9:39pm July 25, 2013

➸ Urocyon's Jaunts: Conversations About Beauty and Beauty Privilege Need To Be Intersectional

In my essay The Beauty Binary, Street Harassment and Rape Culture, I wrote about how the perception of beauty in regards to street harassment operates on a sliding scale (though usually a rigid binary) where whether or not a woman is perceived as “beautiful" or perceived as…

I agree with most of this, although I think some of it is even more complicated, with even more layers, than is acknowledged here. (Disability and disfigurement aren’t mentioned at all. Severe disfigurement, even in an otherwise privileged woman, can affect perceptions of beauty in some of the most extreme possible ways. As in, I know of women whose disfigurement has resulted in everyone near them running away from them, refusing to talk to them, AT BEST, and at worst, people vomiting or screaming at the sight of them, or point blank acting as if they’d have been better off dead than survive whatever disfigured them.

The so called “stigmata” of some genetic conditions can have a usually less severe, but still extreme, effect on perceptions of beauty. Usually negative. But occasionally positive (when it’s something like small chin, large eyes, long eyelashes, supermodel figure, etc. – such things, even when clear markers of genetic conditions, are less likely to be picked up upon by geneticists because the assumption is genetic conditions make you ugly).

And that’s just two of many things relating to disability and disfigurement that can strongly affect how your beauty is perceived.

Even within one type of oppression things are complicated and can go both ways. It’s hard to make any absolute statements because of this, even when things seem absolute without considering the complexity of the situation.

I think it’s very interesting that disfigurement is considered a disability in many places, including supposed to be so under the ADA in the USA, even in circumstances where it doesn’t impair the person’s ability to do anything at all.

(Except that often it’s blamed for impairing social interaction, even when the person with the disfigurement isn’t interacting in any unusual way, they’re just being treated like crap by everyone around them. But it’s somehow their fault for being disfigured.)

Notes: