public decency\u201d), a loosely defined legal category that includes behaviors deemed socially disruptive or morally corrupting. In 2023 and 2024, several influencers were arrested under this charge, among them Lady Samara, pregnant at the time, and sentenced to over three years in prison (later reduced on appeal) for disseminating online content the state deemed inappropriate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The repression of figures like Lady Samara is particularly significant when viewed through the lens of gender and class. The type of femininity she performs\u2014accessible, unapologetically visible and at times sexualized\u2014directly contradicts the normative codes of respectability that postcolonial Tunisia has long upheld through the apparatus of state feminism. Her incarceration, and that of others like her (including queer and working-class content creators like Khoubaib and the couple Ramzi and Afifa), reveals the cost of visibility in an economy and society that struggles to reconcile its integration to global capitalism with certain forms of moral conservatism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This tension is further exacerbated by the Tunisian state\u2019s refusal to treat this type of content labor as legitimate economic activity. Despite its contribution to digital economies and consumer markets, content creation is not recognized as \u201creal work.\u201d This reflects not only the state\u2019s outdated legal frameworks but also a broader ideological dissonance between what capitalism deems economically productive and what states, especially authoritarian and\/or socially conservative ones, consider morally acceptable. The state thus weaponizes legal ambiguity to criminalize forms of labor and expression that fall outside the bounds of normative respectability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Tunisian State, Social Reproduction, and a Better Path Forward<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Social reproduction theory helps us understand the impasse facing Tunisia\u2019s digital beauty entrepreneurs by highlighting how the boundary between productive and unproductive labor is not natural, but politically and historically constructed. Traditionally, labor that produces commodities has been valorized and paid, while labor that reproduces people\u2014caring, cleaning, educating, expressing emotion\u2014has been feminized, racialized, and devalued. Digital influencing occupies an uneasy place between the two. On the one hand, it generates content, attention, and sometimes income. On the other, it relies heavily on affective labor, unpaid self-promotion, and the cultivation of intimate personas\u2014activities typically relegated to the domain of the personal or the feminine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clearly, state repression of these spaces also intersects with racial politics. Tunisia has, since February 2023, entered a moment of heightened racial anxiety, marked by the securitization of sub-Saharan African migration and a public discourse that increasingly racializes both migrants and national black populations. The moral campaigns against influencers unfolded against this backdrop, revealing the converging pressures of race, class, and gender in defining who is allowed to be visible, to speak, to work. It is no coincidence that the crackdown disproportionately affects marginalized subjects: women, queer people, racialized people, and the poor. These are precisely the actors whose labor and social reproduction undergird the entire system, yet whose presence must be controlled to maintain the appearance of social order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a context of economic collapse, political authoritarianism, and social anxiety over national identity, digital labor\u2014especially when performed by women, queer individuals, or marginalized actors\u2014becomes both hyper-visible and hyper-policed. By shifting the focus from the narrow realm of wage labor to the wider systems that sustain life, identities, and hierarchies, we can better understand how and why this is playing out. The increasing repression of content creators and influencers under President Kais Saied\u2019s rule derives from the broader political economy of Tunisia. Likewise, it is structured by global dynamics of gender, labor, and digital capitalism. As such, it is critical that the ongoing criminalization of digital labor in Tunisia not merely be conceived as an attack on individual freedoms\u2014it needs be understood is a reassertion of state control over the terms of visibility, morality, and reproduction. The affective, embodied labor that influencers perform\u2014often from their homes, often as mothers or young women, often without institutional support\u2014is treated as suspect because it challenges the state\u2019s monopoly over public discourse and disrupts the gendered hierarchies that underpin national identity. The fact that this labor is often informal, mobile, and based on personal narrative makes it even more threatening to a state that sees control and surveillance as key to political stability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tensions that digital entrepreneurialism evokes between work and morality, between digital entrepreneurship and repression, also highlights a larger contradiction in Tunisia\u2019s post-revolution trajectory. The same economic crisis that produces self-entrepreneurship also fuels authoritarianism. The same youth who are encouraged to \u201cinvest in themselves\u201d through neoliberal discourses of success are criminalized when that investment takes the form of non-normative gender or sexual expressions. The labor of social reproduction\u2014whether online or off, remunerated or not\u2014is simultaneously essential and unrecognized, celebrated and policed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This all being the case, it is essential that those working to reform regulations and criminal laws concerning digital entrepreneurialism not limit their focus to the domain of the law alone. They must also engage with the fundamental structure of Tunisia\u2019s economy. In the same vein, those seeking to unwind the proliferation of skin whitening products would be na\u00efve to direct energies solely at the relevant principals, be they influencers or underground pharmacies. They must also draw attention to the historical and contemporary factors which lead whiteness to be valorized. Furthermore, they must work to advance the kinds of social and economic reforms which might collapse Tunisia\u2019s racialized hierarchies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> Susan Ferguson, \u201cSocial reproduction: what\u2019s the big idea\u201d, Blog: Pluto Books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a> Mullin, Corinna. \u00ab L\u2019enseignement sup\u00e9rieur en Tunisie, lieu de pouvoir (n\u00e9o)colonial et de lutte d\u00e9coloniale \u00bb. Tumultes, <\/em>2017\/1 n\u00b0 48, 2017. p.185-205.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/a> Lady Samara for instance, once posted a video applying a whitening cream to her elbows while declaring, \u201cI don\u2019t want these to darken, to turn blue,\u201d expressing both her fear of becoming zarg\u0101<\/em> and the labor required to maintain the ideal shade of samr\u0101<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]<\/a> Kaundinya, Anaka. (2023). How Fair & Lovely Bottled Up India\u2019s Insecurities.<\/em> Kajol. https:\/\/www.kajalmag.com\/fair-and-lovely-colorism-india\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5]<\/a> <\/em>Maya Bouall\u00e9gui, \u201cZoom sur la future loi r\u00e9gulant le marketing et le commerce sur le web et les r\u00e9seaux sociaux\u201d, Business News (March 17: 2025).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit: Adam Jones, “\u201cFair and Lovely – Billboard for Skin-Whitening Cream – Chittagong – Bangladesh\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This publication is part of the Project Political Economy of the contemporary MENA Region<\/em> and has been carried out with the financial support of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Tunisia today, the widespread promotion and use of skin whitening products offer a critical lens into how economic, social, and political systems reproduce racial and gender inequality. These products are not merely cosmetic choices or consumer trends\u2014they are embedded in a broader landscape of social pressure, economic aspiration, and digital visibility. For many young […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":457,"featured_media":32304,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_molongui_author":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"podcast":[],"project":[245,41],"region":[25],"class_list":["post-772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","project-political-economy-mena-region","project-tunisia-in-transition","region-middle-east"],"yoast_head":"\nEntrepreneurial Bodies, Disciplined Subjects: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Whitening in Tunisia - Middle East & North Africa<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/noria-research.com\/mena\/entrepreneurial-bodies-disciplined-subjects-race-gender-and-the-politics-of-whitening-in-tunisia\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Entrepreneurial Bodies, Disciplined Subjects: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Whitening in Tunisia - Middle East & North Africa\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In Tunisia today, the widespread promotion and use of skin whitening products offer a critical lens into how economic, social, and political systems reproduce racial and gender inequality. 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