Master of Arts in Visual Anthropology

Crafting Brown Beauty explores the ways in which South Asian women and people assigned female at birth (AFAB) have utilized craft to help decolonize their sexuality and desire. Crafting Brown Beauty documents the stories of three Desi-American’s journeys to embrace and live in their authentic sexual identities, and ultimately reveals the power that embodied practices and craft have in decolonizing sexuality and creating community. Using poetry, spoken word, painting, photography, spiritual healing, and social media, these three Desi-Americans utilize their respective crafts and focus on themes of sexuality and desire in order to make sense of post-colonial coloniality over the brown body and embrace their authentic selves. The drama of these combined stories climax with pain of living through the colonized aspects of one’s sexual identity, the difficulty in recognizing and reframing these aspects, the effort in relearning and loving a decolonized sexual identity. 

 

Running time: 28 minutes