Celebrating ugliness is always going to be more radically queer than widening beauty standards.
Redefining beauty standards to include gender-nonconforming, body hair, fat, disability etc is all nice but ultimately it strives to include more people in the concept of beauty, but never all people. Some people will always be considered ugly in order for the word beautiful to have any meaning at all.
So redefining beauty standards is what we call an assimilationist goal. Just like redefining what we call normal is an assimilationist goal.
Abolishing beauty standards and boldly celebrating ugliness is radical because it challenges the root assumption that anyone should be beautiful and that beauty gives a person more value than the value of glorious ugliness, shameless repulsiveness, the wonderful freakishness of being queer.
This isn’t easy. Beauty standards are everywhere in the queer scene, always slightly different from the mainstream but just as suffocating. It takes work to truly embrace ugliness in ourselves and to see how exciting it can be in the people we desire. But it is worth it. Beauty is always going to be a trap, it is always going to leave us struggling as we go through change and aging and sickness and chance. Falling in love with our own ugliness is freedom.
We are revolting. We are revolted. We revolt.
Hm, I just don’t know … Both “Everyone is beautiful” and “Ugly and proud” ultimately serve the same far future goal of removing beauty as a category by which we order humans, so that’s good. But in the short term, the first just seems … psychologically healthier? Also it’s closer to the truth, I think. Beauty is entirely subjective, no matter how you look, some people will find you ugly, some people will find you beautiful, nothing you can do about it. “We shouldn’t judge people for being ugly, it does not define their worth, we should make our peace with sometimes being seen as ugly”, all true, but also: Nobody is objectively ugly, that’s simply not a thing, we’re just brainwashed.
Well, I’m gonna copy-paste some of this from a previous answer to this point, with a few changes:
I’d say that the big difference is that beauty
or normalcy can only ever be the things that have been defined as
beautiful. We can expand that to include pimples and fat and baldness
and gender nonconformity but it will only ever be the things that we have spend time and work to include.
When we grow fatter than what we have normalized,
when our skin has more imperfections that we have normalized, when we
grow older, when our bodies become more unusual, or we change in some
other ways we didn’t anticipate, we once again run into the fear of
being ugly because this new imperfection hasn’t been brought into the concept of beautiful yet.
So no matter how much work we did redefining our
beauty standards, as long as we are invested in the idea that we are beautiful we keep having to do the work again and again because we keep
running into their limits.
The ugly and the weird on the
other hand, is limitless. It can be anything. Ugly can be things we
never even imagined. When we have stopped ascribing value to beauty, our
body can become anything and it will not lose any of its value. When we
have fallen in love with ugliness, our body can not disappoint us
anymore.
And why on earth would that be
psychologically unhealthy? Do you honestly believe that we all need to feel beautiful so badly that to abandon the pursuit is
psychologically unhealthy? That makes no sense to me.
If beauty standards are a harmful societal construct, obviously the healthiest thing to do is to try to stop attaching value to that construct. Refusing to meet a standard and trying to reduce your own investment in that standard is far more liberating than trying to meet a standard by expanding it.
Redefining standards of what it means to be ugly or normal means trying to change some of the rules of a competition game.
Celebrating ugliness and weirdness
means refusing to play that game at all.
(I answered another ask about beauty here)
QueerAnarchism 