̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - beauty

When beauty matters: the politics of how we look

amb206 — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 13:31:16 +0000

We live in a world brimming with images. But the pictures that perhaps most powerfully evoke our individual life stories are seldom seen. Stored in personal albums or pushed to the back of drawers, these are not the images that we necessarily choose to share on social media. Taken on occasions that are both special and ordinary (the first day at school, that family trip to the beach), these photographs are imbued with feelings, many of them complex and complicated. Looked back on from a distance of time passed, they reveal our vulnerability: how we were and how we are, how we and others saw us and see us.

When sociologist Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa interviewed a group of Mexican women about their lives, she invited them to share their photo albums and reflect on their feelings about their bodies and the multiplicity of connections developing around them over time. Her objective was to explore women’s lived experiences and reveal the powerful role that ideas about beauty and race play in shaping individual lives. Moreno Figueroa sought a complex account from her interviewees, but the route those narratives took and the depth of their emotions surprised her. So much so, that she decided, on publishing her work, not to reproduce any of the women’s photographs.

Much has been written about women and beauty. Far less has been written about the ways in which notions of beauty, femininity, age and race intersect to create strongly perceived ‘differences’ which have profound and enduring effects. To be deemed beautiful confers immediate advantages – yet beauty is fleeting and fragile. A state of being beautiful is either displaced to the past or deferred to the future. As Moreno Figueroa has written, in a paper with her colleague Rebecca Coleman, “beauty is not a ‘thing’ which can be experienced in the present, but is that which is felt in different temporalities”.

Next week (30 August to 3 September 2016) Moreno Figueroa and colleagues (Dr Dominique Grisard from the ̽��ֱ�� of Basel & the Swiss Center for Social Research and Dr Margrit Vogt from the ̽��ֱ�� of Flensburg) will stage a ground-breaking summer school and conference titled ‘ ̽��ֱ��Politics of Beauty’. Participants will include academics and artists who will share professional and personal experiences to encourage wide-ranging debate on topics related to beauty.

As a sociologist concerned with understanding the ‘quality’ of inequality, the depth and feeling of racism and sexism, Moreno Figueroa argues that beauty should be understood as an “embodied affective process” – not so much a state of being as a feeling about being. “We’re inviting our participants to engage with the politics of beauty and its ramifications. How does beauty travel? What kinds of beauty discourses are created and transmitted in such journeys? How are the politics of beauty reconfigured both through its travels and its locatedness? When do they matter and to what effect and extent? These are important questions because they go to the heart of many human experiences,” Grisard, Vogt and Moreno Figueroa write in their invitation to this event.

Moreno Figueroa has written extensively on beauty and race – especially in the context of Latin America – and has helped to raise awareness of the ways in which they contribute to the reproduction of pervasive forms of racism and sexism and the reinforcement of structures of inequality. ̽��ֱ��Mexican women who shared their photographs were educated lower and middle-class professionals. They were also, like the majority of Mexico’s population, mestiza (racially mixed). ̽��ֱ��interviews revealed the strong concern with appearance, skin colour, physical features which are in turn deeply intertwined with notions of acceptable femininity and national belonging – and the words that cropped up again and again was morena (dark-skinned) and fea (ugly). One woman reported that, as a child, she used to ask her uncles, when they teased her about her looks, “Why am I so morena?”

“This question sounds naïve but it’s not, as it comes from a context where racial mixture has given a sense that different physical features are possible. Some get ‘lucky’, some don’t,” says Moreno Figueroa. “Mexico is a highly racialised society in which issues of racism, and particularly prejudices about skin colour, are neither acknowledged nor addressed – but have remained hugely influential both in the intimate environment of the family and in the wider world outside it. Deeply embedded in Mexican society are notions of beauty that have their origins in deliberate moves to ‘improve’ indigenous races. Improving meant encouraging marriages that would result in children with lighter skins and ‘fine’ features. Hand-in-hand with notions of improvement come ideas about degeneration.”

In interviewing contemporary mestiza women about their life stories, Moreno Figueroa was asking them to describe the form of racism that exists within the majority population and not the more familiar type of racism directed by a majority to a minority.

“In the context of everyday experience framed by the racial logics of mestizaje, there are no fixed racial positions and people are not engaged in processes of identity politics as found in other parts of the world. This is what is so striking about mestizaje: people are not white or black, but rather, they are whiter than or darker than others,” she says. “ ̽��ֱ��category of mestizo which epitomises Mexican national identity is relative. As the historian Alan Knight has pointed out, mestizo represents an achieved and ascribed status underpinned by whitening practices and promises of whiteness as privilege.”

It is within this framework that the racialisation of understandings of beauty comes to the fore. ̽��ֱ��infamous Mexican Caste Paintings (Pinturas de Castas) give a sense of how during colonial times artists recreated highly composed scenes that represented the routes for racial and class improvement underlined by aspirations of beauty, refinement and leisure. A union between a Spanish man and an Indigenous woman would produce a mestiza child; one between a Spanish man and a mestiza woman, a castizo child; and between a Spanish man and a castizo woman a Spanish child. In this rationale, in three generations, with careful planning and no mixing with Indigenous or Black blood, people could whiten themselves by ascription and make sure their descendants would fare better in life.

While Moreno Figueroa is careful not to claim a direct line between the Colonial period (1521-1810) and contemporary Mexico, it cam as no surprise that one of her participants shared stories of unease when young whiter women were courted by darker men, or of exasperation when a relative decided to marry a woman as dark as him. ̽��ֱ��reported dialogues are revealing: “How come he married her? Can’t he see what she looks like? And even nowadays he’s like 70 years old and his kids are in their 30s, they still ask him ‘If you can see you’re so dark, why did you marry such a dark woman?’. Why didn’t he think about ‘improving the race’.”

While the Mexican racial project is specific to its context, it shares some similar experiences of colonisation with other Latin American countries, as well as strong responses to 19th-century scientific racism, such as the trend to develop official ideologies of racial mixture (for example, Mexican Mestizaje or Brazil’s racial democracy) as part of nation-building strategies. As Moreno Figueroa explains: “These racial projects, and many others around the world, are tightly entangled with ideas about femininity where notions of beauty, its oppressiveness and fascination, play a central role in filtering privilege and crystalising paths of purity and belonging.”

Beauty might not be tangible, not a ‘thing’, but the promise of it underpins a global business worth many millions of dollars, generated by an industry that trades on vulnerability as well as pleasure. “It would be easy perhaps to dismiss the cosmetics and beauty treatment industries as somehow superficial and exploitative,” says Moreno Figueroa. “But beauty lies in a difficult terrain – it is also a question of hope and pleasure, pain and shame. These are profoundly felt human emotions for both women and men. They deserve our full attention.”

Participants in the summer school and conference include: Diane Negra ( ̽��ֱ�� College Dublin, Ireland); Francis Ray White ( ̽��ֱ�� of Westminster, UK); Jackie Sanchez Taylor ( ̽��ֱ�� of Leicester, UK); Joy Gregory (Slade School of Fine Art, UK); Marcia Ochoa (UC Santa Cruz, USA); Meeta Rani Jha, ( ̽��ֱ�� of Winchester, UK); Mimi Thi Nguyen ( ̽��ֱ�� of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA); Ng’endo Mukii (independent film maker, Nairobi, Kenya); Paula Villa (LMU Munich, Germany); Rosalind Gill (City ̽��ֱ��, London, UK); Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory ̽��ֱ��, USA); Sarah Banet-Weiser (USC Annenberg, USA); and Shirley Tate, ( ̽��ֱ�� of Leeds, UK).

For details of the Politics of Beauty summer school and conference go to https://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/about/events/beauty-summer-school

Questions of beauty and its politics will be discussed at a summer school and conference next week (30 August to 3 September 2016). Participants will examine the ways in which perceptions and experiences of race, ethnicity, sexuality and colonialism converge to exert powerful influences on our lives.

Deeply embedded in Mexican society are notions of beauty that have their origins in deliberate moves to ‘improve’ indigenous races. Improving meant encouraging marriages that would result in children with lighter skins and ‘fine’ features. Hand-in-hand with notions of improvement come ideas about degeneration.

Monica Moreno Figueroa

Pinturas de Castas

Mexican Caste Paintings from the 18th century

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Beauty and despair

amb206 — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:16:37 +0000

Published last month, the All Party Parliamentary Group’s report on “Body Image” blames our anxieties on celebrity culture and media images. But the problem of “body dissatisfaction” is not new. Celebrity culture and iconic bodies – and not so iconic ones – go all the way back to the time of Socrates in 5^th century BC Athens. Socrates was famously ugly and pondered what it must be like to be Alcibiades, who was the matinee idol of his day. But Socratic ugliness is not just comic relief in an otherwise serious dialectic.

It is plausible to argue that philosophy begins right here, in the perception of one's own imperfections relative to some unattainable ideal. In fact the ideal (or “Form”) becomes a central tenet of Platonic philosophy – the problem being that you have to die to attain it. In Renaissance neo-Platonism, Socrates, still spectacularly ugly, acquires an explicitly Christian logic: philosophy is there to save us from our ugliness (perhaps more moral than physical). But the implication is already there in works like Plato’s “Phaedo.” If we need to die in order to attain the true, the good, and the beautiful (to kalon), it must be because truth, goodness, and beauty elude us so comprehensively in life. You think you’re beautiful? Socrates seems to say. Well, think again! ̽��ֱ��idea of beauty, in this world, is like a mistake. Perhaps Socrates’s mission is to make the world safe for ugly people. Isn’t everyone a little ugly, one way or the other, at one time or another? Who is beautiful, all the time? Only the archetypes can be truly beautiful.

In modern times, Jean-Paul Sartre is the closest equivalent to Socrates. As per the Parliamentary report, Sartre says that his body image problem started very young. He was only 7. Up to that point he had had a glittering career as a crowd-pleaser. Everybody referred to young “Poulou” as “the angel”. His mother had carefully cultivated his luxuriant halo of golden locks. Then one fine day his grandfather takes it into his head that Poulou is starting to look like a girl, so he waits till the boy’s mother has gone out, then tells his grandson they are going out for a special treat. Which turns out to be the barbershop. Poulou can hardly wait to show off his new look to his mother. But when she walks through the door, she takes one look at him before running up the stairs and flinging herself on the bed, sobbing hysterically. Her carefully constructed — one might say carefully combed — universe has just been torn down, like a Hollywood set being broken and reassembled for some quite different movie, rather harsher, darker, less romantic and devoid of semi-divine beings. For, as in an inverted fairy-tale, the young Sartre has morphed from an angel into a “toad”. It is now, for the first time, that Sartre realises that he is — as his American lover, Sally Swing, will say of him — “ugly as sin.”

“ ̽��ֱ��fact of my ugliness” becomes a barely suppressed leitmotif of his writing. He wears it like a badge of honor (Camus, watching Sartre in laborious seduction mode in a Paris bar: “Why are you going to so much trouble?” Sartre: “Have you had a proper look at this mug?”). I can’t help wondering if ugliness is not indispensable to philosophy. Sartre seems to be suggesting that thinking — serious, sustained questioning — arises out of, or perhaps with, a consciousness of one’s own ugliness. Philosophy, in other words, has an ironic relationship to beauty.

Sartre (like Aristotle, like Socrates himself at certain odd moments) is trying to get away from the archetypes. From, in particular, a transcendent concept of beauty that continues to haunt — and sometimes cripple — us. In trying to be beautiful, we are trying to be like God (the “for-itself-in-itself” as Sartre rebarbatively put it). In other words, to become like a perfect thing, an icon of perfection, and this we can never fully attain. But it is good business for manufacturers of beauty creams, cosmetic surgeons and barbers.

̽��ֱ��beautiful, to kalon, is not some far-flung transcendent abstraction, in the neo-existentialist view. Beauty is a thing (social facts are things, Durkheim said). Whereas I am no-thing. Which explains why I can never be truly beautiful. Even if it doesn’t stop me wanting to be either. Perhaps this explains why Camus, Sartre’s more dashing sparring partner, jotted down in his notebooks, “Beauty is unbearable and drives us to despair".

In the light of the thoughts of Socrates and Sartre, it seems to me the government has two options. Either we need to promote cosmetic surgery for all; or we can have a shot at becoming more truly philosophical.

Andy Martin is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge. He is author of ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus (Simon and Schuster, 2012).

A high level inquiry reported last month that more than half of the British public has a negative body image. Cambridge academic Andy Martin reflects on the idea of beauty and our pursuit of the unattainable.

Celebrity culture and iconic bodies – and not so iconic ones – go all the way back to the time of Socrates in 5th century BC Athens.

Dr Andy Martin

Andy Martin

Dr Andy Martin

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