This article explores the racial and gendered politics that shape contemporary understandings of beauty by considering how appearance features in the identity construction of Kopano Matlwa's characters in the novel Coconut. Feminist scholars have long argued that "physical appearance" carries more importance for women than for men (Hunter 188). This can be traced back to the familiar gendered dualism that associates women with their bodies and nature and meh with the mind and culture. As in any binary opposition, one term is marginalized while the other is valorized. Women, with their bodies and assumed association with nature, are regarded with suspicion in a Westem epistemological tradition that continues to assign disproportionate value to the mind, at the expense of the body. For a woman to be properly feminine, she must thus manipulate her appearance to conform to very specific ideals of beauty that flow from distrust of the female body in its natural state. In her groundbreaking work on gender. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir shows that one is not bom a woman but becomes one; in other words, that femininity is a social construction. She argues that "[i]n woman dressed and adorned, nature is present but under restraint, by human will remoulded nearer to man's desire," and the woman whose appearance renders her desirable or beautiful is one in whose body nature has been "rigorously conflned" (de Beauvoir 191). As Wendy Chapkis puts it, "acceptable femininity shares a secret with all who attempt to pass [as acceptable, 'proper' women]: my undisguised self is unacceptable, I am not what I seem" (5). The "pain" mentioned in the phrase from Coconut that appears in the title of this article thus refers to more than physical hurt. It extends to the pain that women experience when
