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.
I don’t understand why everyone frames this as a personal issue. I certainly agree that embracing ugliness can help people feel better about themselves. But really, regardless of whether I think I’m hot, beautiful, handsome, ugly, revolting, whatever, that won’t change the way that someone who does ascribe worth to beauty treats me. If someone’s going to treat people they find unattractive poorly, how I feel about myself won’t affect that. Moreover, it’s easier to not care about how (un)attractive you are when when it doesn’t affect every interaction you have with another person :
Oh, I was never thinking of this as just an individual struggle. Far from it.
It’s definitely about what we try to cultivate in our communities and what we strive for in our entire society.
So it’s about what we spend out energy on. Are we going start yet another photo campaign to ‘redefine beauty’ in a slightly broader way? Celebrating a little more fat or a little more body hair while the overarching concept of beauty standards remains?
Or are we going to focus our activism on challenging the idea that anyone has to be beautiful and resisting the violence targeted at people (especially women) who fail to meet beauty standards?
What sort of behavior do we think belongs in our communities? What strategies do we use to create safer communities? What behavior do we recognize as harmful?
Hope this clears some things up. I really should have made this clearer from the start. I find the individualization and life-style-ification of our struggles incredibly frustrating and I’d hate to fall into that.
QueerAnarchism 