theroastedpoosqueery:

queeranarchism:

weiszklee:

queeranarchism:

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)

i also do find it much more psychologically healthy to just accept ugliness and to not try to erase it or engulf it in the concept of ‘beauty’ at all cost. The idea that “beauty have its own meaning for each person and their subjectivity” is cute but ultimately false i think, as ‘beauty’ is a word and a ‘word’ is a communication tool, so each word must have a common base for everyone (if “sky” means X for one person and Y for another etc and each definition of “sky” never interlaces, then ‘sky’ doesnt really mean anything and is a useless concept). With that in mind, i think its important to be honest and to say there are some things that will never be considered beautiful, or only in very specifics occasions because we know and love a person who is in this situation (a face disfigured with acid, leprosy wounds, wtv). On the same note, certain beauty standards are so normalized in certain environment (thinness, clean skin, no hair leg,.. in my region of the world) that trying to say “yea but in x places or in x period it was actually considered beautiful sooo” is also a waste of time, because you do not live with people from x places or in x period -the subjectivity of your environment is your objectivity. And yea, in ourselves, and even if we are someone who is generally found as ‘beautiful’, there will be something we will find ugly (maybe im wrong but i dont think there is a person who find themselves pretty everywhere and all the time).

So yeah trying to find ourselves or others as beautiful is a waste of time or worse, frankly dangerous -even more so for people who have been raised as girls, because the beauty=valuable equation is that much stronger. And why should it be healthy to put that much effort in trying to find ourselves pretty ? Its the same amount of effort than trying to meet the beauty standards no? I mean wtv im doing, when i look at people in the street, i will always find some beautiful and others ugly, and why is it something that should be changed ? Why should i force myself to find things beautiful ? What is the point in this ? Why should i force myself to find my hair leg beautiful, when im just…too lazy to shave them and do not care very much that my legs are ugly ? The problem is if i think that because x person is beautiful, they have more value. But the solution to this is not to to force myself to find everyone beautiful, it is to recognize value in everyone including the ugly ones. This body positivism thing is really taking a turn for the worse, and i think its not a coincidence companies jump on the wagon : because the body positivism trend is actually 100% compatible with capitalism since it is indeed just ‘normalization’ like @queeranarchism said. “Go buy our new rainbow-flag computer and our new cream to have a lustrous unibrow” lmao.

[[Story of my life time : i have dermatillomania, a psychological trouble (ocd) that makes me try to get rid of my skin with the help of my nails, razors or wtv, so oc i have wounds and scars everywhere. For years i tried to find myself beautiful despite this, to such an extent it was becoming ridiculous and frankly heart-wrenching : look at me putting some cute headband to distract myself from the state of my face ! i was wasting so much time of my life not only trying to be beautiful, but trying to find myself beautiful ! then i joined a queer & anar group, in which there was so many ugly people, and it was so… liberating. People with breasts that hang so low they touch their belly, people with disgusting pimples everywhere, people with uncovered and moving fat rolls… at first i was ‘uuuh’ and felt actually kind of superior with my conventionally-attractive appearance (once im hidden under makeup and clothes), and then i learn to know these ugly people. And most of them were like so impressive. Like they were ugly and i was enjoying their presence and were actually feeling so small next to them !  it was exhilarating. I was feeling it in my bones, that we could be ugly and interesting and complex and funny and everything ! being ugly or beautiful was just a characteristics among so many others ! so now im finally on my way to accept myself : yea i find my scars and wounds ugly, and its just fine like this. Its so much easier to be ugly and proud rather than to run after an unattainable goal of beauty, because i dont have to make efforts at all, i just have to be (well okay thats in itself plenty of efforts lol). Maybe someone will find my scars beautiful, maybe not ; i hope soon i wont care about it and let myself have the right to just exist. (ironically since i think like this and dont try to find myself beautiful at all cost my ocd got much better lmao. i think its a sign).]]

Thank you for your addition, that’s really helpful!

I think some of our attitude towards beauty is slightly different. As a social construct,I think beauty standards can theoretically be changed to include anything (wounds etc, the lot) but like you said: this will always be dependent on a common base because that is what a social construct does, and this will always exclude some things because otherwise the word has no function.

So we could theoretically challenge the idea that wounds are ugly, raise our kids to find wounds beautiful and if we did it with enough people, we’d probably effectively change the concept of beauty. But why would we want to? How is that more liberating than to stop trying to be beautiful?

Like you said, this whole reclaiming beauty through body positivity thing is a capitalist paradise. It is so so easy to co-opt, declaw and commercialize.

I too long for queer anarchist spaces where it just doesn’t matter and when i look at queer art I think queer self-presentation that specifically, over-the-top screams ugliness without any attempt to rebrand that as beauty takes a step towards creating that space.

Unfortunately I’ve also come across a lot of queer spaces that claimed to reject beauty standards but that means ‘redefining’ beauty standards, not destroying them. And then you end up with a very queer-fashion-aware space where the next beauty standard may include fat women with uni brows and pink hair, but we’re still trying to meet a beauty standard and we’re still attaching social value to who effectively meets those redefined beauty standards. That sort of spaces are massively disappointing and just, in that aspect, counterrevolutionary.