Hana "Nara"’s Reviews > On the Politics of Ugliness > Status Update

“Beauty is not the platonically pure beginning but rather something that originated in the renunciation of what was once feared, which only as the result of this renunciation…became the ugly.” Beauty was form added to formlessness. “If one originated in the other, it is beauty that originated in the ugly, and not the reverse.”

For Adorno, in fact, beauty was an exclusionary, elitist, and oppressive category forged by the dominant orders and forced on the people.

[...] that ugliness is relationally formed when bodies come into contact with other bodies, discourses, and ideologies. To study ugliness is thus to “stud[y] the social meanings, symbols, and stigmas attached to [it] and […] how they relate to enforced systems of exclusion and oppression.”

Like disability, ugliness is “not [a] personal misfortune or individual defect but [a] product of a disabling social and built environment […] the product of social injustice."

[...] become more thoughtful as to what lies behind calling someone or something ugly, and how it is not only not a neutral description, but one that carries with it deep political implications.

[...] ugliness does not operate in isolation, but functions in relation to other categories. At the same time, ugliness also operates to support injustice by providing justification for its existence within the visual order.

A focus on ugliness can be useful in understanding how everyday interactions and systems of representations function in concord and in opposition to body norms and strictures of appearance. Ugliness assists us in undertaking the work of better understanding the role that the politics of appearance play in the flows of injustice.

[...] to mark another being as “ugly” is to make a commentary that is at its heart caught up in the mechanisms not only of the politics of appearance but also in racism, sexism, ableism, fatphobia, ageism, and capitalist attachments to perfectible and optimizable bodies. Thus, “ugliness” is all too often deemed a property of “the politically, economically, and socially disenfranchised.”

[...] to engage ugliness on its own terms and without immediate reverence for or capitulation to beauty.

[Andrei] Pop and [Mechtild] Widrich’s careful curation reveals that, when deployed on bodies and behaviors, “beauty” and “ugly” function “as a form of social control” that in turn has tangible consequences for individuals.