On the Politics of Ugliness, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018

Ugliness or unsightlinessis much more than a quality or property of an individual?s appearance?it has long functioned as a social category that demarcates access to social, cultural, and political spaces and capital. The editors of and authors in this collection harness intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches in order to examine ugliness as a political category that is deployed to uphold established notions of worth and entitlement. On the Politics of Ugliness identifies and challenges the harmful effects that labels and feelings of ugliness have on individuals and the socio-political order. It explores ugliness in relation to the intersectional processes of racialization, colonization and settler colonialism, gender-making, ableism, heteronormativity, and fatphobia. On the Politics of Ugliness asks that we fight against visual injustice and imagine new ways of seeing.

1. Introduction: On the Politics of Ugliness (Sara Rodrigues and Ela Przybylo)

2. Ugliness (Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer)

3. Listening to the Ugliness of Hetero-Erotic Miscommunication in Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (Yetta Howard)

4. “Put On All Your Make-Up and Cry It Off In Public”: The Function of Ugliness in Femme Grieving Practices (Andi Schwartz)

6. The Lesson of the Cockroach: Towards an Ethics of Ugliness (Esther Hutfless and Elisabeth Schäfer)

7. (Un)Mapping the City Beautiful: Orlando Florida’s ‘Ugly’ Settler Colonial Legacy (Stephanie Wheeler)

8. New Body Project(s): “Excess” Skin the in the Context of Massive Weight Loss (Yasmina Katsulis)

9. The Indiscreet Charms of Spatial Ugliness: An Enquiry into a (Post)Colonial City (Sayandeb Chowdhury)

10. Stigma Stains: The Somaesthetics of Institutional Abjection (Natasha Lushetich)

11. Agatha’s Breasts on a Plate: “Ugliness” as Resistance and Queerness (Bernadette Wegenstein)

13. Ugliness as Colonial Violence: Mediations of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women (Katherine Morton)

15. Butler’s Monsters: The Grotesque and the Black Communal Body in Octavia Butler’s Dawn (Jalondra Davis)

16. On the Limitations of the Rhetoric of Beauty: Embracing Ugliness in Contemporary Fat Visual Representations (Stefanie Snider)

17. The Ugly, the Uninvited, the Unseen in the Work of Sia & Emma Sulkowicz (Karina Eileraas Karakuş)

18. Teaching While Ugly: A Story of Racial Pulchritude, Privilege, and Pedagogy (Michael Johnson, Jr.)

19. The Ugly Gaze (Shannon Bell)

Sara Rodrigues is a researcher and writer based in Toronto, Canada. She holds a PhD in Social and Political Thought (York University). Her research program focuses on phenomenological and poststructuralist engagements with the body, embodiment and body practices. Her work has appeared in Human Studies, Sexualities and International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, among others. She is a Founding Editor of Feral Feminisms.

Ela Przybylo is a Ruth Wynn Woodward Postdoctoral Fellow and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Ela’s work on asexuality has appeared in GLQ, Sexualities, Feminism & Psychology, in Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, and in Introducing the New Sexuality Studies, Third Edition. Ela is also a proud Founding and Advisory Editor of the peer-reviewed, open access, inter-media online journal, Feral Feminisms.

Offers a political, rather than aesthetic, consideration of ugliness

Leverages an intersectional approach to ugliness by centering the interrelationship between race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class

Approaches ugliness through an interdisciplinary lens by drawing on art history, critical race theory, feminist theory, literary studies, psychoanalysis, and critical theory