Whiteness at the Dressing Table: Race, Gender, and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century France and the French Caribbean

This dissertation examines how eighteenth-century women’s vanity items such as makeup boxes, snuffboxes, perfume vials, etui kits, sugar pots, coffee, tea, and chocolate implements and their corresponding consumables—makeup, perfume, coffee, tea, chocolate, sugar—not only allow for but actively construct white femininity, often at the expense of forced Black labor, in eighteenth-century France and its Caribbean colonies. Through a material approach to these objects and consumables, I argue that these conceptions of race and gender are present in the material and visual culture in an era when these ideas are widely debated, discussed, and philosophized, prior to their codification in the early nineteenth century.