Beauty, ugliness and ideas of difference

Ugliness and beauty have become politicized in the modern period – used to marginalize and silence, and also to empower. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current climate of “body shaming” and “body positivity,” in which feeling empowered and attractive has become a marketable commodity. This chapter charts the mobilization of aesthetics: within the eugenics movement and “unsightly beggar” ordinances in the early decades of the twentieth century; through the politics of commemoration and protest following World War I, and in the new discourse of rights starting in the 1960s and 70s. Aesthetics becomes a battleground in the Black is Beautiful movement, second-wave feminism, and in attempts to destigmatize homosexuality, disability and non-normative bodies generally. Bodily difference in the modern world is routinely subject to legal definition, professional scrutiny, photographic documentation, and medical correction. But as the universality of aesthetic categories wanes it becomes possible to think of beauty and ugliness as fluid and contested terms open to creative and political re-appropriation.