Status Updates From On the Politics of Ugliness

“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.

[...] ugliness is political in two ways: first, it denotes inequalities and hierarchies, often serving as a repository for all that is “other” and despised; second, it is contingent and relational, taking shape through the comparison and evaluation of bodies.

[...] taxonomic bias against “ugly” species exists in scientific reporting. Fleming and Bateman found that mammals considered as “ugly” and/or not “charismatic,” such as rodents and bats, were the subject of far fewer studies despite greater species diversity and a higher rate of extinction.

Considerations of ugliness have also surfaced in theorizations of the operation of ugliness in/on the non-human, with a particular focus on feral animals and ugly species.

Bonnie Berry offers the term “social aesthetics” as a way to recognize the public and social aspect of the reception of one’s appearance as interlaced with bias and grounded in social inequality. What we have been referring to as visual injustice, Berry terms “looks-bias” and “lookism” or bias against people considered not attractive or ugly, which can have mild to severe economic and social impacts on one’s life.

Hatred of ugliness is further fueled by deep-seated racism that often manifests itself as visual injustice. Yeidy Rivero discusses how the Colombian version of Ugly Betty was, much like its ABC counterpart, “informed by intertwined Eurocentric, patriarchal, racial, Western/Christianized ideologies” and driven by racialized notions of ugliness.

Hatred of aging and disability are informed by white ideals of youth, health, able-bodiedness, and normative beauty, all of which are underwritten by a politics of ugliness. Women are especially taxed with the expectation that they should not be ugly and that if they are ugly, they are unworthy of sex.

The practices of being “not ugly” are, Talley suggests, ableist and rooted in a fear of bodily variance and a deep desire to appear, simply, normal.

The production of ugliness, like the production of beauty, is thus dependent on disciplinary codes of appearance and conduct.

The resulting “caricature of the ugly feminist” demonstrates that ugliness is as much about appearance as it is about behaviors that depart from the social norms acceptable in and to capitalist patriarchy.

Violette Leduc wrote that “ugliness in a woman is a mortal sin. If you’re beautiful, you turn heads for your beauty. If you’re ugly, you turn heads for your ugliness.” Leduc’s apt observation demonstrates that ugliness, like beauty, is harnessed against women in misogynist ways and is attached to the intrinsic worth and value a woman holds in the world—her currency under patriarchy.

Architecture, landscape, and city design thus strived and continues to strive to “exclude people deemed ugly” by reducing their access to public spaces. [...] People with disabilities are confronted by inaccessibility on a daily basis, which forecloses their entry to many public and private spaces.

Kristeva theorized abjection as a visceral response that speaks to the disintegration of boundaries between the self and other, suggesting that reacting with horror to “ugly” smells or appearances is a response of the socialized body, and not simply innate.

Thus our visceral responses to dirt, the grotesque, plainness, and/or monstrosity, are about maintaining social relations and social margins.

“visual injustice”—a system of discrimination that relies on the politics of appearance and visuality to render and deny privilege, access, and resources, including power, money, work, and love.

Siebers asserts that “aesthetics […] posits the human body and its affective relation to other bodies as foundational to the appearance of the beautiful” and—as this collection will develop—to the ugly.

Critical disability studies theorist Tobin Siebers argues that while philosophy has sought to disembody aesthetics, aesthetics is inherently political and embodied.

Theoretical and scholarly work on ugliness has developed along two tracks. The first mostly developed within philosophy, elaborating upon ugliness as an aesthetic category opposed to beauty. This body of work suggests that ugliness is the direct opposite of beauty and that the two qualities are properties of seeing.

Indeed, ugliness seems to emerge as a property or attribute of places and bodies rather than as a process that relies on an unjust distribution of value and power in relation to the workings of gender, ability, race, class, beauty norms, body size, health, sexuality, and age.