Abstract
Many years ago, when I was in middle school, we were asked to bring a family photograph for a school project. Upon seeing the photograph that I brought that day, featuring my mom and I holding coconuts on a sunny day at the beach, a male classmate laughed and commented, “Gosh, your mom is so much prettier than you are.” That sentence not only made me feel so insecure and ashamed in my own skin at the time, but it also stuck with me for so long for reasons I could not fully explain. After all, it came from someone whose opinion I did not necessarily highly value and whose affection I was not really interested in gaining. So, why did that comment sting so much? As young women, why does it tremendously hurt not to be found beautiful and desirable—why do we even care? What is it about “ugliness” that erodes our self-esteem when we find ourselves associated with it in some way? Why is it that we are so quick to link our sense of self-worth to body image, to the way we look?
On the Politics of Ugliness explores these questions and many more from an interdisciplinary approach to the study of ugliness in its various facets by treating it not merely as an aesthetic category but one that is pervaded with social, political, and ethical undertones. Each chapter explores the ways in which the historical and cultural articulations of ugliness permeate the public imagination and in turn serve to mediate various institutional practices and intersubjective relations. The book brings together 19 essays (including the editors’ introduction) that tackle power relations surrounding ugliness in original and compelling ways. The chapters parse the exclusionary force of ugliness, whereby those groups and individuals who have historically been deemed ugly are perpetually disenfranchised, marginalized, ignored, abandoned, and expelled from the polity, while pondering the possibilities of resistance by considering the generative power of ugliness around which those groups and individuals could organize.
The editors, Rodrigues and Przybylo, who also happen to be the founding editors of the wonderfully engaging feminist online journal, Feral Feminisms, begin with the basic assertion that “ugliness is a feminist issue” (p. 17). The book offers a creative rethinking of some of the classic insights of feminist theory (for instance, Kristeva’s notion of abjection), and in this way, it expands the scope of feminist thinking. Rodrigues and Przybylo note that while feminist theory, critical race theory, disability studies, queer theory, and postcolonial thought have thus far been somewhat attentive to the politics of ugliness, its treatment has rather been incidental and complementary to other relevant political categories and struggles. Attempting to fill this gap in the literature by way of a shift in focus, the anthology aims to take the politics of ugliness as its central object of analysis in demonstrating the intricate and nuanced ways in which our collective aesthetic perceptions influence and are in turn influenced by differential power relations. In comparison to some other recently published work on the subject, this book does not treat ugliness solely by way of the affects it inspires, like disgust, hate, and anger, nor does it limits its scope primarily to a cultural and historical analysis. A major strength of the book lies in its employment of numerous methodologies in the study of a wide variety of topics around the embodiment of ugliness (including, but not limited to, fatphobia, suicide, racism, postcolonialism, and heteronormativity). These methodologies range from literary analysis to autoethnography, from qualitative research to poetry, and from cultural criticism to photography, which makes this book a unique work of political theory, broadly construed. The inclusion of artistic explorations alongside scholarly inquiries suggests that the intended audience for the anthology is not restricted to academic circles. Speaking to specialists and nonspecialists alike, the range this book covers in terms of the multiplicity of approaches, topics, and literary styles also makes it a pleasure to read recreationally and also a great fit for various undergraduate humanities courses that seek to incorporate engaging material.
The anthology is composed of four parts: Desire, Relationality, Erotics; The Spatio-Temporalities of Ugliness; Materialities and Representations; and Ugliness as Generative Power. The editors Rodrigues and Przybylo explain that the chapters inquire into an exploration of ugliness as a form of “visual injustice,” which they conceptualize in terms of the perpetual expulsion of bodies that are deemed ugly (p. 3). Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s chapter following the editors’ introduction traces the historical lineages whereby the aesthetic categories of beauty and ugliness are interfused with power relations, in that the beautiful is often tied to “high culture,” whereas anything that falls short of or deviates from the standards of high culture has been named ugly. While the beautiful traditionally stands for “the ideal, reason, truth, goodness, perfection, clarity, order, harmony, civilization: for humanity’s higher aspirations” (p. 31) in the philosophy of art, we see that ugliness, “much like evil,” has historically been “linked to marginality, the politically, economically, and socially disenfranchised, the racially Other (blacks and Jews among others)” (p. 33). Problematizing these associations, Athanassoglou-Kallmyer argues that as aesthetic categories, the notions of beauty and ugliness have been shaped by the interests of the ruling class and are therefore inevitably laden with ethical and political connotations. The artistic treatment of beauty and ugliness, in this way, amounts to a political act that could sustain or potentially disrupt these power relations. While Julia Kristeva (from whom Athanassoglou-Kallmyer also draws) previously established this important link between common aesthetic sensibilities and social and political processes of exclusion through her notion of the abject (which evokes disgust, blurs boundaries, and must be expelled), Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s account is more historically grounded than psychoanalytic, in that she provides a critical genealogy of this interweaving between aesthetics and politics as the backdrop against which the more contemporary explorations of the essays in the rest of the anthology take place.
As the book shows, ugliness is also tied to biopolitics, that is, politics around questions of life: Whose lives matter? Whose lives are cherished and protected, not just individually, but structurally? Who is perpetually excluded, abandoned, or expelled? Katherine Morton’s discussion of the portrayals of missing and murdered indigenous women as a form of colonial violence that perpetuates the idea that the lives of these women are dispensable is pertinent here. Picking the least flattering photographs for the missing posters of these women serves to buttress the idea that they are “undesirable”; hence, neither their lives nor deaths matter. Morton’s analysis shows us that there is a lot hinging on our aesthetic categories and sensibilities such that the issue sometimes becomes a matter of life and death. The Eurocentric ideals of beauty do not only serve to discipline bodies and render difficult solidarity between and among women, but they also uphold our collective understandings of what it means to be human and whose lives deserve attention, care, and protection. These aesthetic ideals, in this sense, are linked to colonial projects that render the lives of racialized groups dispensable and undeserving of protection. Representation, in this sense, is a biopolitical matter: It serves to establish whose lives shall matter for the larger polity.
In an effort to address and replace the dehumanizing ways in which racialized bodies are portrayed, various social justice movements have made it their mission to represent their communities through more respectable imagery. Jalondra A. Davis notes, however, that these representations risk reducing the collective identity to a single communal body by way of erasing or downplaying difference, ambiguity, and complexity. In a close reading of the 1987 novel Dawn, Davis discusses Octavia Butler’s literary exploration of a specific kind of ugliness, “the grotesque,” which serves to theoretically carve a third space for black feminism that would not simply substitute politics of irreverence for politics of respectability: “The grotesque provides this third space precisely because of its trespassing on boundaries and refusal of absolutes” (p. 312). As an ambiguous figure, the grotesque resists these forms of political reductionism and underlines the complexity, hybridity, and multiplicity of meaning in identity. Davis’s reading does not merely seek to claim ugliness up and against the white bourgeois masculinist norms of beauty but instead attempts to articulate another kind of a politics of resistance that would do its work from this third space: Through startling invasions of bodily integrity Dawn calls for ways of thinking an otherwise world that have not yet been spoken. It ultimately nods toward what should be a great meeting place of science fiction and black political discourse, a politics that is willing to contemplate the grotesque and unthinkable in the interest of creating a more just world. (pp. 327–328)
Davis’s discussion seeks to bring out new ways of imagining resistance beyond the confines of “either/or.”
In contrast, Stefanie Snider, in her piece that examines the embracing of ugliness in fat activism, writes: [I]f beauty is being used as a method toward social justice and greater inclusion or diversity in Western culture it will always fail, always leave people out, always imply that there are some people not able or willing to participate in the beauty rhetoric. (p. 346)
Snider’s analysis, however, seems to rest on an either/or framework that leaves out some important ways in which the beautiful/ugly dichotomy is constantly reworked. While the point that Snider makes about the ideals of beauty being necessarily exclusionary and inadequate is valid, it is nonetheless worthwhile to point out that there is some value in the transformative expansion of these ideals within and through the fat acceptance movement, in the way in which, for instance, Lizzo reworks these norms to be more expansive and inclusive. These norms can also be reworked so radically that it becomes ambiguous as to what is beautiful and what is ugly to the extent that the ideal would no longer be able to serve exclusionary means, for instance, in feminist punk aesthetics that seek to undermine this dichotomy by way of interweaving beauty and ugliness so tightly that it is no longer possible to tell them apart (think of the “kinder whore” aesthetic that Kat Bjelland and Courtney Love adopted in the early 1990s). Snider’s suggestion that any claim to the beautiful is necessarily going to be exclusionary, while insightful for the context in which she is writing, may leave out some of the nuanced ways in which femmes “bargain with the patriarchy” to borrow Deniz Kandiyoti’s term. Is it not possible (or desirable) to reject the myth of the eternal feminine as an exclusionary ideal while at the same time opening it up to resignification such that it becomes more inclusive? The suggestion that the beauty ideal is irrevocably exclusionary would ultimately miss out on the important shifts and attempts at resignification that are politically transformative, which some of the other chapters in the anthology explore in depth.
In conclusion, On the Politics of Ugliness is a timely book with many layers and complex analyses that raise original points alongside some artistic expressions that provide a lot of depth to the subject matter. Given that the book aims to work at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, the use of art in this way is pertinent, compelling, and insightful. It is my contention that the greatest strength of the book lies in its willingness to delve into various topics through numerous methods, putting forth nuanced analyses from within intersectional frameworks that pay attention to race, class, gender, disability, ethnicity, nationality, and age simultaneously. The subjects covered in this anthology are going to speak to scholars from a number of different areas of study, including but not limited to sociology, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, women’s and gender studies, literary theory, and political theory, as well as members of the general public who are simply curious about the politics surrounding ugliness. All in all, the book does not seek to put forth a single thread that is demonstrative of the politics of ugliness but instead highlights the complexity and multiplicity in the ways in which ugliness is politically configured. This multiplicity, in methods, subjects, and styles, is especially fitting, given that the politics of ugliness operates in diverse, and sometimes contradicting, ways as many of the chapters show. Ugliness can be a tool for marginalization, but it can also be a tool for political mobilization. It signifies not one but many possible outcomes, and sometimes the beautiful and the ugly are so enveloped together that the ambiguity becomes politically productive. “Ugly” can refer to imperfection, but beauty can also be repackaged as “the perfection in imperfection,” which is a strategy that various companies currently employ to sell more products. The chapters in this anthology discuss at length and astutely demonstrate the various tensions and complexities surrounding the many facets of the politics of ugliness.
