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ON
THE
PO L I T I C S
OF
U G L I NE S S
EDITED BY
SARA RODRIGUES
AND
EL A PRZYBYLO
On the Politics of Ugliness
Sara Rodrigues • Ela Przybylo
Editors
On the Politics
of Ugliness
Editors
Sara Rodrigues Ela Przybylo
Toronto, ON, Canada Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Simon Fraser University
Vancouver, BC, Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-76782-6 ISBN 978-3-319-76783-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76783-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935188
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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Cover credit: “Thank You For The Syphilis,” mixed media and collage on mylar. Sarah Allen Eagen, artist,
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Contents
1 Introduction: On the Politics of Ugliness 1

Ela Przybylo and Sara Rodrigues
2 Ugliness 31
Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer
Part I Desire, Relationality, Erotics 51
3 Listening to the Ugliness of Hetero-Erotic Miscommunication

in Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms 53
Yetta Howard
4 “Put on All Your Make-Up and Cry It Off in Public:”

The Function of Ugliness in Femme Grieving Practices 69
Andi Schwartz
5 I Want to Kill Myself 91

Vivek Shraya
6 The Lesson of the Cockroach: Towards an Ethics of Ugliness 103

Esther Hutfless and Elisabeth Schäfer
v
vi Contents
Part II The Spatio-Temporalities of Ugliness 125
7 (Un)Mapping the City Beautiful: Orlando Florida’s “Ugly”

Settler Colonial Legacy 127
Stephanie K. Wheeler
8 New Body Project(s): “Excess” Skin in the Context of Massive

Weight Loss 151
Yasmina Katsulis
9 The Indiscreet Charms of Spatial Ugliness: An Enquiry into

a (Post)colonial City 171
Sayandeb Chowdhury
10 Stigma Stains: The Somaesthetics of Institutional Abjection 193

Natasha Lushetich
Part III Materialities and Representations 217
11 Agatha’s Breasts on a Plate: “Ugliness” as Resistance

and Queerness 219
Bernadette Wegenstein
12 Imagining Ugliness: Failed Femininities, Shame, and Disgust

Written Onto the “Other” Body 237
Breanne Fahs
13 Ugliness as Colonial Violence: Mediations of Murdered

and Missing Indigenous Women 259
Katherine Morton
14 Writing Ugly 291
Melody Ellis
15 Butler’s Monsters: The Grotesque and the Black Communal

Body in Octavia Butler’s Dawn 309
Jalondra A. Davis
Contents
vii
Part IV Ugliness as Generative Power 335
16 On the Limitations of the Rhetoric of Beauty: Embracing

Ugliness in Contemporary Fat Visual Representations 337
Stefanie Snider
17 The Ugly, the Uninvited, and the Unseen in the Work of Sia
and Emma Sulkowicz 367
Karina Eileraas Karakuş
18 Teaching While Ugly: A Story of Racial Pulchritude,

Privilege, and Pedagogy 389
Michael Johnson, Jr.
19 The Ugly Gaze 411

Shannon Bell
Index 427
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors

Ela Przybylo is Ruth Wynn Woodward Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender,
Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Przybylo
is the author of Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality
(forthcoming 2019). 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 Managing Editor of the peer-reviewed, open access, inter-
media online journal, Feral Feminisms (http://feralfeminisms.com). Visit her
online at: https://przybyloela.wordpress.com/.
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.
About the Contributors

Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer Born in Athens, Greece, and trained as an art
historian at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and Princeton University,
Athanassoglou-Kallmyer previously taught at the University of Maryland and
the University of Chicago and is currently Professor of Art History, University
ix
x Editors and Contributors
of Delaware. She has published extensively on French nineteenth-century art,

including essays on Gericault, Horace Vernet, Delacroix, and Cezanne, and
three books: French Images from the Greek War of Independence: Art and Politics
under the Restoration (Yale University Press, 1989); Eugene Delacroix: Prints,
Politics, and Satire (Yale University Press, 1991); and Cezanne and Provence:
The Painter in His Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Shannon Bell is Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto,
Canada (http://www.yorku.ca/shanbell/). Her books include: Fast Feminism
(2010); Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (1994); Whore
Carnival (1995); Bad Attitude/s on Trial (co-authored 1997, reissued 2017);
The Book of Radical General Semantics (co-edited 2016); Subversive Itinerary:
The Thought of Gad Horowitz (co-edited 2013); and New Socialisms (co-edited
2004).
Sayandeb Chowdhury is Assistant Professor, School of Letters, Ambedkar
University Delhi and doctoral fellow, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur
University, Calcutta where he is working on the history and practice of early
photography in and on Calcutta. He was UKNA Fellow at the International
Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden in 2015 and a Charles Wallace India Trust
fellow, 2016. His essays have been published or are forthcoming in Film
International, Journal of South Asian History and Culture, South Asia Review,
The Economic and Political Weekly, European Journal of English Studies, and
thematic anthologies published by Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Karnac
Books, University of Brussels Press, Amsterdam University Press, and
University of Nebraska Press. He also contributes regularly on books, politics
and cinema to leading Indian publications such as Biblio, Indian Express,
Outlook, Business Standard, TheWire.in, The Caravan, and Art India.
Jalondra A. Davis is a black feminist artist-intellectual. She writes, researches,
educates and performs in Los Angeles, California. She holds a BA in English
from Loyola Marymount University, a Master of Professional Writing from
the University of Southern California, and a PhD in Ethnic Studies from
University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on black political
discourse in black/Africana popular literatures and culture, with a focus on
women, gender and sexuality. Her current project “On Queens and Monsters:
Science Fiction and the Black Political Imagination” examines how black
women’s speculative fiction engages and revises both science fiction tropes and
narrative discourses surrounding black femininity. She is also the author of a
coming-of-age novel entitled Butterfly Jar, about a black girl growing and act-
ing up during the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings. Davis is a lecturer in the
Africana Studies Department at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
xi
Melody Ellis is a writer and academic based in Melbourne. She completed her
undergraduate studies in fine art at Sydney College of the Arts in 2001, and
in 2014 was awarded a PhD in creative writing from RMIT. Her interdisci-
plinary writing practice explores a preoccupation with desire, place, subjectiv-
ity and psychoanalysis. Ellis’s writing is informed by her practice as an
exhibiting artist and sometimes curator. She recently co-authored a chapter
with Associate Professor Francesca Rendle-Short for The Materiality of Love:
Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice (Routledge 2017).
Breanne Fahs is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State
University, where she specializes in studying women’s sexuality, critical
embodiment studies, radical feminism, and political activism. She has pub-
lished widely in feminist, social science and humanities journals and has
authored or edited six books: Performing Sex (SUNY Press, 2011), The Moral
Panics of Sexuality (Palgrave, 2013), Valerie Solanas (Feminist Press, 2014),
Out for Blood (SUNY Press, 2016), Transforming Contagion (Rutgers University
Press, 2018), and Firebrand Feminism (University of Washington Press, 2018).
She is the director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group
at Arizona State University, and she also works as a clinical psychologist in
private practice where she specializes in sexuality, couples work, and trauma
recovery.
Yetta Howard is the author of Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the
Underground (University of Illinois Press, 2018) and is editing a photography
and essay collection, Rated RX.: Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan (under
contract with Ohio State University Press) in collaboration with ONE
National Gay and Lesbian Archives. Howard specializes in gender and sexual-
ity studies, queer studies, and feminist theories of race and ethnicity.
Emphasizing visual and auditory texts, her research and teaching focuses on
twentieth- and twenty-first-century American cultural studies with an invest-
ment in underground, experimental and unpopular cultural production.
Some of Howard’s work has also appeared in Social Text; Sounding Out!; TSQ:
Transgender Studies Quarterly; The Journal of Popular Culture; Women &
Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory; and she guest edited a special issue
of Journal of Lesbian Studies on the theme “Under Pressure.”
Esther Hutfless is a philosopher and psychoanalyst in Vienna, Austria. She
teaches at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna and the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Academy. Her main teaching and research areas
include: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Feminist Philosophy, Ontology,
Écriture féminine, and Queer Theory. With Barbara Zach, she edited the first
xii Editors and Contributors
German anthology on queer theory and psychoanalysis Queering Psychoanalysis.

Transdisziplinäre Verschränkungen (Zaglossus, 2017); with Elisabeth Schäfer
she edited Hélène Cixous. Gespräch mit dem Esel (Zaglossus, 2017); and again
with Elisabeth Schäfer and Gertrude Postl edited Hélène Cixous. Das Lachen
der Medusa. Zusammen mit aktuellen Beiträgen (Passagen, 2013). Her work
has also appeared in the Journal für Psychoanalyse.
Michael Johnson, Jr. is currently Associate Lecturer and Advisor for the
Center for Liberal Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside. He also
serves as Vice President of Diversity, Outreach and Inclusion for the Popular
Culture Association, and as lifelong member and former Faculty Adviser for
Gamma Iota Omicron.
Karina Eileraas Karakuş received a BA in Women’s Studies, International
Relations and French from Wesleyan University in Connecticut and was the
first graduate of the PhD program in Women’s Studies at UCLA. She special-
izes in feminist, queer and postcolonial theory; autobiography, diaspora and
cultural memory; visual culture, film, media and performance studies; nation-
alism, sexuality, and revolution in the Middle East and North Africa; and the
relationship between fantasy, violence, and misrecognition. She is currently
revising a paper on the French-Lebanese film “Lila dit ca” and contributing to
a queer archive of Marilyn Monroe, female embodiment, and celebrity cul-
ture. She most recently published an article in Signs on nude protest as femi-
nist site of rage and as means of reformulating the public square with respect
to the Egyptian nude blogger Aliaa al-Mahdy.
Yasmina Katsulis is a medical anthropologist and Associate Professor of
Women and Gender Studies, who joined the Arizona State University faculty
in 2004. She received her doctoral degree in Anthropology from Yale
University (2003), and shortly following, a post-doctoral training position
supported by the National Institute of Health, through Yale’s School of
Epidemiology and Public Health. Katsulis specializes in qualitative and mixed
method research on the structural and social contexts of health disparities,
particularly as they relate to disparities around gender, race, and class among
the most marginalized and vulnerable populations. She has worked with such
diverse populations as sex workers struggling with drug addiction and home-
lessness; the experiences of sex workers involved in diversion programs offered
through the criminal justice system; foster youth; and, more recently, post-
bariatric patients. Katsulis teaches on sexualities, the body, global health, fat
studies, and alcohol and drug use.
xiii
Natasha Lushetich is Senior Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Practices and Visual

Studies at LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore, having previously lectured
at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research focuses on intermedia, art as
philosophy; theories of hegemony; biopolitics; agnotology and micro-
violence; and cultural performance. Among her publications are: Fluxus: The
Practice of Non-Duality (Rodopi 2014); On Game Structures, a special issue of
Performance Research, co-edited with Mathias Fuchs (2016); and
Interdisciplinary Performance Reformatting Reality (Palgrave 2016). Natasha’s
recent writing has also appeared in such cross-disciplinary journals as
Babilónia; Environment, Space, Place; Performance Research; TDR; Text and
Performance Quarterly; The Journal of Somaesthetics; and Total Art Journal, as
well as in a number of edited collections.
Katherine Morton is a PhD candidate in the department of Sociology at
Memorial University of Newfoundland. Born and raised in British Columbia
on unceded Coast Salish territory, Morton specializes in social research related
to Indigenous populations and colonial violence in British Columbia. Her
PhD research identifies points of intersection between violence, Indigenous
identity and colonialism in relation to the material spaces of residential
schools. She examines residential schools as carceral spaces that contradict
Canada’s national sense of self. She completed research in her MA on the
construction of tropes of Indigenous identity and their presence in indige-
nous focused public inquiries. Prior to grad school, Morton held positions in
both the federal and provincial public service researching and providing pol-
icy analysis on Indigenous cultural heritage, the duty to consult and demo-
graphic change. She is the co-president of the CSA Violence and Society
Research Cluster, and she works as an instructor at Memorial University.
Morton’s research interests include violence, g ender, identity politics, critical
theory, colonialism, land claim negotiations and discourse analysis.
Elisabeth Schäfer holds a postdoctoral position in the research project “Artist
Philosophers Philosophy AS Arts-Based Research” [AR 275-G21] sponsored
by the Austrian Science Funds FWF, at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.
She also teaches at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna.
Her main teaching and research areas include: Deconstruction, Queer-
Feminist Philosophy, Écriture féminine, and Philosophy of the body. In 2013
she co-edited with Esther Hutfless and Gertrude Postl the first German trans-
lation of Hélène Cixous’ essay “Le Rire de la Méduse” (Passagen Vienna). In
2017 she published—with Esther Hutfless—“Conversation avec l’ane. Écrire
aveugle” by Hélène Cixous along with two supplementing texts by the editors
and Gertrude Postl (Zaglossus Vienna). Schäfer is currently working on a
xiv Editors and Contributors
habilitation research project on “Trans*Writing Immanence and

Transformation. Towards a Political, Ethical and Aesthetical Theory of Writing
as Arts-based Research.”
Andi Schwartz is a PhD candidate in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies
at York University. She works at the intersection of critical femininities and
digital representations. Her research interests include femme identities and
communities, online subcultures and counterpublics, and radical softness.
Her writing has been published in Broken Pencil, Herizons, Shameless, Daily
Xtra, and Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology.
Vivek Shraya is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the
University of Calgary, and an artist whose body of work includes several albums,
films, and books. Her first book of poetry, even this page is white, won a 2017
Publisher Triangle Award and was longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads. Her debut
novel, She of the Mountains, was named one of The Globe and Mail’s Best Books,
and her first children’s picture book, The Boy & the Bindi, was featured on the
National Post bestseller list. Shraya has read and performed internationally at
shows, festivals and post-secondary institutions, including sharing the stage with
Tegan & Sara. She is one half of the music duo Too Attached and the founder of
the publishing imprint VS. Books. A four-time Lambda Literary Award finalist,
Shraya was a 2016 Pride Toronto Grand Marshal, and has received honors from
Toronto Arts Foundation and The Writers’ Trust of Canada.
Stefanie Snider is Assistant Professor of Art History at Kendall College of Art
and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she teaches classes in contem-
porary art, history of photography, and race, gender, and sexuality in twenti-
eth- and twenty-first century art. Snider earned her PhD from University of
Southern California and researches contemporary art and visual culture that
focuses on marginalized communities, especially work made by, for, or about
LGBT/queer, fat, and disabled populations. Some of Snider’s work has
appeared in the Journal of Lesbian Studies; More Caught in the Act: An Anthology
of Performance Art by Canadian Women (ed. Johanna Householder and Tanya
Mars, YYZ Books and Artexte Editions, 2016); The Photograph and the Album
(ed. Theresa Wilkie, Jonathan Carson, and Rosie Miller, Museums Etc.,
2013); and The Fat Studies Reader (ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay,
New York University Press, 2009). She guest edited an issue of Fat Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society on “Visual Representations
of Fat and Fatness” in 2013. In 2016–17, she won a Travel Research in Equity
Collections Award from the Smithsonian Institution to survey the Disability
Reference Collection at the National Museum of American History. Snider is
xv
currently working on projects about the work of artists Laura Aguilar, Tee
Corinne, and Tatyana Fazlalizadeh.
Bernadette Wegenstein is a semiotician, filmmaker, and leading figure in the
emergent field of media theory. In books like Getting Under the Skin: Body and
Media Theory, and The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction
of Beauty, she shows how the most intimate experiences of the human body are
intertwined with the technologies we use to communicate, represent the world,
and envision and diagnose our illnesses. From analyses of literature, the visual
arts, the history of cinema, and the onset of digital technology, Wegenstein’s
work explores how the ways we inhabit our bodies are inextricably bound to
how we desire them to be, and how this desire is thoroughly cosmetic, that is,
structured by the logic of enhancement and improvement. She works and
teaches on Italian cinema, cinematic representations of the Holocaust, and
documentary and experimental film. She is also a documentary filmmaker
with three features, Made Over in America, See You Soon Again and The Good
Breast distributed, another one in post-production, and a fifth one in pre-
production. The Center for Advanced Media Studies, which she directs at
Johns Hopkins University, supports an integrated agenda of research and
media arts production in collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Stephanie K. Wheeler is Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing and
Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. Wheeler’s academic interests
include Cultural Rhetorics, Rhetoric and Writing, Disability Studies,
Indigenous Rhetorics, and Holocaust Studies. She is particularly interested in
the intersections of these areas, specifically the ways that disability and able-
ism are deployed as colonial tools to marginalize and disenfranchise unwanted
bodies.
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 David during orgasm, Twentynine Palms (2003) 61

Fig. 3.2 Katia after the assault, Twentynine Palms (2003) 64
Fig. 4.1 Natalie Perkins, “Ugly Femme Pride” (2011) 72
Fig. 7.1 One of 35 “panhandling rectangles” 134
Fig. 7.2 Box drawn around sidewalk obstacles that restrict panhandler
movement and space 136
Fig. 7.3 Lines that overlap into the street, which could be mistaken for a
blue box 137
Fig. 9.1 An empty Old Court House Street looking south into Esplanade,
the street having emptied itself on the Maidan with the
Ochterlony Monument on the far left. Photo by A. De Hone
(1870s)181
Fig. 9.2 A glimpse of Old Court House Street. Photo by Glen Hensley
(1940s)185
Fig. 9.3 Havoc at a road junction in central Calcutta after communal
riots. British troops had to carry out what was described as an
“extensive military operation” to quieten this area. British Army
vehicles can be seen in the background (1946) 186
Fig. 10.1 River House Ward, Bethlem Royal Hospital (2014), pho
tographer anonymous 197
Fig. 10.2 Patient X’s spatial intervention: Mobile Object, River House
(2014), photographer anonymous 198
Fig. 10.3 Nursing Station Glass, River House (2014), photographer
anonymous199
Fig. 10.4 A set of ward keys, River House (2014), photographer
anonymous203
xvii
xviii List of Figures
Fig. 10.5 Observation Room, River House (2014), photographer

anonymous206
Fig. 11.1 Scenes of the life of Agatha sculpted by Scipionedi Guido,
Cattedrale di Sant’Agata, Catania (late Sixteenth Century).
Photo courtesy of Waystone Productions 221
Fig. 11.2 Tommaso Minardi, “Saint Agatha with Her Breasts on a Charger”
(mid Nineteenth Century). Photo courtesy of Wellcome
Collection: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0 228
Fig. 11.3 ORLAN, Le baiser de l’artiste (1977), reinstalled in 2017 at the
Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris. Photo courtesy
of the author 230
Fig. 11.4 Birgit Jürgenssen, Emanzipation (1973), private collection,
Singapore. Photo courtesy of Estate Birgit Jürgenssen 232
Fig. 11.5 Saint Agatha (likely sculpted in seventeenth century Italy),
Metropolitan Museum, New York. Creative Commons
Attribution CC0 1.0 Universal 233
Fig. 15.1 The Evolution of Mud Mama from Beginning to Start (2008), six
collages in watercolor, gold leaf and collage on paper. Reprinted
from Rubell Family Collection Contemporary Art Foundation
website. Copyright 2008 by Wangechi Mutu. Reprinted with
permission313
Fig. 15.2 Non je ne regretterien (2007), ink, acrylic, glitter, cloth, paper
collage, plastic, plant material and mixed media on Mylar.
Reprinted from Rubell Family Collection Contemporary Art
Foundation website. Copyright 2007 by Wangechi Mutu.
Reprinted with permission 314
Fig. 15.3 California State University, Los Angeles; student interpretation
of an Oankali-human construct. Presented December 7, 2017
by Adora Delgado. Printed with permission 320
Fig. 15.4 California State University, Los Angeles; student interpretation
of Oankali aliens. Presented December 7, 2017 by student
groups. Printed with permission 320
Fig. 16.1 Laura Aguilar, In Sandy’s Room (1989/1993), Gelatin Silver Print.
Image permission courtesy of the artist 349
Fig. 19.1 Recognition film still, The Pinnacles Desert, Western Australia
(2004)413
Fig. 19.2 Recognition film still, The Pinnacles Desert, Western Australia
(2004)413
Fig. 19.3 Shannon and David, Las Ramblas, Barcelona (1975). Photo
courtesy of the author 417
Fig. 19.4 Shannon Bell, China Town, Toronto (2017), photo by Jennifer
Gillmor. Photo commissioned by and courtesy of the author 422
1
Introduction: On the Politics of Ugliness
Ela Przybylo and Sara Rodrigues
Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of one’s

appearance. In Western contexts and histories especially, ugliness has long
functioned as a social category that demarcates one’s rights and access to
social, cultural, and political spaces. People who are unsightly are framed as
not only unworthy of being seen or of having eyes set upon them, but they
then become the target of interventions to curb the possibility of their causing
aversion and discomfort in others. For example, “ugly laws” or “unsightly beg-
gar ordinances,” which were widespread in the US, UK, and Europe by the
late nineteenth century, functioned to formally exclude certain people’s access
from the public sphere on the basis that their bodies would pollute the public
spaces because they were dirty, disabled, “deformed,” sickly, disgusting, or
unsightly.1 Emerging in many cities in the US as a tool of the state, ugly laws
have functioned at the nexus of ableism, classism, racism, and settler colonial-
ism—protecting wealthy, white, able-bodied, and hetero-domesticated settler
subjects from the perceived aggressions of the exploited and exhausted impov-
erished working classes and other “burdensome” subjects.2 Ugly laws, if noth-
ing else, demonstrate the extent to which what we look like, that is, how we
appear to one another but more specifically to those with the power to see,
functions as a key determinant in what kind of life we can expect to live. Yet,
E. Przybylo (*)
Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University,
Vancouver, BC, Canada
S. Rodrigues
Toronto, ON, Canada
© The Author(s) 2018 1

S. Rodrigues, E. Przybylo (eds.), On the Politics of Ugliness,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76783-3_1
2 E. Przybylo and S. Rodrigues
as with ability, bodies are prone to change, to alter, and to move in and out of
categories of ugliness, such that upholding investments in unsightliness ulti-
mately functions against even the most privileged. In the words of Heather
Laine Talley, “ugliness matters for us all, but it particularly matters for those
with bodies defined as ugly.”3 Bodies are punished when they are deemed
“ugly,” and this treatment is justified on account of their reduction to being
an ugly thing, and thus, as Noël Carroll argues, “beneath or outside ethics.”4
On the Politics of Ugliness is a collection of engagements with ugliness as a
politically invested site, one that flows in and out of dialogue with gender,
ability, race, class, age, sexuality, health, and body size. The editors and authors
of this collection refuse to accept that ugliness is solely the property of a body,
space, or thing, and argue that ugliness is also a function leveraged to uphold
notions of worth and entitlement. In identifying and locating ugliness as a
political category, On the Politics of Ugliness strives to imagine new ways of
seeing ugliness and of being and being seen as ugly by fighting against its cat-
egorization and use as a pejorative denomination of visual injustice.
Ugliness appears everywhere in our everyday lives and in scholarship on the
body, beauty, culture, appearance, and representation. Yet, it is infrequently
engaged with as a direct object of study. As this Introduction will explore,
while mentions of ugliness have been abundant in philosophy, aesthetic and
literary theory, feminist theory, critical race studies, art history, and critical
disability studies, and while ugliness so clearly informs these many fields, it
has been elaborated on in fairly limited terms. In philosophy and art history,
ugliness is usually explored in terms of aesthetics, tending to erase from view
its complex politics and its effects on atypical bodies. In such work, ugliness is
also largely dependent on conceptualizations of beauty, while its social and
relational aspects are obscured from view. Indeed, ugliness seems to emerge as
a property or attribute of places and bodies rather than as a process that relies
on an unjust distribution of value and power in relation to the workings of
gender, ability, race, class, beauty norms, body size, health, sexuality, and age.
This collection seeks to centralize ugliness as an object of study, exploring how
ugliness operates in the perpetuation and justification of social, political, and
visual injustice, and to consider what drives our social and academic fears of
ugliness.
In this chapter, we open up this study of ugliness by exploring what it
means and what is at stake when someone or something is marked with and
by “ugliness.” We do this by considering contemporary deployments of ugli-
ness, with a focus on Western socio-cultural contexts, as well as by providing
a review of theoretical engagements with ugliness. We position ugliness politi-
cally, rather than purely aesthetically, tracing its intersections with discourses,
Introduction: On the Politics of Ugliness 3
practices, and institutions of power. To this end, we trace what it means to

engage with a “politics of ugliness,” through a survey of conceptualizations of
ugliness in both academic literature and the social context, drawing out ugli-
ness as a uniquely mobile category that is deployed not only to marginalize
bodies but also to keep those bodies in their subjugated place.
In outlining the stakes of thinking with ugliness as well as providing an
overview of the existing literature on ugliness, this chapter is organized accord-
ing to the sections that comprise this collection. We begin by exploring ugli-
ness as a form of visual injustice, focusing in particular on how ugliness affects
relating and how spatio-temporalities are organized to expunge bodies deemed
ugly. Following this, we explore the materialization of ugliness through and on
bodies as well as in representations. Next, we consider ways in which ugliness
has been imagined as a site to be desired, as a generative power. Throughout,
we focus on literature that is adept at exploring the politics behind the opera-
tions of ugliness—that is, work within the fields of feminist theory, critical
disability studies, sexuality studies, cultural studies, postcolonial literatures,
and critical race studies. Yet, we find that while many of these fields are, in
intricate and surprising ways, cognizant of the politics of ugliness and how
they map onto other categories, they have not meticulously engaged with ugli-
ness as an object of analysis. This body of interdisciplinary work makes men-
tion of ugliness only incidentally, such that it is more difficult to conduct a
genealogy on the politics of ugliness than on the aesthetics of ugliness. It seems
that theorists have a vested political interested in ugliness but that explicitly
politicized analyses of ugliness are wanting. All the same, this work, as we will
explore, speaks to the political valence of ugliness and its operation alongside
identities and bodies, laying the groundwork for this collection. In what fol-
lows, we argue that it is important to position ugliness politically as a form of
visual injustice, first tracing extant scholarly considerations of the intersection
of ugliness with circuits of power and oppression, and then outlining how the
pieces in this collection consider these intersections anew.
isual Injustice: Relationality and the Spatio-

V
Temporalities of Ugliness
Theoretical and scholarly work on ugliness has developed along two tracks. The
first mostly developed within philosophy, elaborating upon ugliness as an aes-
thetic category opposed to beauty. This body of work suggests that ugliness is
the direct opposite of beauty and that the two qualities are properties of seeing.
Such a view tends to naturalize ugliness as a property of objects, people, places,

and of the technology of sight. The philosophical engagement with ugliness
also binds its analysis to the examination of art and literature. While we do not
explore this literature, we invite readers to read Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s
chapter in this volume, entitled simply “Ugliness,” to become orientated more
fully to the genealogy of ugliness in aesthetic theory. We are interested in disas-
sociating our project from the philosophy of aesthetics to pursue a more politi-
cized understanding of ugliness and to consider how categories of ugliness are
interlaced with and deeply underwritten by ability, age, gender, race, class,
body size, health, and sexuality.
Critical disability studies theorist Tobin Siebers argues that while philoso-
phy has sought to disembody aesthetics, aesthetics is inherently political and
embodied.5 Tracing the notion and discipline of “aesthetics” to eighteenth-
century philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, Siebers asserts that “aesthetics
[…] posits the human body and its affective relation to other bodies as foun-
dational to the appearance of the beautiful” and—as this collection will
develop—to the ugly.6 On the Politics of Ugliness draws on this insight of polit-
icizing aesthetics, privileging a politicization of ugliness and its myriad opera-
tions over a disembodied, disconnected, and abstract observation of its
function. While anthropologist Michael Taussig has argued that “beauty is as
much infrastructure as are highways and bridges,” we, in this collection, are
invested in exploring the infrastructures of ugliness.7 In this section, we sum-
marize how ugliness is political and how it comes to take effect through the
operations of gender, ability, race, class, body size, health, sexuality, and age
and in dialogue with other concepts such as “dirt” and “monstrosity.” To this
end, we weave together mentions of ugliness from the fields of feminist the-
ory, critical disability studies, cultural studies, postcolonial literatures, critical
race studies, sexuality studies, fat studies, and transgender studies, to provide
a necessarily partial genealogy of the politics of ugliness.
As art historian Athanassoglou-Kallmyer discusses in her pivotal piece on
thinking ugliness politically, ugliness is at once too broad and too diffuse, serv-
ing as “an all-purpose repository for everything that [does] not quite fit,” a
marker of “mundane reality, the irrational, evil, disorder, dissonance, irregular-
ity, excess, deformity, [and] the marginal.”8 Ugliness thus tends to be, more
often than not, discussed through a variety of proximate and overlapping yet
distinct terms: the nasty, grotesque, abject, feral, plain, unaltered, disgusting,
revolting, dirty, and monstrous. For instance, since the anthropological work
of Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger, “dirt” has been understood as that
which generates social boundaries, a method of designating what belongs
within the social body and what should be expunged from it.9 Dirt and dirty
bodies arise in this reading as dangerous and despised artifacts indicative of

social margins and social anxieties. Dirt also comes to mark “waste” in the
form of the body’s excess fluids such as “[s]pittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces”
and of society’s excess.10 Importantly, dirt is a concept historically racialized
and classed, and the expulsion of that which is dirty parallels the goals of
empire building and white supremacy.11 Yet “dirt” and “waste” do not replicate
the work of ugliness because dirt and ugliness cannot stand in for one another,
even though they are symbolically linked. Ugliness is indicative of a broader
affective disposition that cannot be solely distilled down to dirtiness or waste.
We can refer to this affective disposition as “visual injustice”—a system of dis-
crimination that relies on the politics of appearance and visuality to render and
deny privilege, access, and resources, including power, money, work, and love.
Similarly, the process of thinking about abjection, disgust, and revolt is less
about thinking ugliness than it is about visceral reactions to ugliness. Siebers
establishes that these reactions, alongside the reaction of taste (i.e., finding
something “tasteful”), “reveal the ease or disease with which one body might
incorporate another,” establishing aesthetic effects themselves as inherently
political.12 Thus our visceral responses to dirt, the grotesque, plainness, and/
or monstrosity, are about maintaining social relations and social margins.
These and other “ugly feelings”13 are indicative of culturally and materially
shaped inclinations to the world around us that are grounded in the “ease or
disease” with which we relate to one another.14 Most famously, Julia Kristeva
articulated this as the abject. She writes, “[i]t is thus not lack of cleanliness or
health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, systems, order. What
does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the
composite.”15 Kristeva theorized abjection as a visceral response that speaks to
the disintegration of boundaries between the self and other, suggesting that
reacting with horror to “ugly” smells or appearances is a response of the social-
ized body, and not simply innate.16 Further, Kristeva points out that the dirty
body serves as a reminder that one could, and likely will become, ugly, unruly,
and out of place at one or many points in life.
The conviction that certain bodies are inherently ugly and thus worthy of
confinement or social disposal is evident in the enactment of “ugly laws” in
the United States, which, as Susan Schweik explores, were municipal laws that
refused people access to public spaces on the grounds that some people were
deemed unsightly in appearance and offensive to others.17 These ordinances
were formed on ableist, classist, racist, and settler colonial terms, intent on
preserving a particular white and settler colonial landscape at the expense of
Indigenous people, immigrants, people of color, and people with disabilities.
Drawing on Schweik, Mary Unger argues that panic around ugly bodies
increased in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as new legisla-
tion in the US, intensified police forces, and civic regulation were informed
by new measures and standards of national efficiency and order.18 The impacts
of industrialization on the environment created national desires for keeping
spaces “beautiful” in a Fordist context that mechanized bodies in the cultiva-
tion of a productive, industrialized workforce. Together, this context of desired
national cohesion, Fordism, and aspirations to beauty informed the institu-
tionalization of racist, ableist, settler colonial, and classist mechanisms such as
ugly laws, eugenics, immigration laws, and City Beautiful movements in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also informed the creation
of institutional spaces for housing those deemed ugly including the prison,
asylum, hospital, and reservation system. As Unger writes, “ugliness in this era
acts as a way to identify aesthetically those who present a social or cultural
danger to the nation.”19 Further, this “ugly panic” extends to eradicating not
only “ugly” bodies but also “ugly” things and spaces as ugliness is understood
as “violat[ing] the aesthetic norm of an efficient and streamlined nation.”20
Architecture, landscape, and city design thus strived and continues to strive
to “exclude people deemed ugly” by reducing their access to public spaces.21
Siebers argues that this “[p]ublic aversion to disability” in particular extends
to a “wider symbolism that includes nonhuman bodies, buildings, and many
other structures.”22 People with disabilities are confronted by inaccessibility
on a daily basis, which forecloses their entry to many public and private
spaces. Moreover, undesirable members of societies are often sequestered into
spaces that are ugly by virtue of design or neglect or both, such as prisons.
Kenneth E. Hartman, a man imprisoned for life, describes the “ghastly ugli-
ness” of the prison. He writes: “Repulsive prisons are everywhere, blotting out
whole sections of the rural landscape of contemporary America, or, inside the
cities, compressed into vertical slabs of blank walls fenestrated only with mir-
rors. These eyesores reek of the industrialization of incarceration, of the huge
business of prison. […] There is a disposable quality. […] The stink of the
abattoir hides behind impassive, silent walls and inside cloned boxes squat-
ting inside miles of chain-link fence.”23 Nonetheless, within the prison,
Hartman recognizes beauty, but it is a function of community and comrad-
ery; it is not of design or place. The beauty—and ugliness—of prison are, for
Hartman, embedded in the prison’s treatment of individuals.24 Ugly laws and
spatial sanctions of ugliness demonstrate hostility towards people with dis-
abilities and incarcerated people that is informed by a conviction that ugli-
ness is both attached to certain bodies and in need of eradication. This
explains the aspiration for clean, manicured spaces and cityscapes that speak
to ideals of good health, upper-classness, and whiteness—“matter in place,”

to draw on Douglas.25
Our aesthetic, political, economic, sexual, and social discomfort with
ugliness thus extends to a dislike of ugly spaces, ugly buildings, dilapidation,
and disrepair. Academic interest in ugliness has recently turned towards its
deployments in the context of space and place and their respective intersec-
tions with consumerism. Myra Hird has conducted some of the most well-
known studies on waste and its management and meanings, suggesting in
one instance that the “indeterminacy” of waste, marked in part by its con-
stant heterogeneity and its modification as a result of its exposure to the
elements, makes waste management a failed project.26 A recent study of con-
sumers’ food purchasing preferences found that people are less likely to con-
sider products that are “ugly” or “suboptimal,” which leads to considerable
food waste.27 Several recent articles in social movement theory have consid-
ered the function of waste and filth in the discourse and practice of Occupy
Wall Street (OWS). Matthew Bolton, Stephen Froese, and Alex Jeffrey argue
that a discourse of dirt framed Zuccotti Park, leading to concerns about
“sanitation” and “disease.” Occupiers were compelled to “order, discipline,
and sanitize” the park and, by extension, their protest as a way to evade the
park’s closure.28 Max Liboiron points out that a discourse of purification was
present in both OWS messaging and popular discourse about the move-
ment.29 A rhetoric of trash and waste pervaded OWS messaging: recent
graduates carrying massive debt loads carried garbage bags as a symbol of the
worthlessness of their degrees in the neoliberal era, and Occupiers saw them-
selves as protesting against Wall Street’s “dirty” money and as involved in an
effort to “clean up” the system.30 At the same time, aggressive municipal
waste management practices, which saw many Occupiers’ personal belong-
ings trashed, were “used as a conscious effort to restrict access to space and
to define and discipline protesters” and to portray the camps as “hazardous,”
“unsafe,” and “dirty.”31
Materialities and Representations of Ugliness

In addition to work on concepts related to ugliness such as dirt and the abject,
and to considerations of the spatialization of ugliness, there have also been
fruitful instances of exploring the politics of ugliness more broadly. French
writer Violette Leduc wrote that “ugliness in a woman is a mortal sin. If you’re
beautiful, you turn heads for your beauty. If you’re ugly, you turn heads for
your ugliness.” Leduc’s apt observation demonstrates that ugliness, like beauty,
is harnessed against women in misogynist ways and is attached to the intrinsic
worth and value a woman holds in the world—her currency under patriar-
chy.32 As is well known, feminists have routinely been accused of being both
inherently “ugly” and have been attacked for our supposed refusal to engage in
beauty practices. The resulting “caricature of the ugly feminist” demonstrates
that ugliness is as much about appearance as it is about behaviors that depart
from the social norms acceptable in and to capitalist patriarchy.33 Most recently
and infamously, Hillary Clinton, in the final debate of the 2016 US presiden-
tial election, was dubbed by Donald Trump a “nasty woman” (a label that
shortly thereafter took over the feminist corners of the Internet resulting, for
instance, in the production of “nasty woman” t-shirts), demonstrating the
ways in which women in power easily border on various analogues for ugli-
ness, nastiness included. The production of ugliness, like the production of
beauty, is thus dependent on disciplinary codes of appearance and conduct. If
the production of femininity is, drawing on Sandra Lee Bartky’s seminal work,
a series of “disciplinary practices” that relate to a woman’s “body’s sizes and
contours, its appetite, posture, gestures and general comportment in space and
the appearance of each of its visible parts” then to be conceived of as an “ugly”
woman (or an “ugly” feminist) is to breach these codes of behavior, attention,
and appearance—to either disregard them, mimic them improperly, or to be
in excess of them.34 Entire regulatory mechanisms emerge to render “ugly”
female faces and bodies less ugly and thus acceptable for consumption. Beauty
apps such as Meitu and FaceTune enable uses to filter and retouch photos—
smoothing skin, slimming faces, and Westernizing features—before sharing
them on social media. Their precursors were makeover television series like
The Swan, which “transformed” “self-identified ugly ducklings [via] domains
of cultural/biomedical surveillance currently available,” all in the name of “lib-
eration, empowerment, and healthy personal fulfillment.”35 Such interven-
tions also have a racialized quality, since, as Eugenia Kaw demonstrates,
surgeries such as “double-eyelid” surgery are prevalent among Asian-American
women who want to pursue a more “Caucasian-looking eye” as the emblem of
beauty within white supremacist frameworks of appearance.36
Sociologist Heather Laine Talley, in Saving Face: Disfigurement and the
Politics of Appearance, argues that, rather than trying to be beautiful, countless
procedures are aimed at making one “not ugly,” since women and girls fear
being ugly above and beyond much else.37 Echoing Kathy Davis’s work, Talley
suggests that the desire to be “not ugly” is “at the most basic level, the desire
to live outside of the stigma of ugliness.”38 The practices of being “not ugly”
are, Talley suggests, ableist and rooted in a fear of bodily variance and a deep
desire to appear, simply, normal. In exploring the workings of this, Talley
looks to what she identifies as “facial variance” including cases in which a
person does not have a face or has an irregular face, which becomes a marker
of a disability unlike nearly any other and is widely understood, due to appear-
ance discrimination, as social death.39 Lucy Grealy, in Autobiography of a Face,
demonstrates the great extent to which the face counts in whether a person is
understood as “ugly.” She writes, “I was my face; I was ugliness.”40 To have an
irregular face, to be “ugly” in this way, is to be deemed worthy of disposal and/
or awaiting social death, thereby demonstrating the intertwined nature of the
structures of ugliness and disability as well as their lethal effects.
People with disabilities are routinely rendered ugly and undesirable by
able-bodied people, demonstrating a deep-seated commitment to able-bodied
ideology (i.e., ableism) and normative embodiments. Rosemarie Garland-
Thomson has explored the ways in which appearance politics play a central
function in the social making of disability and the ways in which people with
disabilities are discriminated against.41 Both aging adults and people with
disabilities, for instance, undergo a process of desexualization through the
operation of ugliness and being rendered “undesirable.” Russell Shuttleworth,
along with other critical disability studies theorists, argues that the violent
process of desexualization, that is, of being barred from being sexual, rests not
only on the assumption that people with disabilities are less desiring and
capable of sex but also that they are less attractive and thus less entitled to
sex.42 Hatred of aging and disability are informed by white ideals of youth,
health, able-bodiedness, and normative beauty, all of which are underwritten
by a politics of ugliness. Women are especially taxed with the expectation that
they should not be ugly and that if they are ugly, they are unworthy of sex.
Hatred of ugliness is further fueled by deep-seated racism that often mani-
fests itself as visual injustice. Yeidy Rivero discusses how the Colombian ver-
sion of Ugly Betty was, much like its ABC counterpart, “informed by
intertwined Eurocentric, patriarchal, racial, Western/Christianized ideologies”
and driven by racialized notions of ugliness.43 The histories that equate racial-
ized bodies with ugliness and ugliness with racialization are so complex that it
would be fair to argue that ugliness is a concept thoroughly reliant on racism
for meaning. In the words of sociologist Maxine Leeds Craig, “racism is prac-
ticed as a visual hatred.”44 For example, in The Racial Contract, Charles W. Mills
discusses how projects of conquest from the Enlightenment onwards were
founded on a political dislike of black features and a visual injustice that
favored the appearance of whiteness above all else.45 Thus “the white body
[was made] the somatic norm, so that in early racist theories one finds not
only moral but aesthetic judgments, with beautiful and fair faces pitted against
ugly and dark races.”46 Slaveholder Thomas Jefferson celebrated the rights of
white men in 1781 by drawing them as distinct from black men on the basis
of their appearance, writing of the “superior beauty” of the white race and the
ugliness of the “colored race.”47 From hair texture to skin tone, facial shape to
body height and size, whiteness has been deeply conflated with beauty and
goodness, and racialization with ugliness and moral failing. Because women
are often valued for their beauty and punished for its lack, challenging the
conflation of racialization with ugliness has been a central political concern for
women and feminists of color. Leeds Craig argues that in the face of white
supremacist notions of appearance according to which black women were por-
trayed as “ugly and sexually available,” “black women had to contest their
wholesale definition as non-beauties.”48 Black feminist interventions into this
narrative of beauty and ugliness are infinite and include the work of bell hooks,
Toni Morrison’s literary canon, and reclamations of beauty ranging from
“Black is Beautiful” in the 1960s to the #BlackGirlMagic movement launched
by CaShawn Thompson and in circulation in the last several years on social
media.49 Anti-racist approaches to beauty have often emphasized and embraced
“beauty” in contexts of the racist conflation of ugliness with bodies of color,
focusing on honing an oppositional consciousness grounded in the body and
oriented against white supremacist and colonial norms of appearance. Further,
a black “politics of respectability” has been modeled in part on a distancing
from notions of “ugly” appearance and behavior, emphasizing instead white
bourgeois norms and habits as a strategy to combat racism.50
Bodies that more successfully perform beauty norms and reject “ugly”
behaviors and presentations are more likely to secure or retain elevated socio-
economic status.51 For example, Rivero discussed how Ugly Betty relied on the
protagonist climbing the social ladder and finding heterosexual coupledom
through a process of beautification and rejection of her assigned ugliness.52
Ugliness, like beauty, in this way is a class-based attribute. Further, in her
memoir on working-class lesbian identity, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure,
Dorothy Allison writes of the ways ugliness is used against working-class
women who “get worn down” with work and patriarchal oppression.53 She
writes that “we were hard and ugly and trying to be proud of it. The poor are
plain, virtuous if humble and hardworking, but mostly ugly. Almost always
ugly.”54 Rivero and Allison as well as Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson
provide a commentary on the ways in which those who occupy socially disen-
franchised and overworked bodies will remain framed as ugly by mainstream
thought and politics unless they secure the resources to partake in bodily
upkeep along normative lines.55 Because femininity in particular requires intri-
cate upkeep and economic investment, ugliness can also be used against women
who do not partake in the “fashion-beauty complex”56 or “beauty myth,”57
honing instead a “plain” or “unaltered” aesthetic in order to reject normative
body standards as they are tied to race, ability, class, age, sexuality, health, and
body size. This pressure is felt especially by transgender women who are
expected to perform normative femininity supremely, with no margin for error,

facing discriminatory expulsion from the category “woman” if they fail.58
Fat studies scholars and activists have traced and challenged the longstand-
ing association between fatness and ugliness. While fat bodies were once
revered because they signified wealth and prosperity, the proliferation of adver-
tising and consumer culture has, over the past four decades, turned a fat body
into an ugly body.59 Such scholarship makes clear that the association of fatness
with ugliness is not natural but instead emerges from the “historical and cul-
tural positioning” of fat people in a society that benefits from their marginal-
ization60 as well as from processes of adhering meaning onto bodies.61 The
association between fatness and ugliness impacts fat people’s social and profes-
sional lives62 as well as their access to non-discriminatory medical and health
care.63 Saguy and Ward argue that to “come out” as fat is to reject the associa-
tion between fatness and ugliness (among other unjust associations); however,
they recognize that such a move generates a climate in which some stigmas are
reclaimable while others are not. Interestingly, they wonder when people might
subsequently reclaim the stigma of “ugliness” by “coming out” as ugly.64
Aside from a few studies on the growing phenomenon of lookism, academics
have yet to engage seriously with appearance-related discrimination.65 Bonnie
Berry’s work across her two books Beauty Bias and The Power of Looks offers an
important exception, as she explores social stratification based on appearance.66
Berry offers the term “social aesthetics” as a way to recognize the public and social
aspect of the reception of one’s appearance as interlaced with bias and grounded
in social inequality. What we have been referring to as visual injustice, Berry
terms “looks-bias” and “lookism” or bias against people considered not attractive
or ugly, which can have mild to severe economic and social impacts on one’s life.
Notably, Talley identifies both “uglyism” and “facism,” drawing on Anthony
Synnott. Talley articulates these as “a pattern of bias that systematically disad-
vantages those whose appearance is at odds with dominant conventions of
attractiveness.”67 Popular writers and bloggers have started to share first-hand
experiences of ugliness and are heeding the call for a de-stigmatization of ugli-
ness. With the idea of prettiness as a labor-intensive “skill set” in mind,
Jezebel’s Tracey Moore suggested that women are starting, albeit slowly, to
advocate for the “freedom” to be ugly.68 An anonymous woman shared her
experience of ugliness in response to a Reddit AskWomen thread that asked
what life is like for an “unattractive woman.” The poster, doduo, associated
ugliness with invisibility, writing that, in the context of heterosexual relations,
men “don’t want to talk to you. They don’t see you. Bartenders forget my
order.”69 She also felt that her status as “ugly” affected her employment, writ-
ing that “it’s impossible to find a retail job, or a desk job. No one wants to hire
an unattractive [woman] for front-of-house.”70 Blogger Denarii Monroe
recently argued that “lookism”—discrimination on the basis of appearance—

inhibits her capacity to be carefree and/or uninhibited in her everyday life.
Monroe suggests that people whose appearance falls within the bounds of
what is considered conventionally attractive can make silly faces or engage in
odd bodily expressions and still be read as attractive. “Spontaneity,” Monroe
argues, “was a luxury I could not afford.”71 Monroe implies that advocacy and
activism ought to shift focus to establish for people the “right” to be ugly and,
with it, the freedom to be “all the iterations” of oneself.72
Transgender, genderqueer, and non-binary bodies are also patrolled and
disciplined through invective language grounded in a politics of ugliness.
Susan Stryker, in a classic essay in transgender studies, speaks back to cisgen-
der accusations of transgender bodies as being ugly by depicting herself as “a
monster.”73 In depicting herself as a “monster,” Stryker talks back to this vio-
lent language, utilizing monstrosity as a useful symbol for problematizing the
bounds of gender. Monstrosity has a long history of deployment against mar-
ginalized bodies including women, racialized people, people with disabilities,
gay and lesbian people, and transgender people.74 Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai
have observed that monstrosity has been utilized to construct concepts of the
racialized terrorist and thus to justify politics of racist hatred.75 Along with
feminists, lesbian, queer, genderqueer, non-binary, and transgender people are
frequently accused of ugliness as payback for breaking with conventional gen-
der understandings. Sociologist Wendy Chapkis has written that “ugly is more
than a physical description. For a woman it’s meant to be shorthand for
worthless, undesirable, undeserving. And lesbians are by popular definition
ugly women.”76 In these ways, ugliness functions to keep the bounds of gen-
der in check, and is used to keep bodies in line, in their presumed place.
Considerations of ugliness have also surfaced in theorizations of the operation
of ugliness in/on the non-human, with a particular focus on feral animals and
ugly species. For instance, a recent meta-analysis of studies on species conserva-
tion in Australia found that, although conservation-based studies and efforts
have expanded in recent years, taxonomic bias against “ugly” species exists in
scientific reporting.77 Fleming and Bateman found that mammals considered as
“ugly” and/or not “charismatic,” such as rodents and bats, were the subject of far
fewer studies despite greater species diversity and a higher rate of extinction.78
Desiring Ugliness: Ugliness as Generative Power

At the same time, there is also a curious fetishization of ugliness in the contem-
porary moment, which has its origins in modern art. Today, abandoned sites
become the subject of high-resolution photographic exhibitions (e.g., Zach
Fein’s photographs of Detroit and Michael Day’s photographs of Chernobyl);

the uses of ruins in art are the subject of major art exhibitions (e.g., the Tate
Modern’s 2014 “Ruin Lust” exhibition); and tourism projects in notably
“beautiful” cities host walking tours of “ugly” sights (e.g., Eugene Quinn’s
“Vienna Ugly Tour”).79 More pointedly, against this fetishization of ugliness,
the strategic embrace of ugliness by marginalized groups can constitute a form
of protest, as was discussed above with regard to the Occupy Wall Street move-
ment. Further, several postcolonial literary works effectively deploy common
sense understandings of ugliness against colonizers, claiming ugliness as a tool
that can be used as the ground for building a subaltern consciousness and an
anti-colonial politics. For instance, Jamaica Kincaid, in her polemic A Small
Place, memorably depicts ugliness as the property of the tourist who neocolo-
nizes the island of Antigua. In this reversal, “a tourist is an ugly human being
[…] An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly,
empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze
at this and taste that.”80 Ugliness is here effectively deployed back against the
neocolonial do-gooder tourist subject, such that it is a property not of this or
that person, but of the processes, habits, and inclinations of colonial intrusion.
In a different way, Edwige Danticat enacts a performative self-naming of ugli-
ness, mobilizing the Haitian idiom “‘Nou lèd, nou la!’ We are ugly, but we are
here!”81 Mobilizing the symbolics of ugliness and their racist, sexist, and colo-
nial trajectories, Danticat refuses to be excised under colonial rubrics of
ugliness-as-disposability, in turn remaking ugliness as a positive marker of
identity and means of survival in the face of colonial oppression.
Similarly, other feminist scholars and writers have also put ugliness to use
in strategic ways that talk back to patriarchal systems that function to expect
beauty of women and punish those women who are deemed ugly. Karina
Eileraas Karakuş, in “Witches, Bitches, and Fluids,” discusses rock and punk
girl bands’ performances of ugliness. She considers their ugly sounds, such as
shrieks and wails, their ugly appearance (marked by ripped hosiery and messy
make-up), their unfeminine aggression, and the intentional presence of their
bodily fluids.82 In such subversive enactments, ugliness becomes a feminist
tool that can resist the discipline, beautification, and (self-)objectification of
feminine bodies. Similarly, Valerie Chepp has considered women rappers, like
Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, who subvert norms of black “respectability” by
honing “irreverence,” strategically drawing on “ugly” behaviors to claim sexual
and bodily subjectivity.83 Unger also discusses how the avant-garde poet
Djuna Barnes centralized ugliness when writing about marginalized women
in early twentieth-century New York City, offering a commentary on sexism
and unsightliness in a national context consumed with “cleaning up” the
cityscape through ordinances such as ugly laws.84
Importantly, as we have been discussing, ugliness is not one thing, and it is

not a property of one body or another. It is, instead, borrowing from Siebers’
insight, a “social location complexly embodied.”85 As a repository for many
socio-cultural feelings and attitudes, ugliness operates in ways that have danger-
ous and deadly consequences for bodies and those who inhabit them. When a
body is labeled or understood as “ugly,” it is subsequently targeted for expung-
ing, overlooking, destruction, and affectively motivated terror. Instead of cham-
pioning beauty, and instead of presenting ugliness as a site of undesirability and
something to be abjected and rejected, the works that comprise On the Politics
of Ugliness harness the generative possibilities of ugliness as a way into rethink-
ing, reframing, and reoccupying marginalization, institutionalization, represen-
tation, bio-politicization, stigmatization, narrativization, and visualization.
Situating Ugliness, Politics, and Interdisciplinarity

On the Politics of Ugliness draws on the rich trajectory of interdisciplinary
feminist thinking and research to centralize ugliness as a political category and
to develop several claims about ugliness. This collection explores the various
ways in which ugliness is deployed against those whose bodies, habits, ges-
tures, feelings, expressions, or ways of being deviate from social norms. It
argues that ugliness is political in two ways: first, it denotes inequalities and
hierarchies, often serving as a repository for all that is “other” and despised;
second, it is contingent and relational, taking shape through the comparison
and evaluation of bodies.
Critical engagements with ugliness have been relatively constant through-
out the twentieth century but the past three decades have seen a particular
resurgence in scholarly interest in ugliness. This revival is arguably galvanized
by feminist theoretical articulations of associated concepts such as abjection,86
the grotesque,87 and monstrosity,88 which, as we outlined above, consider the
intersection of ugliness with bodies and embodiment. Still, it is the art histori-
cal lens and its interests that remains the dominant mode of engaging with
ugliness. Even though contemporary theorists work to re-envision ugliness,
they largely remain interested in the place and function of ugliness in art and
literature or in explicating the philosophies of ugliness, with a focus on the
classical and modern eras. With regard to the former interest, a number of
recent works examine how ugliness was mobilized in classical or modern art
and literature. Patrizia Bettella follows representations of ugly women in thir-
teenth- to seventeenth-century Italian poems written by men to reveal a per-
vasive misogynist sentiment in medieval culture.89 Naomi Baker’s Plain Ugly
examines representations of unattractive human bodies in early modern

English culture, focusing on how such portrayals construct particular norma-
tive expressions of identity in early modern England.90 Lesley Higgins’
uniquely feminist work suggests that while modernist writers intended to fos-
ter “true” beauty through the propagation of ugliness, they did so at the
expense of their female figures.91 Nancy Pedri’s work considers ugliness in
contemporary artwork, examining the juxtaposition of one “nice” and one
“ugly” self-portrait of photographer Jo Spence. Pedri’s analysis suggests that
these photographs manifest portraiture’s complicity in the “binary pair of
beauty and ugliness.”92 A number of recently published works have also
focused on close readings of aesthetic theories so as to elucidate upon and offer
clarifications of well-known philosophical works on beauty and/or ugliness.93
Some of the more recent engagements with ugliness gesture towards a con-
sideration of ugliness that de-centers art and aesthetics. For instance, Andrei
Pop and Mechtild Widrich’s recent collection Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in
Art and Theory brings together essays that recognize ugliness as that which
extends beyond the mere “imprinting of aesthetic ideals on passive objective.”94
The essays in their collection reject the subordination of ugliness to beauty, and
take up ugliness as a form of self-identification or as a metaphor for political
disharmony. Pop and Widrich’s careful curation reveals that, when deployed
on bodies and behaviors, “beauty” and “ugly” function “as a form of social
control” that in turn has tangible consequences for individuals.95 Similarly,
Gretchen Henderson’s recent book Ugliness: A Cultural History takes an inter-
est in how perceptions of ugliness have “played out in practice.”96 Henderson
considers works of art and art practice in equal measure with bodies, cultural
practices, historical events, sights, smells, and sounds. Henderson’s work ulti-
mately demonstrates that ugliness exists and operates between people, things,
spaces, bodies, and modes of being, and that it continually negotiates different
meanings as well as challenges its own stasis. Henderson shows that it is ugli-
ness, as much as beauty, that makes us human. These recent works make a
central contribution to thinking on ugliness in that they demonstrate that
“ugliness” is as much a social and experiential phenomenon as it is a theoretical
framework. The work of Pop and Widrich, as well as that of Henderson, define
the contours of ugliness as they emerge in both the aesthetic but also the pre-
vailing socio-cultural and political context.97
Nonetheless, there is a need for not only further but for a different kind
of theoretical engagement with ugliness that moves outward from an art
historical and aesthetic theoretical perspective and beyond exclusively fol-
lowing around expressions of ugliness in Eurocentric art and literature.
Critical and social theorists must move towards a consideration of the
political and socio-cultural implications of ugliness in and on lived experi-

ence and human subjectivity. This anthology responds to a theoretical and
practical gap and calls for engagements with ugliness that are not centered
on art and/or aesthetics. In this way, we follow Mark Cousins who argues
that “if ugliness is to become an object of inquiry, this inquiry will have to
be conducted outside the scope of aesthetics.”98 Cousins proposes that ugli-
ness occupies and must be considered as a “real and independent dimen-
sion.”99 A primary objective of this collection, which we explain in more
detail below, is just this—to engage ugliness on its own terms and without
immediate reverence for or capitulation to beauty.
First, in serving, as Athanassoglou-Kallmyer discusses, as “an all-purpose
repository for everything that [does] not quite fit,” ugliness is fundamentally
dependent on other identity categories including those of gender, race, class,
age, ability, sexuality, and body size, as we explored above.100 In this sense, to
mark another being as “ugly” is to make a commentary that is at its heart
caught up in the mechanisms not only of the politics of appearance but also
in racism, sexism, ableism, fatphobia, ageism, and capitalist attachments to
perfectible and optimizable bodies. Thus, “ugliness” is all too often deemed a
property of “the politically, economically, and socially disenfranchised.”101
Further, ugliness in itself becomes a way for barring a person’s access to status,
work, and love, functioning as an absence of capital.102 In this way “ugliness
matters for us all” but it matters especially for those who are marginalized and
for those understood as “ugly.”103 Studying ugliness and its operations is thus
useful for gaining insight into how bodies come to pass as socially viable and
valuable or, conversely, as socially detestable. A focus on ugliness can be useful
in understanding how everyday interactions and systems of representations
function in concord and in opposition to body norms and strictures of appear-
ance. Ugliness assists us in undertaking the work of better understanding the
role that the politics of appearance play in the flows of injustice.
Second, we advance that ugliness is inherently relational. There is no such
thing as an “ugly body” in the sense that ugliness is not a property of bodies;
instead, an “ugly body” emerges in the evaluations that take place when
embodied beings come into contact with each other. Operating relationally,
we are marked as ugly or we experience ourselves as ugly through a metrics of
hierarchical comparison and evaluation of bodies. Ugliness is most often used
pejoratively and against disenfranchised groups and individuals, and it is used
to communicate not simply a quality among others but a moral failing, an
absence of value in the predominant social order. As Carroll argues, to be
hailed as ugly is a suggestion that one is “somehow an inadequate instantiation
of the concept of human being” and thus as “beneath or outside ethics.”104
Thus, we put forward “visual injustice” as the system through which ugliness
operates to discriminate as well as render and deny privilege and access to
resources.
As we have demonstrated, ugliness does not operate in isolation, but func-
tions in relation to other categories. At the same time, ugliness also operates
to support injustice by providing justification for its existence within the
visual order. In studying ugliness, this collection is thus fundamentally com-
mitted to disrupting visual injustice and the taken-for-grantedness of designa-
tions of ugliness. Drawing on these two insights, it is our hope that this
collection will begin and continue the feminist conversation as to how and
why bodies are labeled ugly, or conversely, beautiful. We hope that upon
interacting with this collection, readers can become more thoughtful as to
what lies behind calling someone or something ugly, and how it is not only
not a neutral description, but one that carries with it deep political implica-
tions. In short, we assert that ugliness is a feminist issue.
Notably, we see considerations of ugliness as significant also to critical dis-
ability studies and the politics of seeing and being seen. Because Western
cultures are at heart ocularcentric, the relational work of appearing impacts
our sense of ability and disability. Like disability, ugliness is “not [a] personal
misfortune or individual defect but [a] product of a disabling social and built
environment […] the product of social injustice.”105 Adopting this perspec-
tive on ugliness makes it clear that ugliness is relationally formed when bodies
come into contact with other bodies, discourses, and ideologies. To study
ugliness is thus to “stud[y] the social meanings, symbols, and stigmas attached
to [it] and […] how they relate to enforced systems of exclusion and oppres-
sion.”106 Another part of this project is thus reversing the idea of ugliness as
inherently negative and as inherently a property of some bodies, features, ges-
tures, or habits.
The essays and contributions in this collection engage with ugliness from
interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives. The collection opens with a
reprinting of art historian Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s encyclopedia entry,
“Ugliness,” in which she considers the conceptualizations and effects of ugli-
ness in its art historical, literary, and theoretical manifestations.107 Following
this, the first section, “Desire, Relationality, Erotics,” consists of a group of
essays that put ugliness in dialogue with the ethics and intricacies of interrelat-
ing. This first section provides instances of exploring both how ugliness is
relationally maintained and what ethical relations it makes possible by look-
ing at the visual politics of ugliness in relation to grief, sound, heterosexuality,
femme counterculture, trans and queer identities and communities, and spe-
cies abjection. Literary theorist Yetta Howard undertakes an analysis of Bruno
Dumont’s film Twentynine Palms (2003), exploring the failure of hetero-

erotics through the framework of ugliness, looking specifically at the film’s
auditory and visual elements. Howard locates ugliness not only as a pejorative
marker of difference but also as a site of pleasure that serves to help us navigate
the (un)ethical relatings and miscommunications that take place at the sites of
masculinity and heterosexuality. From there, Andi Schwartz explores the ugly
politics of grief in queer femme online communities. Analyzing ugliness as a
central component of femme identities as well as a tool around which femme
culture is built, Schwartz traces expressions of grief on Tumblr following the
deaths of Mark Aguhar and Taueret Davis, respected Tumblr femmes. Building
on the themes of grief, and trans and queer community, multimedia artist
Vivek Shraya (with photography by Zachary Ayotte) undertakes a part poetic,
part visual essay exploring the “condemnation of [the] body” as ugly in rela-
tion to racism, transphobia, and misogyny. In “I Want to Kill Myself,” Shraya
explores desires for suicide and their entanglement with choreographies of
ugliness. Finally, philosophers Esther Hutfless and Elisabeth Schäfer close this
section by thinking through how Clarice Lispector’s work mobilizes ugliness
in the politics of vision that occur between a human self and cockroach other.
In their explication of Lispector’s work, ugliness is both an aspect of life and a
radical challenge of living ethically in relation to difference.
The essays in “The Spatio-Temporalities of Ugliness,” explore ugliness in
relation to the temporal and spatial orders of institutionalization. These chap-
ters explore the ways in which ugliness functions to both “expand” and “con-
tract” the limits of livability in contemporary contexts. Stephanie Wheeler’s
work opens this section with a consideration of the settler colonial politics of
ugly laws in the homeless laws and politics of Orlando, Florida. These twenty-
first-century ugly laws, as the most severe homelessness laws on record, dem-
onstrate the extent to which understandings of ugliness and their settler-
colonial, classist, and ableist undercurrents, continue to shape civic and pub-
lic life. Yasmina Katsulis follows with an analysis of the TLC show, Skin Tight.
Exploring the temporalities of ugliness, Katsulis considers how the reality TV
show frames patient disappointment with their pre- and post-operative bod-
ies, both of which are conceived of, by both the show and the patients, as ugly
and in excess. Rather than the typical before and after story that weight-loss
culture celebrates, Katsulis argues for a distinct, ugly temporality that makes
space for patient disappointment as well as the disappointments attached to
being embodied in the first place. Next, postcolonial theorist Sayandeb
Chowdhury examines the space of the city of Calcutta, exploring the visual
politics of the city in conversation with ugliness and racialization. Through an
exploration of photographic representations of postcolonial Calcutta,
Chowdhury argues that Calcutta underwent a representational crisis and

became increasingly visualized as an “ugly” city which had impacts for its
inhabitants who were visually ostracized in the photographic register. In the
final piece in this section, Natasha Lushetich explores ugliness in dialogue
with institutionalization at the site of London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital. As an
attempt in “ethical” aesthetics, Lushetich argues that the hospital’s covert stig-
matization becomes a space through which ugliness is produced in its inhabit-
ants. Lushetich demonstrates that, despite a surface institutional commitment
to clean manicured spaces, illness, medication, and a general sense of precarity
means that ugliness circulates in and around the vulnerable bodies therein.
The third part of this collection, “Materialities and Representations,” grap-
ples with the diverse ways that bodies are first represented and then under-
stood as ugly. Challenging normative ideologies of ugliness, the works in this
section explore in particular the ways that representations of bodies as ugly
can be resisted toward the production of alternative bodily possibilities and
modalities of existence. Alternative modes of ugly embodiment are imagined
in relation to breast cancer, femininity, settler colonialism, the methodology
of ugliness, and black body politics. Bernadette Wegenstein’s essay examines
ugliness as resignification through an engagement with the absent female
breast. Wegenstein engages with the story of Saint Agatha the martyr along-
side contemporary women’s refusals to undergo breast reconstruction after
breast cancer in order to demonstrate that “missing the breast” is both an
embodied and rhetorical position that opens up the possibility to recast and
reposition the socio-cultural significance of female breasts and femininity.
Similarly, feminist psychologist Breanne Fahs, discusses the production and
reification of ugliness through women’s reactions to and imaginations of a
body they dread. Fahs’s study of how women imagine the body they dread
reveals that ableism, ageism, racism, and internalized sexism all inform their
descriptions of bodies they would not wish to have. Katherine Morton’s work
engages a critical evaluation of media representations of missing and mur-
dered Indigenous women in Canada. Morton demonstrates that as main-
stream Canadian media offers more attention to Indigenous issues, it does so
by drawing on stereotypes about Indigenous women that justify neocolonial-
ism. Morton suggests that not only does the Canadian media individualize
Indigenous social issues, it does so by producing a discourse of ugliness that
functions to reinforce neo-settler-colonial practices. Following this, Melody
Ellis articulates a new relationship to speaking about ugly representation
through advocating a strategy she calls “to ugly.” Drawing on French femi-
nisms, Ellis suggests that it is possible to think ugliness as a verb and method-
ology, encouraging the inhabitation of this uncomfortable category in relation
to one’s relationship with others and to writing, instead of working toward a

distancing from ugliness. Finally, feminist theorist and critical race scholar
Jalondra Alicia Davis puts forward an analysis of ugliness in relation to black
feminist speculative fiction, focusing on the grotesque in the many-tentacled
figures in Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987). Davis argues that Butler’s alien can
be read as a plural figure and a metaphor for black community organizing that
eschews notions of respectability, communality, and orderliness.
The final section, “Ugliness as Generative Power,” explores the possibilities
for mobilizing ugliness as a feminist point of resistance against visual injustice
and pervasive modes of seeing. As much as ugliness does irreducible harm to
bodies at the intersections of gender, race, class, ability, age, body size, health,
and sexuality, it also creates instances of self-articulation and self-affirmation
in the face of narrowing and ever-precise standards of normative appearance.
The pieces in this section consider the generative possibilities of ugliness with
attentiveness to fat politics, feminist art practice, anti-oppressive pedagogy,
and feminist Lacanian visuality. First, Stefanie Snider utilizes fat studies schol-
arship to examine the ways that fat bodies have been visually marginalized in
dominant cultural ideologies. She assesses that while the typical response to
this visual marginalization has been to assert that fat is beautiful, such an
expansion relies on the same fear of ugliness that motivates fatphobia.
Examining the work of artists Laura Aguilar and Iiu Susiraja, Snider identifies
and in turn agitates for a more direct engagement with and deployment of
ugliness in fat activism. Next, Karina Eileraas Karakuş considers how feminist
performance art “plays” with ugliness as a way to refuse patriarchal expecta-
tions for female corporeality. Examining the performative persona of singer/
songwriter Sia and the activist art of Emma Sulkowicz, Eileraas argues that
ugliness can disturb and damage dominant protocols of femininity, and is
thus a powerful tool for feminist artists. From there, Michael Johnson Jr. pro-
vides an articulation of “racial pulchritude” as a unique way of reframing ugli-
ness. Drawing on an autoethnographic method alongside his experiences of
pedagogic practice, Johnson Jr. explores how his role as professor intersects
with his racialization and sexualization. Racial pulchritude emerges as a way
to think the incommensurability of racialized beauty norms, such that, as he
writes, “one’s beauty is not directly comparable to another’s because of a racial
difference between both individuals.” Shannon Bell’s work concludes this sec-
tion with a psychoanalytic reading of ugliness that rests on thinking with
Lacan’s “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a.” Developing a notion of “the ugly gaze,”
Bell provides us with a rebellious form of visual politics that is autobiographi-
cally oriented, particularly by her lifelong engagement with ugliness as a mode
of misbehaving.
On the Politics of Ugliness asserts that it is only in facing ugliness as a politi-

cal category that we can agitate against routinely harmful ways of seeing,
understanding, and relating. Certainly, as the works in this collection demon-
strate, ugliness is a category of value to the fields of feminist theory, gender
studies, critical race studies, critical disability studies, sexuality studies and
queer theory, as well as literary and cultural studies, as it offers up another way
for examining how some bodies are held to be valuable while others are ren-
dered untenable through the workings of visual injustice. Moreover, this col-
lection, by expanding the terms under which ugliness is considered, offers up
ugliness as that which can instigate new ways of being and new ways of dis-
rupting our thinking about and adherence to normalizing regimes. On the
Politics of Ugliness is at its heart an undertaking that seeks to explore how ugli-
ness, when understood as a political category, can inform the intersectional
processes of racialization, colonization and settler colonialism, gender-making,
ableism, and heteronormativity. On an even broader level, the goal of this
collection is to detonate the harmful effects that labels and feelings of ugliness
have on us through seeking to demonstrate that ugliness is always an invested
and over-determined category that can and must be challenged.
Notes
1. Susan M. Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: New York
University Press, 2010).
2. Schweik, The Ugly Laws, 17.
3. Heather Laine Talley, Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance
(New York: New York University Press, 2014), 194.
4. Nöel Carroll, “Ethnicity, Race, and Monstrosity: The Rhetorics of Horror
and Humor,” in Beauty Matters, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 52.
5. Tobin Siebers (ed.), The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000) and Disability Aesthetics
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
6. Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 1.
7. Michael Taussig, Beauty and the Beast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012), 5.
8. Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Ugliness,” in Critical Terms for Art History,
eds. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 281.
9. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1966/2002).
10. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 150.
11. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Mariana Valverde, The Age of
Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada 1880s–1920s
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991/2008).
13. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007).
15. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 4.
16. Kristeva, Powers of Horror. Also see Michelle Meagher, “Jenny Saville and a
Feminist Aesthetic of Disgust,” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (2003): 23–41.
17. Schweik, The Ugly Laws.
18. Mary Unger, “‘Dropping Crooked into Rhyme:’ Djuna Barnes’s Disabled
Poetics in The Book of Repulsive Women,” Legacy: A Journal of American
Women Writers 30, no. 1 (2013): 124–150.
19. Unger, “‘Dropping Crooked into Rhyme,’” 125.
20. Unger, “‘Dropping Crooked into Rhyme,’” 126.
22. Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 70–71.
23. Kenneth E. Hartman, “Searching for the Beautiful Prison,” Special Issue: The
Beautiful Prison: Studies in Law, Politics and Society 64, ed. Austin Sarat
(Bingley: Emerald Books, 2014), 15.
24. Hartman, “Searching for the Beautiful Prison.”
25. Douglas, Purity and Danger.
26. Myra J. Hird, “Knowing Waste: Towards an Inhuman Epistemology,” Social
Epistemology, 26, no. 3–4 (2012): 453–469.
27. Ilona E. de Hooge, Marije Oostindjer, Jessica Aschemann-Witzel, Anne
Normann, Simone M Loose, and Valerie Almli, “‘This Apple is too Ugly for
me!’: Consumer Preferences for Suboptimal Food Products in the
Supermarket and at Home,” Food Quality and Preference, 56 no. A (2017):
80–92.
28. Matthew Bolton, Stephen Froese, and Alex Jeffrey, “‘Go Get a Job Right
After you Take a Bath:’ Occupy Wall Street as Matter Out of Place,” Antipode
48 no. 4 (2016): 868.
29. Max Liboiron, “Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy
Movement,” Social Movement Studies 11 no. 3–4 (2012): 393–401.
30. Liboiron, “Tactics of Waste,” 396–7.
31. Liboiron, “Tactics of Waste,” 395.
32. Violette Leduc cited in Martin Provost, Violette (France: Diaphana Films,
2013).
33. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1997), 18.
34. Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology
of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 80. See also Talley, Saving Face.
35. Kathryn P. Morgan, “Foucault, Ugly Ducklings, and Technoswans:
Analyzing Fat Hatred, Weight-loss Surgery, and Compulsory Biomedicalized
Aesthetics in America,” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to
Bioethics 4, no. 1 (2011): 189.
36. Eugenia Kaw, “Medicalization of Racial Features: Asian-American Women
and Cosmetic Surgery,” in The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance,
and Behavior, ed. Rose Weitz (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 184–185.
37. Talley, Saving Face, 104–105 and 191–194.
38. Talley, Saving Face, 105.
39. Talley, Saving Face.
40. Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face (New York: Perennial, 1994/2003), 7.
41. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How we Look (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
42. Russell Shuttleworth, “Bridging Theory and Experience: A Critical-
Interpretive Ethnography of Sexuality and Disability,” in Sex and Disability,
eds. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Durham: Duke University Press,
2012), 176. Also see Loree Erickson, “Revealing Femmegimp: A Sex-Positive
Reflection on Sites of Shame as Sites of Resistance for People with
Disabilities,” Atlantis 31, no. 2 (2007): 42–52; Tomasz Sikora and Dominika
Ferens, “Introduction: Let’s Talk About (Crip) Sex,” Inter Alia: A Journal of
Queer Studies 11a (2016), special issue on Ugly Bodies: Queer Perspectives on
Illness, Disability, and Aging: i–ix.
43. Yeidy M. Rivero, “The Performance and Reception of Televisual ‘Ugliness’
in Yo soy Betty La Fea,” Feminist Media Studies 3, no. 1 (2003): 68.
44. Maxine Leeds Craig, Ain’t I A Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the
Politics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 12.
45. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1997), 62.
46. Mills, The Racial Contract, 61.
47. Qtd. in Leeds Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen, 12.
48. Leeds Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen, 6, 5, 24.
49. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press,
1992); Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage International,
1970/2007); Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2013); Janell Hobson, “Black Beauty and Digital Spaces: The
New Visibility Politics,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology,
10 (2016): http://adanewmedia.org/2016/10/issue10-hobson/.
50. Valerie Chepp, “Black Feminist Theory and the Politics of Irreverence: The
Case of Women’s Rap,” Feminist Theory 16, no. 2 (2015): 207–226; Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the
Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1993).
51. Carla Rice, “Exacting Beauty: Exploring Women’s Body Projects and
Problems in the 21st Century,” in Feminist Issues: Race, Class and Sexuality
(5th edn), ed. Nancy Mandell (Toronto: Pearson Canada, Inc., 2009).
52. Rivero, “The Performance and Reception of Televisual ‘Ugliness.’”
53. Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (New York: Dutton
Press, 1995), 36.
54. Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, 37.
55. Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure; Theda Skocpol and Vanessa
Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Rivero, “The Performance and
Reception of Televisual ‘Ugliness.’”
56. Bartky, Femininity and Domination.
57. Wolf, The Beauty Myth.
58. Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scape-
Goating of Femininity (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007).
59. Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity
(Amherst, MN: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 50.
60. LeBesco, Revolting Bodies?, 16.
61. Sander L. Gilman, Fat Boys: A Slim Book (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2004).
62. Angela Tretheway, “Discipined Bodies: Women’s Embodied Identities at
Work,” Organization Studies, 20, no. 3 (1999): 423–450.
63. Annemarie Jutel, “Weighing Health: The Moral Burden of Obesity,” Social
Semiotics, 15, no. 2 (2005): 113–125.
64. Abigail C. Saguy and Anna Ward, “Coming out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma,”
Social Psychology Quarterly, 74, no. 1 (2011): 70–71.
65. Louis Tietje and Steven Cresap, “Is Lookism Unjust?: The Ethics of Aesthetics
and Public Policy Implications,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 19, no. 2
(2005): 31–50. Also see Jacqueline Granleese and Gemma Sayer, “Gendered
Ageism and “Lookism:” A Triple Jeopardy for Female Academics,” Women in
Management Review, 21, no. 6 (2006): 500–517 and Chris Warhurst, Diane
van den Broek, Richard Hall, and Dennis Nickson, “Lookism: The New
Frontier of Employment Discrimination?” Journal of Industrial Relations 51,
no. 1 (2009): 131–136.
66. Bonnie Berry, The Power of Looks: Social Stratification and Physical Appearance
(New York: Routledge, 2016/2008) and Beauty Bias: Discrimination and
Social Power (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007).
68. Tracey Moore, “Will Women Ever Have the Freedom to be Ugly?” Jezebel,
October 22, 2013. http://jezebel.com/will-women-ever-have-the-freedom-
to-be-ugly-1447984254. Accessed October 20, 2016.
69. Dustin Rowles, “What it’s Like to Live as an Unattractive Woman,” Pajiba,
September 5, 2016. http://www.pajiba.com/miscellaneous/what-its-like-to-
live-as-an-ugly-woman.php. Accessed November 8, 2016, para. 4.
70. doduo, cited in Rowles, “What it’s Like to Live as an Unattractive Woman,”
para 7.
71. Denarii Monroe, “The Right to be Ugly,” Ravishly, August 8, 2016. http://
www.ravishly.com/2016/08/08/right-be-ugly-how-lookism-affects-my-abil-
ity-be-carefree. Accessed October 15, 2016, para. 21.
72. Monroe, “The Right to be Ugly.”
73. Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of
Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ, 1, no. 3 (1994): 240.
74. Rosi Braidotti, “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines,” in Writing on the Body:
Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina,
and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
75. Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and
the Production of Docile Patriots,” Social Text, 20, no. 3 (2002): 117–148.
76. Wendy Chapkins, “The Ugly Dyke,” in Looking Queer: Body Image and
Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities, ed. Dawn
Atkins (Philadelphia, PA: Haworth Press, 1998), 26.
77. Patricia A. Fleming and Phillip W. Bateman, “The Good, the Bad, and the
Ugly: Which Australian Terrestrial Mammal Species Attract Most Research?”
Mammal Review 46, no. 4 (2016): 241–254.
78. Fleming and Bateman, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
79. Warwick Mules, Phillip Roe, Grayson Cooke, and Erika Kerruish, “Editors’
Introduction.” Transformations no. 28, 2016. http://www.transformations-
journal.org/issues/28/editorial.shtml. Accessed November 1, 2016, n.p.
80. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000),
14 and 17.
81. Kincaid, A Small Place, 27. Edwidge Danticat, “We are Ugly, but we are
Here,” in Women Writing Resistance: Essays On Latin America and the
Caribbean, ed. Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez (Cambridge: South End
Press, 2003).
82. Karina Eileraas Karakuş, “Witches, Bitches and Fluids: Girl Bands
Performing Ugliness as Resistance,” TDR, 41, no. 3 (1997): 122–139.
83. Chepp, “Black Feminist Theory and the Politics of Irreverence.”
84. Unger, “‘Dropping Crooked into Rhyme.’”
85. Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2008), 14.
86. Kristeva, Powers of Horror.
87. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (London:
Taylor and Francis, 1995).
88. Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable
Self (London/Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002).
89. Patrizia Bettella, The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian
Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2005).
90. Naomi Baker, Plain Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early Modern Culture
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
91. Lesley Higgins, The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
92. Nancy Pedri, “Portraiture’s Unruly Faces: Beauty in Jo Spence’s Putting
Myself in the Picture,” in Beauty and the Abject: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,
ed. Corrado Federici, Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons, and Ernesto Virgulti (New
York: Peter Lang, 2007), 133 and 139.
93. See, for example: Serena Feloj, “Introduction to the Focus on Disgust,”
Lebenswelt: Aesthetics and Philosophy of Experience 3 (2013): 154–155;
Theodore Gracyk, “Sublimity, Ugliness, and Formlessness in Kant’s Aesthetic
Theory,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45, no. 1 (1986): 49–56;
Paul Guyer, “Kant on the Purity of the Ugly,” Values of Beauty: Historical
Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Peter
Uwe Hohendahl, “Aesthetic Violence: The Concept of the Ugly in Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory,” Cultural Critique, 60, no. 1 (2005): 170–196; Grant
F. Leneaux, “The Aesthetics of Imperfection: Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic
Subversion of Comedy,” Orbis Litterarum, 35, no. 2 (1980): 148–162; Sean
McConnell, “How Kant Might Explain Ugliness,” The British Journal of
Aesthetics 48, no. 2 (2008): 205–228; Christopher Turner, “Leftovers:
Dinner with Kant,” Cabinet Magazine. Spring 2009. http://cabinetmaga-
zine.org/issues/33/turner.php. Accessed November 12, 2016.
94. Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, eds, Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art
and Theory (London: IB Tauris, 2014), 13.
95. Pop and Widrich, Ugliness, 13.
96. Gretchen E. Henderson, Ugliness: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion
Books, 2015).
97. Pop and Widrich, Ugliness and Henderson, Ugliness.
98. Mark Cousins, “The Ugly (Part 1),” AA files, 28 (1994a): 62.
99. Mark Cousins, “The Ugly (Part 2),” AA files, 29 (1994b), 3.
100. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Ugliness,” 281.
101. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Ugliness,” 283.
104. Carroll, “Ethnicity, Race, and Monstrosity,” 37, 52.
105. Siebers, Disability Theory, 3.
106. Siebers, Disability Theory, 3.
107. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Ugliness.”
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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
frowning behind, looks, from across the firth, absolutely like a
tasteful little haunt of the capricious spirit of romance.
Well, between this road on the lowland side of the firth, and the
water’s-edge, and before it winds off round by the romantic seat of
Sir Michael Shaw Stewart, farther up, there stand, or stood, two or
three small fishing cottages which, from the hills nearly over them,
looked just like white shells, of a large size, dropped fancifully down
upon the green common between the hills and the road. In these
cottages, it was observed, the fishermen had numerous families,
who, while young, assisted them in their healthful employment; and
that the girls, of which there were a number, were so wild in their
contented seclusion, that if any passenger on the road stopped to
observe them, as they sat in groups on the green mending their
father’s nets, they would take alarm, and rise and run off like fawns,
and hide among the rocks by the sea, or trip back into the cottages.
Now it happened, once on a time, that a great event took place to one
of the cottager’s daughters, which, for a long period, deranged and
almost destroyed the happy equality in which they had hitherto lived;
and becoming the theme of discourse and inquiry concerning things
beyond the sphere of the fisher people and all their neighbours as far
as Gourock, introduced among them no small degree of ambition
and discontent.
There was one of the fishermen, a remarkably decent, well
disposed Highlandman, from the opposite shore of Argyleshire,
named Martin M‘Leod, and he had two daughters, the youngest of
which, as was no uncommon case, turned out to be remarkably and
even delicately beautiful.
But nobody ever saw or thought anything about the beauty of
Catherine M‘Leod, except it might be some of the growing young
men in the neighbouring cottages, several of whom began, at times,
to look at her with a sort of wonder, and seemed to feel a degree of
awe in her company; while her family took an involuntary pride in
her beyond all the others; and her eldest sister somehow imitated her
in every thing, and continually quoted her talk, and trumpeted about
among the neighbours what was said and done by “my sister Kate.”
Things continued in this way as Kate grew to womankind; and she
was the liveliest little body about the place, and used to sing so
divertingly at the house-end, as she busied herself about her father’s
fishing gear, and ran up and down “among the brekans on the brae,”
behind the cottages, or took her wanderings off all the way to the
Clough lighthouse at the point. I say things continued in this way
until a gentleman, who, it turned out, was all the way from London,
came to lodge in Greenock, or Gourock, or Inverkip, or somewhere
not very far distant; and, being a gentleman, and, of course, at liberty
to do every sort of out-of-the-way thing that he pleased, he got a
manner of coming down and wandering about among the cottages,
and asking questions concerning whatever he chose of the fishermen;
and then it was not long until he got his eyes upon Kate.
“The gentleman,” as her sister used to tell afterwards, “was
perfectly ill, and smitten at once about our Kate. He was not able,”
she said, “to take the least rest, but was down constantly about us for
weeks; and then he got to talking to and walking with Kate, she
linking her arm in his beneath the hill, just as it had been Sir Michael
Stewart and my lady; and then such presents as he used to bring for
her, bought in the grand shop of Bailie Macnicol, at Greenock;
gowns, and shawls, and veils, and fine chip hats, never speaking of
ribbons, and lace edging, and mob caps—perfectly beautiful.”
The whole of the fishermen’s daughters became mad with envy of
poor Kate, and admiration of her new dress, which some said was
mostly bought by her father after all, who wanted to have his
daughter made a lady of; and now nothing was heard in the hamlet
but murmurings and discontented complaints; every girl looking at
herself in the little cracked glass that her father used to shave by, to
see if she were pretty, and wishing and longing, not only for a lover of
her own, but even for a gentleman. So, as matters grew serious, and
the gentleman was fairly in love, old Martin M‘Leod, who looked
sharply after Kate, behoved to have sundry conversations with the
gentleman about her; and masters being appointed to teach her right
things, which the fisher folks never heard of, but which were to turn
her into a lady, Kate and the gentleman, after a time, were actually
married in Greenock new church, and set off for London.
During all this time, there were various opinions among the fisher
people, how that Kate never was particularly in love with the
gentleman; and some even said that she was in love with somebody
else (for pretty maidens must always be in love), or, at least, that
some of the youths of the neighbourhood were in love with her; but
then the old folks said, that love was only for gentle people who could
afford to pay for it; and that when a gentleman was pleased to fall in
love, no one had a right to say him nay, or pretend to set up against
him. Some of the young women, to be sure, ventured to contest this
doctrine, and cited various cases from the authority of printed
ballads bought at the Greenock fair, at a halfpenny each; and also
from the traditionary literature of Argyleshire, which was couched in
the mellifluous numbers of the Gaelic language; but, however this
might be, the fame of Catherine M‘Leod’s happy marriage and great
fortune was noised abroad exceedingly, among the fisher people
throughout these coasts, as well as about Gourock and all the parts
adjacent.
As to the gentleman, it was found out that his name was Mr
Pounteney, and that little Kate M‘Leod was now Mrs Pounteney, and
a great London lady, but what quality of a gentleman Mr Pounteney
really was, was a matter of much controversy and discussion. Some
said that he was a great gentleman, and others thought that, from
various symptoms, he was not a very great gentleman; some went so
far as to say he was a lord or a prince, while others maintained that
he was only a simple esquire.
Nothing, therefore, could be talked of wherever Flora M‘Leod
went, but about “my sister Kate;” and she was quite in request
everywhere, because she could talk of the romantic history and
happy fortune of her lucky sister. Mrs Pounteney’s house in London,
therefore, Mrs Pounteney’s grand husband, and Mrs Pounteney’s
coach, excited the admiration and the discontent of all the
fishermen’s daughters, for many miles round this romantic seacoast,
and these quiet cottages under the hills, where the simple people live
upon their fish, and did not know that they were happy. Many a long
summer’s day, as the girls sat working their nets on a knoll towards
the sea, the sun that shone warm upon their indolent limbs on the
grass, and the breeze that blew from the firth, or swept round from
the flowery woods of Ardgowan, seemed less grateful and delicious,
from their discontented imaginings about the fortune of Mrs
Pounteney; and many a sweet and wholesome supper of fresh boiled
fish was made to lose its former relish, or was even embittered by
obtrusive discourse about the fine wines and the gilded grandeur of
“my sister Kate.” Even the fisher lads in the neighbourhood—fine
fearless youths—found a total alteration in their sweethearts; their
discourse was not relished, their persons were almost despised; and
there was now no happiness found for a fisherman’s daughter, but
what was at least to approach to the state of grandeur and felicity so
fortunately obtained by “my sister Kate.”
The minds of Kate’s family were so carried by her great fortune,
that vague wishes and discontented repinings followed their constant
meditations upon her lucky lot. Flora had found herself above
marrying a fisherman; and a young fellow called Bryce Cameron,
who had long waited for her, and whose brother, Allan, was once a
sweetheart of Kate’s herself, being long ago discarded; and she, not
perceiving any chances of a gentleman making his appearance to
take Bryce’s place, became melancholy and thoughtful; she began to
fear that she was to have nobody, and her thoughts ran constantly
after London and Mrs Pounteney. With these anxious wishes, vague
hopes began to mix of some lucky turn to her own fortune, if she
were only in the way of getting to be a lady; and at length she formed
the high wish, and even the adventurous resolve, of going all the way
to London, just to get one peep at her sister’s happiness.
When this ambition seized Flora M‘Leod, she let the old people
have no rest, nor did she spare any exertion to get the means of
making her proposed pilgrimage to London. In the course of a
fortnight from its first serious suggestion, she, with a gold guinea in
her pocket, and two one-pound notes of the Greenock Bank, besides
other coins and valuables, and even a little old-fashioned Highland
brooch, with which the quondam lover of her sister, Allan Cameron,
had the temerity to intrust to her, to be specially returned into the
hand of the great lady when she should see her, besides a hundred
other charges and remembrances from the neighbours, she set off
one dewy morning in summer, carrying her shoes and stockings in
her hand, to make her way to London, to get a sight of everything
great, and particularly of her happy sister Kate.
Many a weary mile did Flora M‘Leod walk, and ride, and sail,
through unknown places, and in what she called foreign parts; for
strange things and people met her eye, and long dull regions of
country passed her like a rapid vision, as she was wheeled towards
the great capital, and proper centre of England. After travelling to a
distance that was to her perfectly amazing, she was set down in
London, and inquired her way, in the best English she could
command, into one of those long brick streets, of dark and dull
gentility, to which she was directed; and after much trouble and
some expense, at length found the door of her sister’s house. She
stood awhile considering, on the steps of the mansion, and felt a sort
of fear of lifting the big iron knocker that seemed to grin down upon
her; for she was not in the habit of knocking at great folk’s doors, and
almost trembled lest somebody from within would frown her into
nothing, even by their high and lofty looks.
And yet she thought the house was not so dreadfully grand after
all;—not at all such as she had imagined, for she had passed houses
much bigger and grander than this great gentleman’s; it was not even
the largest in its own street, and looked dull and dingy, and shut up
with blinds and rails, having a sort of melancholy appearance.
But she must not linger, but see what was inside. She lifted up the
iron knocker, and as it fell the very clang of it, and its echo inside,
smote upon her heart with a sensation of strange apprehension. A
powdered man opened it, and stared at her with an inquisitive and
impertinent look, then saucily asked what she wanted. Flora
courtesied low to the servant from perfect terror, saying she wanted
to see Mrs Pounteney.
“And what can you want with Mrs Pounteney, young woman, I
should like to know?” said the fellow; for Flora neither looked like a
milliner’s woman nor any other sort of useful person likely to be
wanted by a lady.
Flora had laid various pretty plans in her own mind, about taking
her sister by surprise, and seeing how she would look at her before
she spoke, and so forth; at least she had resolved not to affront her
by making herself known as her sister before the servants; but the
man looked at her with such suspicion, and spoke so insolently, that
she absolutely began to fear, from the interrogations of this fellow,
that she would be refused admittance to her own sister, and was
forced to explain and reveal herself before the outer door was fully
opened to her. At length she was conducted, on tiptoe, along a
passage, and then upstairs, until she was placed in a little back
dressing-room. The servant then went into the drawing-room, where
sat two ladies at opposite sides of the apartment, there to announce
Flora’s message.
On a sofa, near the window, sat a neat youthful figure, extremely
elegantly formed, but petite, with a face that need not be described,
further than that the features were small and pretty, and that, as a
whole, it was rich in the nameless expression of simple beauty. Her
dress could not have been plainer, to be of silk of the best sort; but
the languid discontent, if not melancholy, with which the female, yet
quite in youth, gazed towards the window, or bent over a little silk
netting with which she carelessly employed herself, seemed to any
observer strange and unnatural at her time of life. At a table near the
fire was seated a woman, almost the perfect contrast to this
interesting figure, in the person of Mr Pounteney’s eldest sister, a
hard-faced, business-like person, who, with pen and ink before her,
seemed busy among a parcel of household accounts, and the
characteristic accompaniment of a bunch of keys occasionally
rattling at her elbow.
The servant approached, as if fearful of being noticed by “the old
one,” as he was accustomed to call Miss Pounteney, and in a half
whisper intimated to the little figure that a female wanted to see her.
“Eh! what!—what is it you say, John?” cried the lady among the
papers, noticing this manœuvre of the servant.
“Nothing, Madam; it is a person that wants my lady.”
“Your lady, sirrah; it must be me!—Eh! what!”
“No, Madam; she wants to see Mrs Pounteney particularly.”
“Ah, John!” said the little lady on the sofa; “just refer her to Miss
Pounteney. There is nobody can want me.”
“Wants to see Mrs Pounteney particularly!” resumed the sister-in-
law: “how dare you bring in such a message, sirrah? Mrs Pounteney
particularly, indeed! Who is she, sirrah! Who comes here with such a
message while I am in the house?”
“You must be mistaken, John,” said the little lady sighing, who was
once the lively Kate M‘Leod of the fishing cottage in Scotland; “just
let Miss Pounteney speak to her, you need not come to me.”
“No, madam,” said the servant, addressing Miss Pounteney, the
natural pertness of his situation now returning to overcome his
dread of “the old one.” “This young person wants to see my mistress
directly, and I have put her into her dressing-room; pray, ma’am,
go,” he added, respectfully, to the listless Kate.
“Do you come here to give your orders, sirrah?” exclaimed Miss
Pounteney, rising like a fury, and kicking the footstool half way
across the room, “and to put strange people of your own accord into
any dressing-room in this house! and to talk of your mistress, and
wanting to speak to her directly, and privately, while I am here! I
wonder what sister Becky would say, or Mr Pounteney, if he were at
home!”
“Who is it, John? Do just bring her here, and put an end to this!”
said Kate, imploringly, to the man.
“Madam,” said John at last to his trembling mistress, “it is your
sister!”
“Who, John?” cried Kate, starting to her feet; “my sister Flora—my
own sister, from Clyde side! Speak, John, are you sure?”
“Yes, Madam, your sister from Scotland.”
“Oh, where is she, where is she? Let me go!”
“No, no; you must be mistaken, John,” said the lady with the keys,
stepping forward to interrupt the anxious Kate. “John, this is all a
mistake,” she added, smoothly; “Mrs Pounteney has no sister! John,
you may leave the room;” and she gave a determined look to the
other sister, who stood astonished.
The moment the servant left the room, Miss Pounteney came
forward, and stood in renewed rage over the fragile, melancholy
Kate, and burst out with “What is this, Kate? Is it really possible,
after what you know of my mind, and all our minds, that you have
dared to bring your poor relations into my brother’s house? That it is
not enough that we are to have the disgrace of your mean
connections, but we are to have your sisters and brothers to no end
coming into the very house, and sending up their beggarly names
and designations by the very servants! Kate, I must not permit this. I
will not—I shall not;” and she stamped with rage.
“Oh, Miss Pounteney,” said Kate, with clasped hands, “will you not
let me go and see my sister? Will you just let me go and weep on the
neck of my poor Flora? I will go to a private place—I will go to
another house, if you please; I will do anything when I return to you,
if I ever return, for I care not if I never come into this unhappy house
more!” and, uttering this, almost with a shriek, she burst past the two
women, and ran through the rooms to seek her sister.
Meantime, Flora had sat so long waiting, without seeing her sister,
that she began to feel intense anxiety; and, fancying her little Kate
wished to forget her, because she was poor, had worked herself up
into a resolution of assumed coldness, when she heard a hurried
step, and the door was instantly opened. Kate paused for a moment
after her entrance, and stood gazing upon the companion of her
youth, with a look of such passionate joy, that Flora’s intended
coldness was entirely subdued; and the two sisters rushed into each
other’s arms in all the ecstacy of sisterly love.
“Oh, Flora, Flora! my dear happy Flora!” cried Kate, when she
could get words, after the first burst of weeping; “have you really
come all the way to London to see me?—poor me!” and her tears and
sobs were again like to choke her. “Kate—my dear little Kate!” said
Flora, “this is not the way I expected to find you. Do not greet so
dreadfully; surely you are not happy, Kate?”
“But you are happy,” said Kate, weeping. “And how is my good
Highland father, and mother, and my brother Daniel? Ah! I think,
Flora, your clothes have the very smell of the seashore, and of the
bark of the nets, and of the heather hills of Argyleshire. Alas the
happy days you remind me of, Flora!”
“And so, Kate, you are not so very happy, after all,” said Flora,
looking incredulously in her face; “and you are so thin, and pale, and
your eyes are so red; and yet you have such a grand house, Kate! Tell
me if you are really not happy.”
“I have no house, Flora,” said Kate, after a little, “and, I may say,
no husband. They are both completely ruled by his two vixen sisters,
who kept house for him before he married me, and still have the
entire ascendancy over him. My husband, too, is not naturally good
tempered; yet he once loved me, and I might enjoy some little
happiness in this new life, if he had the feeling, or the spirit, to treat
me as his wife, and free himself and the house from the dominion of
his sisters, especially the eldest. But I believe he is rather
disappointed in his ambitious career, and in the hopes he
entertained of matches for his sisters, and he is somewhat sour and
unhappy; and I have to bear it all, for he is afraid of these women;
and I, the youngest in the family, and the only one who has a chance
of being good tempered, am, on account of my low origin, forced to
bear the spleen of all in this unhappy house.”
“But, Kate, surely your husband would not behave so bad as to cast
up to you that your father was a fisherman, when he took you from
the bonnie seaside himself, and when he thought himself once so
happy to get you?”
“Alas! he does indeed!—too often—too often—when he is crossed
abroad, and when his sisters set him on; and it so humbles me, Flora,
when I am sitting at his table, that I cannot lift my head; and I am so
sad, and so heart-broken among them all!”
“Bless me! and can people be really so miserable,” said Flora,
simply, “who have plenty of money, and silk dresses to wear every
day they rise?”
“It is little you know, my happy Flora, of artificial life here in
London,” said Kate, mournfully. “As for dress, I cannot even order
one but as my sister-in-law chooses; and as for happiness, I have left
it behind me on the beautiful banks of the Clyde. O that I were there
again!”
“Poor little Kate!” said Flora, wistfully looking again in her sister’s
face; “and is that the end of all your grand marriage, that has set a’
the lasses crazy, from the Fairlie Roads to Gourock Point? I think I’ll
gang back and marry Bryce Cameron after a’.”
“Is Allan Cameron married yet?” said Kate, sadly. “When did you
see blithe and bonnie Allan Cameron?—Alas the day!”
“He gave me this brooch to return to you, Kate,” said Flora, taking
the brooch out of her bosom. “I wish he had not gien it to me for you,
for you’re vexed enough already.”
“Ah! well you may say I am vexed enough,” said she, weeping and
contemplating the brooch. “Tell Allan Cameron that I am sensible I
did not use him well—that my vain heart was lifted up; but I have
suffered for it; many a sad and sleepless night I have lain in my bed,
and thought of the delightful days I spent near my father’s happy
cottage in Scotland, and about you, and about Allan. Alas! just tell
him not to think more of me; for I am a sad and sorry married
woman, out of my own sphere, and afraid to speak to my own people,
panting my heart out and dying by inches, like the pretty silver fish
that floundered on the hard stones, after my father had taken them
out of their own clear water.”
“God help you, Kate!” said Flora, rising; “you will break my heart
with grief about you. Let me out of this miserable house! Let me
leave you and all your grandeur, since I cannot help you; and I will
pray for you, my poor Kate, every night at my bedside, when I get
back to the bonnie shore of Argyleshire.”
Sad was the parting of the two weeping sisters, and many a kiss of
fraternal affection embittered, yet sweetened, the hour; and anxious
was Flora M‘Leod to turn her back upon the great city of London,
and to journey northwards to her own home in Scotland.
It was a little before sundown, on a Saturday evening, shortly after
this, that a buzz of steam let off at the Mid Quay of Greenock,
indicated that a steamboat had come in; and it proved to be from the
fair seaport of Liverpool, having on board Flora M‘Leod, just down
from London. The boat as it passed had been watched by the
cottagers where she lived up the Firth; and several of them, their
day’s work being over, set out towards the Clough to see if there was
any chance of meeting Flora.
Many were the congratulations, and more the inquiries, when they
met Flora, lumbering homewards with her bundle and her umbrella,
weary and looking anxiously out for her own sweet cottage by Clyde
side. “Ah, Flora! is this you!” cried the whole at once; “and are you
really here again! And how is your sister, and all the great people in
London? And, indeed, it is very good of you not to look the least
proud, after coming from such a grand place!”
With such congratulations was Flora welcomed again among the
light-hearted fisher people in the West of Scotland. But it was
observed that her tone was now quite altered, and her own humble
contentment had completely returned. In short, to bring our story to
a close, she was shortly after married to Bryce Cameron, and various
other marriages soon followed; for she gave such an account of what
she had seen with her eyes, that a complete revolution took place in
the sentiments of the whole young people of the neighbourhood.
It was observed in the hamlet that the unhappy Mrs Pounteney
was never named after this by any but with a melancholy shake of the
head; the ambition of the girls to get gentlemen seemed quite
extinguished, and Flora in time began to nurse children of her own in
humble and pious contentment.—The Dominie’s Legacy.
WAT THE PROPHET.
By James Hogg, “The Ettrick Shepherd.”
About sixty years ago[4] there departed this life an old man, who,
for sixty years previous to that, was known only by the name of Wat
the Prophet. I am even uncertain what his real surname was, though
he was familiarly known to the most of my relatives of that day, and I
was intimately acquainted with his nephew and heir, whose name
was Paterson,—yet I hardly think that was the prophet’s surname,
but that the man I knew was a maternal nephew. So far, I am
shortcoming at the very outset of my tale, for in truth I never heard
him distinguished by any other name than Wat the Prophet.[5]
4. This interesting account of a very extraordinary character was contributed
to the Edinburgh Literary Journal in 1829.
5. The old prophet’s surname was Laidlaw, being of a race that has produced
more singular characters than any of our country.
He must have been a very singular person in every respect. In his
youth he was so much more clever and acute than his fellows, that he
was viewed as a sort of phenomenon, or rather “a kind of being that
had mair airt than his ain.” It was no matter what Wat tried, for
either at mental or manual exertion he excelled; and his gifts were so
miscellaneous, that it was no wonder his most intimate
acquaintances rather stood in awe of him. At the sports of the field,
at the exposition of any part of Scripture, at prayer, and at
mathematics, he was altogether unequalled. By this, I mean in the
sphere of his acquaintance in the circle in which he moved, for he
was the son of a respectable farmer who had a small property. In the
last-mentioned art his comprehension is said to have been truly
wonderful. He seemed to have an intuitive knowledge of the science
of figures from beginning to end, and needed but a glance at the rules
to outgo his masters.
But this was not all. In all the labours of the field his progress was
equally unaccountable. He could with perfect ease have mown as
much hay as two of the best men, sown as much, reaped as much,
shorn as many sheep, and smeared as many, and with a little extra
exertion could have equalled the efforts of three ordinary men at any
time. As for ploughing, or any work with horses, he would never put
a hand to it, for he then said he had not the power of the labour
himself. However unaccountable all this may be, it is no fabrication;
I have myself heard several men tell, who were wont to shear and
smear sheep with him, when he was a much older man than they,
that even though he would have been engaged in some fervent
demonstration, in spite of all they could do, “he was aye popping off
twa sheep, or maybe three, for their ane.”
I could multiply anecdotes of this kind without number, but these
were mere atoms of the prophet’s character—a sort of excrescences,
which were nevertheless in keeping with the rest, being matchless of
their kind. He was intended by his parents for the Church—that is
the Church of the Covenant, to which they belonged. I know not if
Wat had consented thereto, but his education tended that way.
However, as he said himself, he was born for a higher destiny, which
was to reveal the future will of God to mankind for ever and ever. I
have been told that he committed many of his prophecies to writing;
and I believe it, for he was a scholar, and a man of rather
supernatural abilities; but I have never been able to find any of them.
I have often heard fragments of them, but they were recited by
ignorant country people, who, never having understood them
themselves, could not make them comprehensible to others. But the
history of his call to the prophecy I have so often heard, that I think I
can state the particulars, although a little confused in my recollection
of them.
This event occurred about this time one hundred years ago, on an
evening in spring, as Wat was going down a wild glen, which I know
full well. “I was in a contemplative mood,” he said (for he told it to
any that asked him), “and was meditating on the mysteries of
redemption, and doubting, grievously doubting, the merits of an
atonement by blood; when, to my astonishment in such a place, there
was one spoke to me close behind, saying, in the Greek language, ‘Is
it indeed so? Is thy faith no better rooted?’
“I looked behind me, but, perceiving no one, my hair stood all on
end, for I thought it was a voice from heaven; and, after gazing into
the firmament, and all around me, I said fearfully, in the same
language, ‘Who art thou that speakest?’ And the voice answered me
again, ‘I am one who laid down my life, witnessing for the glorious
salvation which thou art about to deny; turn, and behold me!’
“And I turned about, for the voice seemed still behind me, turn as I
would, and at length I perceived dimly the figure of an old man, of
singular aspect and dimensions, close by me. His form was
exceedingly large and broad, and his face shone with benignity; his
beard hung down to his girdle, and he had sandals on his feet, which
covered his ankles. His right arm and his breast were bare, but he
had a crimson mantle over his right shoulder, part of which covered
his head, and came round his waist. Having never seen such a figure
or dress, or countenance before, I took him for an angel, sent from
above to rebuke me; so I fell at his feet to worship him, or rather to
entreat forgiveness for a sin which I had not power to withstand. But
he answered me in these words: ‘Rise up, and bow not to me, for I
am thy fellow-servant, and a messenger from Him whom thou hast
in thy heart denied. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him
only shalt thou serve. Come, I am commissioned to take thee into the
presence of thy Maker and Redeemer.’
“And I said, ‘Sir, how speakest thou in this wise? God is in heaven,
and we are upon the earth; and it is not given to mortal man to scale
the heavenly regions, or come into the presence of the Almighty.’
And he said, ‘Have thy learning and thy knowledge carried thee no
higher than this? Knowest thou not that God is present in this wild
glen, the same as in the palaces of light and glory—that His presence
surrounds us at this moment—and that He sees all our actions, hears
our words, and knows the inmost thoughts of our hearts?’
“And I said, ‘Yes, I know it.’
“‘Then, are you ready and willing at this moment,’ said he, ‘to step
into His presence, and avow the sentiments which you have of late
been cherishing?’
“And I said, ‘I would rather have time to think the matter over
again.’
“‘Alack! poor man!’ said he, ‘so you have never been considering
that you have all this while been in His immediate presence, and
have even been uttering thy blasphemous sentiments aloud to His
face, when there was none to hear but He and thyself.’
“And I said, ‘Sir, a man cannot force his belief.’
“And he said, ‘Thou sayest truly; but I will endeavour to convince
thee.’”
Here a long colloquy ensued about the external and internal
evidences of the Christian religion, which took Wat nearly half a day
to relate; but he still maintained his point. He asked his visitant twice
who he was, but he declined telling him, saying he wanted his reason
convinced, and not to take his word for anything.
Their conversation ended by this mysterious sage leading Wat
away by a path which he did not know, which was all covered with a
cloud of exceeding brightness. At length they came to a house like a
common pavilion, which they entered, but all was solemn silence,
and they heard nobody moving in it, and Wat asked his guide where
they were now.
“This is the place where heavenly gifts are distributed to
humanity,” said the reverend apostle; “but they are now no more
required, being of no repute. No one asks for them, nor will they
accept of them when offered, for worldly wisdom is all in all with the
men of this age. Their preaching is a mere farce—an ostentatious
parade, to show off great and shining qualifications, one-third of the
professors not believing one word of what they assert. The gift of
prophecy is denied and laughed at; and all revelation made to man
by dreams or visions utterly disclaimed, as if the Almighty’s power of
communicating with his creatures were not only shortened, but cut
off for ever. This fountain of inspiration, once so crowded, is now,
you see, a dreary solitude.”
“It was, in truth, a dismal-looking place, for in every chamber, as
we passed along, there were benches and seats of judgment, but none
to occupy them; the green grass was peeping through the seams of
the flooring and chinks of the wall, and never was there a more
appalling picture of desolation.
“At length, in the very innermost chamber, we came to three men
sitting in a row, the middle one elevated above the others; but they
were all sleeping at their posts, and looked as if they had slept there
for a thousand years, for their garments were mouldy, and their faces
ghastly and withered.
“I did not know what to do or say, for I looked at my guide, and he
seemed overcome with sorrow; but thinking it was ill-manners for an
intruder not to speak, I said, ‘Sirs, I think you are drowsily inclined?’
but none of them moved. At length my guide said, in a loud voice,
‘Awake, ye servants of the Most High! Or is your sleep to be
everlasting?’
“On that they all opened their eyes at once, and stared at me, but
their eyes were like the eyes of dead men, and no one of them moved
a muscle, save the middlemost, who pointed with pale haggard hand
to three small books, or scrolls, that lay on the bench before them.
“Then my guide said, ‘Put forth thine hand and choose one from
these. They are all divine gifts, and in these latter days rarely granted
to any of the human race.’ One was red as blood, the other pale, and
the third green; the latter was farthest from me, and my guide said,
‘Ponder well before you make your choice. It is a sacred mystery, and
from the choice you make, your destiny is fixed through time and
eternity.’ I then stretched out my hand, and took the one farthest
from me, and he said, ‘It is the will of the Lord; so let it be! That
which you have chosen is the gift of the spirit of prophecy. From
henceforth you must live a life of sufferance and tribulation, but your
life shall be given you for a proof, in order that you may reveal to
mankind all that is to befall them in the latter days.’ And I opened
the book, and it was all written in mystic characters, which I could
not decipher nor comprehend; and he said, ‘Put up the book in thy
bosom, and preserve it as thou wouldst do the heart within thy
breast; for as long as thou keepest that book, shall thy natural life
remain, and the spirit of God remain with thee, and whatsoever thou
sayest in the spirit, shall come to pass. But beware that thou deceive
not thyself; for, if thou endeavour to pass off studied speeches, and
words of the flesh for those of the spirit, woe be unto thee! It had
been better for thee that thou never hadst been born. Put up the
book; thou canst not understand it now, but it shall be given thee to
understand it, for it is an oracle of the most high God, and its words
and signs fail not. Go thy ways, and return to the house of thy fathers
and thy kinsfolk.’
“And I said, ‘Sir, I know not where to go, for I cannot tell by what
path you brought me hither.’ And he took me by the hand, and led
me out by a back-door of the pavilion; and we entered a great valley,
which was all in utter darkness, and I could perceive through the
gloom that many people were passing the same way with ourselves;
and I said, ‘Sir, this is dreadful! What place is this?’ And he said,
‘This is the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Many of those you see will
grope on here for ever, and never get over, for they know not whether
they go, or what is before them. But seest thou nothing beside?’
“And I said, ‘I see a bright and shining light beyond, whose rays
reach even to this place.’—‘That,’ said he, ‘is the light of the
everlasting Gospel; and to those to whom it is given to perceive that
beacon of divine love, the passage over this valley is easy. I have
shown it to you; but if you keep that intrusted to your care, you shall
never enter this valley again, but live and reveal the will of God to
man till mortality shall no more remain. You shall renew your age
like the eagles, and be refreshed with the dews of renovation from
the presence of the Lord. Sleep on now, and take your rest, for I must
leave you again in this world of sin and sorrow. Be you strong, and
overcome it, for men will hold you up to reproach and ridicule, and
speak all manner of evil of you; but see that you join them not in
their voluptuousness and iniquity, and the Lord be with you!’”
There is no doubt that this is a confused account of the prophet’s
sublime vision, it being from second hands that I had it; and, for one
thing, I know that one-half of his relation is not contained in it. For
the consequences I can avouch. From that time forth he announced
his mission, and began prophesying to such families as he was sent
to. But I forgot to mention a very extraordinary fact, that this vision
of his actually lasted nine days and nine nights, and at the end of that
time he found himself on the very individual spot in the glen where
the voice first spoke to him, and so much were his looks changed,
that, when he went in, none of the family knew him.
He mixed no more with the men of the world, but wandered about
in wilds and solitudes, and when in the spirit, he prophesied with a
sublimity and grandeur never equalled. He had plenty of money, and
some property to boot, which his father left him; but these he never
regarded, but held on his course of severe abstemiousness, often
subsisting on bread and water, and sometimes for days on water
alone, from some motive known only to himself. He had a small
black pony on which he rode many years, and which he kept always
plump and fat. This little animal waited upon him in all his fastings
and prayings with unwearied patience and affection. There is a well,
situated on the south side of a burn, called the Earny Cleuch, on the
very boundary between the shires of Dumfries and Selkirk. It is
situated in a most sequestered and lonely place, and is called to this
day the Prophet’s Well, from the many pilgrimages that he made to
it; for it had been revealed to him in one of his visions that this water
had some divine virtue, partaking of the nature of the Water of Life.
At one time he lay beside this well for nine days and nights, the pony
feeding beside him all that time, and though there is little doubt that
he had some food with him, no body knew of any that he had; and it
was believed that he fasted all that time, or at least subsisted, on the
water of that divine well.
Some men with whom he was familiar—for indeed he was
respected and liked by everybody, the whole tenor of his life having
been so inoffensive;—some of his friends, I say, tried to reason him
into a belief of his mortality, and that he would taste of death like
other men; but that he treated as altogether chimerical, and not
worth answering; when he did answer, it was by assuring them, that
as long as he kept his mystic scroll, and could drink of his well, his
body was proof against all the thousand shafts of death. His
unearthly monitor appeared to him very frequently, and revealed
many secrets to him, and at length disclosed to him that he was
Stephen, the first martyr for the Gospel of Christ. Our prophet, in
the course of time, grew so familiar with him, that he called him by
the friendly name of Auld Steenie, and told his friends when he had
seen him, and part of what he had told him, but never the whole.
When not in his visionary and prophetic moods, he sometimes
indulged in a little relaxation, such as draught-playing and fishing;
but in these, like other things, he quite excelled all compeers. He was
particularly noted for killing salmon, by throwing the spear at a great
distance. He gave all his fish away to poor people, or such as he
favoured that were nearest to him at the time; so that, either for his
prophetic gifts, or natural bounty, the prophet was always a welcome
guest, whether to poor or rich.
He prophesied for the space of forty years, foretelling many things
that came to pass in his lifetime, and many which have come to pass
since his death. I have heard of a parable of his, to which I can do no
justice, of a certain woman who had four sons, three of whom were
legitimate, and the other not. The latter being rather uncultivated in
his manners, and not so well educated as his brethren, his mother
took for him ample possessions at a great distance from the rest of
the family. The young blade succeeded in his farming speculations
amazingly, and was grateful to his parent, and friendly with his
brethren in all their interchanges of visits. But when the mother
perceived his success, she sent and demanded a tenth from him of all
he possessed. This rather astounded the young man, and he
hesitated about compliance in parting with so much, at any rate. But
the parent insisted on her right to demand that or any sum which she
chose, and the teind she would have. The lad, not wishing to break
with his parent and benefactor, bade her say no more about it, and
he would give her the full value of that she demanded as of his own
accord; but she would have it in no other way than as her own proper
right. On this the headstrong and powerful knave took the law on his
mother; won, and ruined her; so that she and her three remaining
sons were reduced to beggary. Wat then continued—“And now it is to
yourselves I speak this, ye children of my people, for this evil is nigh
you, even at your doors. There are some here who will not see it, but
there are seven here who will see the end of it, and then they shall
know that there has been a prophet among them.”
It having been in a private family where this prophecy was
delivered, they looked always forward with fear for some contention
breaking out among them. But after the American war and its
consequences, the whole of Wat’s parable was attributed thereto, and
the good people relieved from the horrors of their impending and
ruinous lawsuit.
One day he was prophesying about the judgment, when a young
gentleman said to him, “O, sir, I wish you could tell us when the
judgment will be.” “Alas! my man,” returned he, “that is what I
cannot do; for of that day and of that hour knoweth no man; no, not
the angels which are in heaven, but the Almighty Father alone. But
there will be many judgments before the great and general one. In
seven years there will be a judgment on Scotland. In seven times
seven there will be a great and heavy judgment on all the nations of
Europe; and in other seven times seven there will be a greater one on
all the nations of the world; but whether or not that is to be the last
judgment, God only knoweth.”
These are dangerous and difficult sayings of our prophet. I wonder
what the Rev. Edward Irving would say about them, or if they
approach in any degree to his calculations. Not knowing the year
when this prophecy was delivered, it is impossible to reason on its
fulfilment, but it is evident that both the first eras must be overpast.
He always predicted ruin on the cause of Prince Charles Stuart, even
when the whole country was ringing with applauses of his bravery
and conquests. Our prophet detested the politics of that house, and
announced ruin and desolation not only on the whole house, but on
all who supported it. The only prophecy which I have yet seen in
writing relates to that brave but unfortunate adventurer, and is
contained in a letter to a Mrs Johnston, Moffat, dated October 1st,
1745, which must have been very shortly after the battle of
Prestonpans. After some religious consolation, he says, “As for that
man, Charles Stuart, let no spirit be cast down because of him, for he
is only a meteor predicting a sudden storm, which is destined to
quench his baleful light for ever. He is a broken pot; a vessel wherein
God hath no pleasure. His boasting shall be turned into dread, and
his pride of heart into astonishment. Terror shall make him afraid on
every side; he shall look on his right hand, and there shall be none to
know him; and on his left hand, and lo! destruction shall be ready at
his side—even the first-born of death shall open his jaws to devour
him. His confidence shall pass away for ever, even until the king of
terrors arrive and scatter brimstone upon his habitation. His roots
shall be dried up beneath, and the foliage of his boughs stripped off
above, until his remembrance shall perish from the face of the earth.
He shall be thrown into the deep waters, and the billows of God’s
wrath shall pass over him. He shall fly to the mountains, but they
shall not hide him; and to the islands, but they shall cast him out.
Then shall he be driven from light into darkness, and chased out of
the land.
“Knowest thou not this of old time, that the triumph of the wicked
is of short duration, and the joy of the hypocrite but for a moment?
Though his excellency mount up into the heavens, and his pride
reach the stars, yet shall he perish for ever, like a shadow that
passeth away and is no more. They who have seen him in the pride of
his might shall say, Where is he? Where now is the man that made
the nations to tremble? Is he indeed passed away as a dream, and
chased away as a vision of the night? Yea, the Lord, who sent him as
a scourge on the wicked of the land, shall ordain the hand of the
wicked to scourge him till his flesh and his soul shall depart, and his
name be blotted out of the world. Therefore, my friend in the Lord,
let none despond because of this man, but lay these things up in thy
heart, and ponder on them, and when they are fulfilled, then shalt
thou believe that the Lord sent me.”
From the tenor of this prophecy, it would appear that he has
borrowed largely from some of the most sublime passages of
Scripture, which could not fail of giving a tincture of sublimity to
many of his sayings, so much admired by the country people. It
strikes me there are some of these expressions literally from the
Book of Job; but, notwithstanding, it must be acknowledged that
some parts of it are peculiarly applicable to the after-fate of Charles
Edward.
When old age began to steal on him, and his beloved friends to
drop out of the world, one after another, he became extremely heavy-
hearted at being obliged to continue for ever in the flesh. He never
had any trouble; but he felt a great change take place in his
constitution, which he did not expect, and it was then he became
greatly concerned at being obliged to bear a body of fading flesh
about until the end of time, often saying, that the flesh of man was
never made to be immortal. In this dejected state he continued about
two years, often entreating the Lord to resume that which He had
given him, and leave him to the mercy of his Redeemer, like other
men. Accordingly, his heavenly monitor appeared to him once more,
and demanded the scroll of the spirit of prophecy, which was
delivered up to him at the well in the wilderness; and then, with a
holy admonition, he left him for ever on earth. Wat lived three years
after this, cheerful and happy, and died in peace, old, and full of
days, leaving a good worldly substance behind him.

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On the Politics of Ugliness 1st ed.

Edition Sara Rodrigues

ISBN 978-3-319-76782-6 ISBN 978-3-319-76783-3 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935188

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Printed on acid-free paper

1 Introduction: On the Politics of Ugliness 1

Part I Desire, Relationality, Erotics 51

3 Listening to the Ugliness of Hetero-Erotic Miscommunication

4 “Put on All Your Make-Up and Cry It Off in Public:”

5 I Want to Kill Myself 91

6 The Lesson of the Cockroach: Towards an Ethics of Ugliness 103

Part II The Spatio-Temporalities of Ugliness 125

7 (Un)Mapping the City Beautiful: Orlando Florida’s “Ugly”

8 New Body Project(s): “Excess” Skin in the Context of Massive

9 The Indiscreet Charms of Spatial Ugliness: An Enquiry into

10 Stigma Stains: The Somaesthetics of Institutional Abjection 193

Part III Materialities and Representations 217

11 Agatha’s Breasts on a Plate: “Ugliness” as Resistance

12 Imagining Ugliness: Failed Femininities, Shame, and Disgust

13 Ugliness as Colonial Violence: Mediations of Murdered

15 Butler’s Monsters: The Grotesque and the Black Communal

Part IV Ugliness as Generative Power 335

16 On the Limitations of the Rhetoric of Beauty: Embracing

18 Teaching While Ugly: A Story of Racial Pulchritude,

19 The Ugly Gaze 411

About the Editors

About the Contributors

of Delaware. She has published extensively on French nineteenth-century art,

German anthology on queer theory and psychoanalysis Queering Psychoanalysis.

Natasha Lushetich is Senior Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Practices and Visual

habilitation research project on “Trans*Writing Immanence and

Fig. 3.1 David during orgasm, Twentynine Palms (2003) 61

Fig. 10.5 Observation Room, River House (2014), photographer

Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of one’s

© The Author(s) 2018 1

practices, and institutions of power. To this end, we trace what it means to

 isual Injustice: Relationality and the Spatio-­

Such a view tends to naturalize ugliness as a property of objects, people, places,

bodies arise in this reading as dangerous and despised artifacts indicative of

to ideals of good health, upper-classness, and whiteness—“matter in place,”

Materialities and Representations of Ugliness

expected to perform normative femininity supremely, with no margin for error,

recently argued that “lookism”—discrimination on the basis of appearance—

Desiring Ugliness: Ugliness as Generative Power

Fein’s photographs of Detroit and Michael Day’s photographs of Chernobyl);

Importantly, as we have been discussing, ugliness is not one thing, and it is

Situating Ugliness, Politics, and Interdisciplinarity

examines representations of unattractive human bodies in early modern

political and socio-cultural implications of ugliness in and on lived experi-

Dumont’s film Twentynine Palms (2003), exploring the failure of hetero-­

Chowdhury argues that Calcutta underwent a representational crisis and

to one’s relationship with others and to writing, instead of working toward a

On the Politics of Ugliness asserts that it is only in facing ugliness as a politi-

Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

By James Hogg, “The Ettrick Shepherd.”

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1 Introduction: On the Politics of Ugliness 1

Part I Desire, Relationality, Erotics 51

3 Listening to the Ugliness of Hetero-Erotic Miscommunication

4 “Put on All Your Make-Up and Cry It Off in Public:”

5 I Want to Kill Myself 91

6 The Lesson of the Cockroach: Towards an Ethics of Ugliness 103

Part II The Spatio-Temporalities of Ugliness 125

7 (Un)Mapping the City Beautiful: Orlando Florida’s “Ugly”

8 New Body Project(s): “Excess” Skin in the Context of Massive

9 The Indiscreet Charms of Spatial Ugliness: An Enquiry into

10 Stigma Stains: The Somaesthetics of Institutional Abjection 193

Part III Materialities and Representations 217

11 Agatha’s Breasts on a Plate: “Ugliness” as Resistance

12 Imagining Ugliness: Failed Femininities, Shame, and Disgust

13 Ugliness as Colonial Violence: Mediations of Murdered

15 Butler’s Monsters: The Grotesque and the Black Communal

Part IV Ugliness as Generative Power 335

16 On the Limitations of the Rhetoric of Beauty: Embracing

18 Teaching While Ugly: A Story of Racial Pulchritude,

19 The Ugly Gaze 411

Fig. 3.1 David during orgasm, Twentynine Palms (2003) 61

isual Injustice: Relationality and the Spatio-

Materialities and Representations of Ugliness

Desiring Ugliness: Ugliness as Generative Power

Situating Ugliness, Politics, and Interdisciplinarity

Dumont’s film Twentynine Palms (2003), exploring the failure of hetero-