The Politics of Beautification in Indigenous Representation
The Politics of Beautification in Indigenous Representation
by Lara Bautista
peer reviewed by Ellie or bua paul
Introduction
Around the Philippines, her image has become inescapable: framed above the cash register in a Baguio eatery; inked on the arms of Manileño youth; blown up on tarpaulins adorning the dwellings of Cordilleran mountain towns—and now, even halfway across the world in London, her eyes twinkle up at me from the April 2023 cover of Vogue sitting in my lap. With that photograph, Whang-Od Oggay—known worldwide as Apo Whang-Od—made history as the oldest-ever Vogue cover model.
Apo Whang-Od is a mambabatok, the designated tattooist of the Butbut tribe of the Kalinga people, and among the last practitioners of batok, their traditional hand-tapped tattooing. In the last decade, a tourism industry has grown around her village of Buscalan, attracting those who wish to receive her signature three-dot marker. Through proliferating media coverage, Whang-Od and other Kalinga women have been reimagined as icons of an “alternative beauty,” their bodies co-opted into a national narrative of cultural pride and resistance to Eurocentric ideals.
But what does this conferment of beauty actually produce? Does it resist the long-standing exoticisation of Indigeneity, or does it reproduce the colonial gaze beneath a decolonial veneer? This essay interrogates the politics of beautification within postcolonial Filipino visual culture, focusing on the representation of Apo Whang-Od to explore how beauty functions as both empowerment and constraint for Indigenous women. Grounded in postcolonial feminist thought (Quijano 2000; Said 1978; Lugones 2007), I argue that the beautification of Kalinga women functions as a decolonial project that challenges the coloniality of Filipino beauty culture by recharacterising Indigenous women as beautiful. Yet I also question the efficacy of beauty as a mechanism of empowerment, showing how beautification, while symbolically liberatory, often still reproduces hierarchies of race, gender, and power.
The Coloniality of Beauty
Colonial rule institutionalised whiteness as beauty in the Philippines. Spanish and later American regimes stratified society along racial and phenotypic lines, embedding white skin and European features as signifiers of virtue, civility, and moral worth (Elizalde 2019; McFerson 2001). Whiteness became symbolic capital, since stratified as social and aesthetic currency determining access to privilege. Its legacy persists in contemporary beauty culture, from skin-whitening advertisements to the predominance of mestiza actresses and influencers who embody the Eurocentric ideal—not an abstract hierarchy, but a tangible reality many contemporary Filipino women, myself included, have learned to navigate intimately. (Cerezo 2022; Rondilla 2012).
Within this hierarchy, Indigeneity has long been rendered antithetical to beauty. Colonial missionaries and administrators described the tattooed bodies of Cordilleran peoples as barbaric and ungodly (Scott 1974; Demeterio 2017). Tattoos—markers of status and femininity within Kalinga custom—were reinterpreted as evidence of savagery, justifying colonial intervention under the rhetoric of moral improvement. Beauty thus became a moralised construct through which the colonial project maintained its authority.
This aesthetic stratification forms what might be termed the coloniality of beauty: the persistence of colonial racial hierarchies in contemporary aesthetic regimes. The exaltation of whiteness continues to shape how Filipina womanhood is imagined and performed, often relegating Indigenous physiognomy to the margins of desirability. Against this backdrop, the emergence of Kalinga tattooing within mainstream fashion media represents not merely a cultural curiosity but a profound disruption of inherited visual orders.
Beautifying Indigeneity
For the Kalinga, tattooing has long been central to constructions of femininity, maturity, and social belonging. Unmarked women (dinuras) were considered incomplete; tattoos symbolised both beauty and virtue, linking physical ornamentation with moral and communal identity (Versoza and Sugguiyao 2017). Pain endurance during tattooing constituted a rite of passage, embedding beauty within narratives of strength and collectivity.
In the contemporary moment, the visual rehabilitation of Kalinga tattooing has reframed this tradition as a form of decolonial beauty. Vogue Philippines’ April 2023 “Beauty Issue” placed Whang-Od at its centre, her tattooed skin presented not as primitive but as luminous, imperfect, and dignified. Filipino photographer Artu Nepomuceno’s portraits emphasise texture—wrinkles, freckles, faded ink—refusing the smoothness and artifice of conventional fashion imagery. “The lipstick’s not perfect,” Nepomuceno observed, “and I think that’s what made it pure” (Vogue 2023).
The editorial’s earth-toned palette, soft lighting, and absence of digital retouching evoke a nostalgic aesthetic of “natural” beauty, aligning Whang-Od with the land and ancestral continuity. Similarly, Versoza’s black-and-white portraits in The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga (2014) capture elder women in stark relief, each line and blemish rendered in almost confrontational detail. The portraits demand recognition of beauty in traits long excluded from Filipino visual culture—age, nudity, darkness of skin, and tattooed flesh.
Through these images, Indigenous women become agents of aesthetic redefinition. Their bodies disrupt the colonial dichotomy between civility and savagery, situating Kalinga aesthetics as legitimate, even aspirational. Yet the celebration of their “purity” and “naturalness” also carries the risk of romanticising Indigeneity. The imagery trades on a sense of authenticity that satisfies cosmopolitan yearning for the unmodern, positioning Indigenous bodies as repositories of an imagined precolonial innocence.
At the same time, representations of Kalinga women complicate the binary of tradition and modernity. Whang-Od’s eclectic blend of woven cloth, beaded jewellery, and modern garments—what Vogue dubbed her “accidental hipster grandma” style—embodies a dynamic hybridity. Her image bridges temporalities: ancestral technique coexisting with global fashion, rural textures meeting digital dissemination. This hybridity unsettles the notion that Indigeneity must be static to be authentic, suggesting instead a living tradition capable of adaptation and negotiation.
Beauty and Empowerment
Within feminist development discourse, empowerment is often invoked as a pathway toward gender equality, though its meaning remains contested. Batliwala (2007) defines empowerment as “the process of transforming the relations of power between individuals and social groups,” achieved through three mechanisms: challenging ideologies that justify inequality, changing access to resources and opportunities, and transforming the institutions that sustain structural subordination.
It is important to note that many frameworks of empowerment—including those foundational to feminist scholarship—have historically assumed a cisgender female subject, reproducing binary understandings of gender that mirror colonial epistemologies. A decolonial feminist analysis must therefore remain attentive to the ways gender and sexuality are structured by the same colonial logics that define beauty and power.
Viewed through Batliwala’s framework, the beautification of Kalinga women can be interpreted as a decolonial act. By elevating Indigenous aesthetics within mainstream media, these representations challenge colonial ideologies equating beauty with whiteness, civility, and progress. They invite Filipino audiences to reconsider the racialised assumptions underpinning national self-image.
Materially, beautification has produced tangible transformations within Kalinga communities. The surge of tattoo tourism following the global recognition of Whang-Od has generated new livelihoods for women in Buscalan, from tattooing and guiding to hosting visitors. As Whang-Od’s great-niece Grace Palicas explains, “Before, farming was our livelihood … you can see how Buscalan changed when tourists started coming” (Carpio 2023:132). Young women who once faced limited prospects now inherit the craft, sustaining both cultural heritage and economic autonomy (Castro-Palaganas 2010). These shifts embody Batliwala’s second mechanism of empowerment: altering access to opportunity and resources.
Psychosocially, the valorisation of Kalinga beauty has fostered visibility and esteem for a community historically marginalised within the nation’s imagination. The reclassification of batok as art rather than barbarity represents an epistemic transformation, confronting colonial hierarchies of knowledge that once dictated whose cultural practices held value.
The Limits of Beautification
Yet, as feminist and postcolonial scholars warn (Gill 2008; Donella 2019), beauty’s entanglement with empowerment is always double-edged. The same processes that elevate Indigenous women to iconic status can re-inscribe them within commodifying logics.
First, beautification often relies upon the gaze of the outsider. The legitimacy of Kalinga aesthetics is consolidated through platforms like Vogue—sites historically complicit in Eurocentric visual hierarchies. The supposed “recognition” of Indigenous beauty therefore remains mediated by non-Indigenous institutions that decide what counts as empowering —a dynamic that complicates my own impulse to read such visibility as inherently empowering. This dynamic perpetuates the coloniality of knowledge, in which external validation defines the value of local practices.
Second, the idealisation of Kalinga beauty as pure, natural, and spiritual risks essentialising Indigeneity itself. The tourism economy that sustains Buscalan simultaneously commodifies its difference, packaging culture for consumption by urban Filipinos and foreign visitors. While such exposure generates income, it can also constrain Indigenous self-representation, binding empowerment to marketability.
Third, beautification obscures internal inequalities. Many Kalinga people still experience prejudice beyond their villages; tattoos remain stigmatised in urban spaces (Kips 2010). Non-Indigenous visitors may freely wear batok-inspired tattoos as tokens of authenticity, while Kalinga individuals conceal their own markings to avoid discrimination. This paradox underscores the fragility of empowerment premised on aesthetic inclusion rather than structural transformation.
Thus, the beautification of Kalinga women simultaneously challenges and reproduces coloniality: it exposes the racist genealogies of Filipino beauty standards while embedding Indigenous identity within circuits of global consumption. Beauty, in this sense, functions as a double agent—both a tool of decolonial resistance and an instrument of renewed objectification.
Empowerment, for Whom?
The ambiguities of beautification invite a final, lingering question: empowerment, for whom? If the symbolic and material gains of Kalinga beautification accrue unevenly—benefiting urban media industries, tourists, and national narratives of modern Filipina pride, perhaps more than the women themselves—then the project risks re-centring non-Indigenous audiences, to the continued expense of Indigenous personhood.
Indeed, the figure of Whang-Od has been mobilised within a broader discourse of Filipino women’s empowerment. Her image now stands as emblematic of a “new Filipina modernity” that merges decolonial pride with cosmopolitan sensibility. This modernity reconciles the colonial duality of Filipino beauty culture—its simultaneous valorisation of whiteness and diversity—by incorporating Indigeneity as aesthetic capital within the nation’s self-image (Cerezo 2022). Through Whang-Od, the Indigenous woman becomes the idealised ancestor in a narrative of national recovery: a symbol through which the modern Filipina reclaims authenticity without relinquishing modernity.
Yet such symbolic appropriation underscores the limits of representational politics. The celebration of Indigeneity as metaphor often leaves intact the economic and political conditions that marginalise Indigenous communities. True decolonial empowerment cannot stand on visual inclusion or virtue signalling alone; it must engage the active redistribution of epistemic authority and material resources.
Finally, this analysis remains situated within the gendered frameworks through which beauty and empowerment are conventionally understood. Future research must extend this inquiry by engaging the experiences of transgender and gender-diverse Indigenous people, and by questioning the very constructs and binaries through which “womanhood” and “empowerment” have been imagined. Such reflection would deepen the decolonial feminist project without displacing its current focus on Indigenous women’s lived realities.
Ultimately, the redefinition of beauty as a negotiation of hybridity between postcolonial and noncolonial ways of knowing, being, and perceiving, is a crucial element in cultivating the conditions for empowerment that are both intrinsically derived and collectively engaged. The beautification of Kalinga women thus reveals both the promise and the limits of aesthetic empowerment: it disrupts the coloniality of beauty by expanding who may be seen as beautiful, yet it also reminds us that true decolonial transformation lies not merely in being represented, but in reclaiming the power to define the terms of representation itself.
Perhaps this is why, for me, beauty feels increasingly less like something to be fixed or resolved, but something I am still learning to negotiate—within the structures that have shaped me, and through the ways I choose to see myself despite them. If the images I once confronted felt like a mirror of what I had internalised, they now gesture toward something else: the possibility of seeing differently, and of feeling pride not in approximation, but in recognition.