How can we think more positively about beauty? As I observe on a daily basis, beauty is used (as a highly popular term) to define multiple privilege, as a sort of intersectional subjective projection that explores personal entitlement (I am talking about the outside/ inside/ me/ other/ world/ transcendental level). Beauty is always exclusionary, it is always constructed in opposition with the despicable ugly. Instead of claiming the new beautiful (and also a re-assignment of a new ugly), why not claiming the ugly and its negativity? Instead of looking for a positive version of beautiful, why not embracing the ugly but without transforming it into the new beautiful?
Jill wrote a strong manifesto in this sense (I took it from here and even if I have some problems with the whole concept of choice detached from structural inequalities, it is a courageous step against beauty discourses):
The Ugly Manifesta
I’d rather be courageous than beautiful. I will not be demure, quiet and pretty… instead I will be loud, I will get into the face of those who try to oppress others and I will confront them. I will be that loud, “ugly” feminist.
I’d rather be unique than beautiful. I will wear the clothes that make me feel happiest in whatever manner I desire. I will wear as much or as little makeup as I feel comfortable with each day. I will shave as much or as little as I see fit. If I happen to fit some standard of beauty one day, fine; I will not care one way or another because my confidence does not depend on anyone’s approval but my own.
I’d rather be happy than beautiful. I will not waste a moment of my life worrying about how I look to others. I’d rather spend my time concerned with how I am trating others, and interacting with them!
I’D RATHER BE UGLY THAN BEAUTIFUL. Being ugly means saying fuck you to the beauty norms and embracing the person I am, not the person that the world is trying to tell me to be; being ugly means being totally happy with the person I am and never hiding that girl from the world, no matter what.photo from Improbable Research
2 comments:
Promoting & fighting for the "ugly" - which the manifesto had a genuine effect of essentialising, does not mean an inversion of the power binome beautiful-ugly, as you suggest. It means a social involvement that mobilizes many other categories, so that "ugly"-ness ceases to be a major evaluative category itself. "Ugly"-ness, just as beauty, comes in many forms and modalities, and it can be used as a tool for exclusion by dominant beautiful just as much as it is by the ugly themselves, and in extremely similar ways.
Anna, you are right, ugly is essentialized here but she/I assume(s) its essence in a strategic way. And I don't have any problem with that. Ugliness is not inverting the dichotomy but has the potential to explode it from inside. Internalizing beauty norms does not justify them in any sense, ugliness has the critical potential to move us away from them. Simply rejecting "beautiful domination" is not a solution; ignoring a problem won't produce its simple disappearance. And discussing beauty/ugliness has the potential to mobilize "other" categories that you talk about (whatever that means) but at this point I don't see how intersectionality makes beauty discourses irrelevant.
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