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Body Aesthetics
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Body Aesthetics

edited by
Sherri Irvin

1
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3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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© the several contributors 2016
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2016
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This book is dedicated to the memory of Tobin Siebers


(January 29, 1953–January 29, 2015), with gratitude for his
outstanding scholarship on the aesthetics of disability.
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Contents

List of Illustrations ix
List of Contributors xiii

Introduction: Why Body Aesthetics? 1


Sherri Irvin

Part I.╇ Representation


1. Black Silhouettes on White Walls: Kara Walker’s Magic Lantern 15
Maria del Guadalupe Davidson
2. Taste in Bodies and Fat Oppression 37
A. W. Eaton
3. From “Little Brown Brothers” to “Queer Asian Wives”: Constructing
the Asian Male Body 60
C. Winter Han

Part II.╇ Look


4. Appearance as a Feminist Issue 81
Deborah L. Rhode
5. A Tale of Two Olympians: Beauty, “Race,” Nation 94
Shirley Anne Tate
6. The Merrickites 110
Glenn Parsons
7. And Everything Nice 127
Stephen Davies

Part III.╇ Performance


8. In/Visible: Disability on the Stage 141
Tobin Siebers
9. Live, Body-Based Performance: An Account from the Field 153
Jill Sigman
10. Aesthetic Effortlessness 180
Barbara Gail Montero
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viii╅ c ontents

11. Misleading Aesthetic Norms of Beauty: Perceptual Sexism in Elite


Women’s Sports 192
Peg Brand Weiser and Edward B. Weiser

Part IV.╇ Practice


12. Body Aesthetics and the Cultivation of Moral Virtues 225
Yuriko Saito
13. White Embodied Gazing, the Black Body as Disgust, and the
Aesthetics of Un-Suturing 243
George Yancy
14. Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating 261
Richard Shusterman
15. Sexual Desire, Inequality, and the Possibility of Transformation 281
Ann J. Cahill
16. Sex Objects and Sexy Subjects: A Feminist Reclamation of Sexiness 299
Sheila Lintott and Sherri Irvin

Index 319
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List of Illustrations

1.1 Renée Cox. The Yo Mama, 1993. 16


1.2 Unknown maker, French. Nude study of a Black Female, about 1855. 19
1.3 Map from Henry Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines.23
1.4 Ernest Benecke and Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard. Zofia, Femme
du Caire, 1853. 25
Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
1.5 Kara Walker. Detail of Camptown Ladies, 1998. 28
Artwork © Kara Walker; Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
1.6 Kara Walker. Detail of Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War
as it Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and
Her Heart, 1994. 32
Artwork © Kara Walker; Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
1.7 Kara Walker. A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage
to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet
tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on
the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining
Plant, 2014. 33
Photo: Jason Wyche. Artwork © Kara Walker; Courtesy of Sikkema
Jenkins & Co., New York.
8.1 Film still of Mary Duffy in Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back
(1996), directed by Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell.
Marquette, MI: Brace Yourself Productions. 150
9.1 Wafaa Bilal. Detail from Domestic Tension, performance, 2007. 157
Copyright Wafaa Bilal. Courtesy Driscoll Babcock Galleries.
9.2 Luminosity (originally performed by Marina Abramović, 1997),
as reperformed by Jill Sigman. 159
Photo: Jonathan Muzikar © The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed
by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2015 Marina Abramović. Courtesy
of Sean Kelly Gallery/(ARS), New York.
9.3 Dancers Sally Hess, Donna Costello, and Irene Hsi in the
movement section of last days/first field (2013). 162
Photo by Rafael Gamo.
9.4 Dancers planting a field of kale seedlings during a performance
of last days/first field (2013). 162
Photo by Rafael Gamo.
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xâ•… List of Illustrations

9.5 Audience members eating kale salad and talking on the newly
planted field in last days/first field (2013). 163
Photo by Rafael Gamo.
9.6 Jill Sigman setting out calf brains during Brain Song (2011). 164
Photo by Julie Lemberger. © Julie Lemberger 2011.
9.7 Sigman cradles two wrapped brains as an audience member
looks on during Brain Song (2011). 165
Photo by Julie Lemberger. © Julie Lemberger 2011.
9.8 Dancers in an improvisational movement score
in (Perma)Culture (2014). 166
Photo by Eric Breitbart.
9.9 Dancer Maria Bauman with ceramic vessels
in (Perma)Culture (2014). 166
Photo by Eric Breitbart.
9.10 Audience members and dancers building together onstage
with ceramic vessels in (Perma)Culture (2014). 167
Photo by Alexandra Pfister.
9.11 Hut #6 (2011) by Jill Sigman at the Oslo Opera House;
Oslo, Norway. 172
Photo by Elisabeth Færøy Lund.
9.12 Hut #9 (2014) by Jill Sigman at Godsbanen; Aarhus, Denmark. 173
Photo by L2 Lab/Alejandra Ugarte.
9.13 Hut #7 (2012) by Jill Sigman at Arts@Renaissance; Brooklyn, NY. 173
Photo by Rafael Gamo.
9.14 Hut #7 detail (2012) by Jill Sigman. 174
Photo by Rafael Gamo.
9.15 Jill Sigman in a performance of TILL at Hut #7 (2012). 175
Photo by Eric Breitbart.
9.16 Sigman and audience members on the lot in TILL at Hut #7 (2012). 176
Photo by Elisabeth Færøy Lund.
11.1 Caster Semenya competing at the World Athletics
Championships in Berlin. 194
AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus, File.
11.2 Caster Semenya appearing on the cover of YOU Magazine,
September 10, 2009. 202
Courtesy of YOU Magazine South Africa.
11.3 Phintias Painter. Attic Hydria, The music lesson. 204
Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY.
11.4 Venere Felice with Eros.205
© Vanni/Art Resource, NY.
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List of Illustrationsâ•… xi

11.5 Masaccio (Maso di San Giovanni). Expulsion from Paradise.207


Scala/Art Resource, NY.
11.6 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio). Venus of Urbino. 1538. 208
Alinari/Art Resource, NY.
11.7 Cranach, Lucas the Elder. The Judgment of Paris. Possibly c.1528.209
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.
11.8 Edouard Manet. Olympia. 1863. 210
© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.
11.9 Eugène Delacroix. Death of Sardanapalus (Ashurbanipal
668–627 bce). 1827. 211
© Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Angèle Dequier/Art
Resource, NY.
11.10 Jean-Léon Gérôme. A Roman Slave Market, c.1884.212
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List of Contributors

Ann J. Cahill is Professor of Philosophy at Elon University. She has written exten-
sively on the philosophy of the body. She is author of Overcoming Objectification:
A Carnal Ethics (Routledge, 2010) and Rethinking Rape (Cornell, 2001), as well as art-
icles including “In Defense of Self-Defense” (Philosophical Papers, 2011), “Getting to
My Fighting Weight” (Hypatia, 2010), “Feminist Pleasure and Feminine Beautification”
(Hypatia, 2003), and “Foucault, Rape, and the Construction of the Feminine Body”
(Hypatia, 2000). She is the co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Social Philosophy
dedicated to the theme of “Miscarriage, Reproductive Loss, and Fetal Death.”
Maria del Guadalupe Davidson is Director of the Women’s and Gender
Studies Program and Co-Director of the Center for Social Justice at the University of
Oklahoma. Her research areas include rhetorical theory and criticism, the intersec-
tion of race and gender, black feminism, and Africana philosophical thought. Her
new book Black Women, Agency, and the New Black Feminism is forthcoming from
Routledge. Dr. Davidson’s most recent publications include the co-edited volume
Exploring Race in Predominantly White Classrooms: Scholars of Color Reflect
(Routledge, 2014). Dr. Davidson is currently working on a book project about black
women and curriculum design, and a larger academic and social project that explores
the one hundred-year anniversary of women’s suffrage.
Stephen Davies is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Auckland. He is the author of many articles and books, including The Artful Species
(Oxford University Press, 2013). He is a former President of the American Society
for Aesthetics.
A. W. Eaton is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois-
Chicago. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in both philosophy
and art history in 2003. She works on topics in feminism, aesthetics and philosophy
of art, value theory, and Italian Renaissance painting. Her special interests include
the epistemological and ontological status of aesthetic value, the relationship between
ethical and artistic value, feminist critiques of pornography, representations of rape
in the European artistic tradition, and artifact teleology. Professor Eaton was a
Laurence Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton’s Center for Human Values in 2005–6. She
is the editor of the Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art section of Philosophy Compass.
C. Winter (Chong-suk) Han is Assistant Professor of Sociology/Anthropology
at Middlebury College. He is author of Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in
Gaysian America (New York University Press, 2015) and many articles about the inter-
section of race and sexuality, including “Sexy Like a Girl, Horny Like a Boy: Contemporary
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xiv list of contributors

‘Gay’ Narratives about Gay Asian Men” (Critical Sociology, 2008), “Asian Girls Are
Prettier: Gendered Presentations as Stigma Management among Gay Asian Men”
(Symbolic Interaction, 2009), and “They Don’t Want to Cruise Your Type: Gay Men of
Color and the Racial Politics of Exclusion” (Social Identities, 2007). Prior to becoming
an academic, he was an award-winning journalist and served for three years as the
editor of the International Examiner, the longest continuously publishing pan-Asian
American newspaper in the United States.

Sherri Irvin is Presidential Research Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and


Gender Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Social Justice at the University of
Oklahoma. She works on the philosophy of contemporary art, feminist aesthetics, the
nature of aesthetic experience, and the connection of aesthetics to social justice. Her
book Immaterial: A Philosophy of Contemporary Art is forthcoming from Oxford
University Press.

Sheila Lintott is Associate Professor and the John Howard Harris Professor of
Philosophy at Bucknell University. She is editor of Motherhood—Philosophy for
Everyone: The Birth of Wisdom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); with Maureen Sander-Staudt,
co-editor of Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering:
Maternal Subjects (Routledge, 2011); with Allen Carlson, co-editor of Nature,
Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty (Columbia, 2008); and author
of a number of journal articles and book chapters on feminist philosophy, philosophy
of art and aesthetics, the aesthetics of nature, and philosophy of friendship.

Barbara Gail Montero is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of


Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has
published papers on a wide range of topics related to the mind and is author of a
forthcoming Oxford University Press book, Thought in Action: Expertise and the
Conscious Mind. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and
the Mellon Foundation. You can find out more about her and her research at
<http://barbaramontero.wordpress.com/>.

Glenn Parsons is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ryerson University,


Toronto. He is the author of Aesthetics and Nature (Continuum Press, 2008),
Functional Beauty (with Allen Carlson; Oxford, 2008), and The Philosophy of Design
(Polity Press, forthcoming).

Deborah L. Rhode is the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law and the Director
of the Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford University. She is the former chair of
the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession, and the
former director of Stanford’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She writes
primarily in the area of legal ethics and gender equity and is author or editor of
twenty-­seven books and over 300 articles. Her books on gender include What Women
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list of contributors xv

Want (Oxford University Press, 2014), The Beauty Bias (Oxford University Press,
2010), Women and Leadership: The State of Play and Strategies for Reform (with
Barbara Kellerman; Jossey-Bass, 2009), The Difference “Difference” Makes: Women
and Leadership (Stanford University Press, 2003), and Speaking of Sex (Harvard
University Press, 1997).
Yuriko Saito is Professor of Philosophy at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Her research fields are everyday aesthetics, Japanese aesthetics, and environmental
aesthetics, and she has published a number of articles and book chapters on these
subjects. Her book Everyday Aesthetics was published by Oxford University Press
(2008) and she is currently working on a sequel for the same publisher.
Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities,
Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture
at Florida Atlantic University. He has authored several books, including Thinking through
the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge, 2012), Body Conscious: A Philosophy of
Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge, 2008; translated into six languages to date),
Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Cornell, 2000; four transla-
tions), Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (Routledge, 1997;
five translations), and Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Blackwell,
1992; 2nd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2000; fourteen translations), and over 200 articles,
many of which treat aesthetic and other philosophical issues related to the body. He is
known as the founder of the discipline of somaesthetics.
Tobin Siebers was the V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor at the University of
Michigan. He is the author of ten books, most recently of two volumes in the field
of disability studies, Disability Theory (Michigan, 2008) and Disability Aesthetics
(Michigan, 2010). In 2011 he received the Senior Scholar Award of the Society for
Disability Studies.
Jill Sigman is a movement artist who works with live body and found materials.
Her work lies at the intersection of dance, visual installation, and social practice art.
Sigman has been pioneering in blurring boundaries between media and in exploring
environmental issues and themes of sustainability through live performance. She has
been honored as a Choreographic Fellow at the Center for Creative Research at NYU,
a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University, a Choreographic Fellow at the
Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, a Movement Research Artist in
Residence, and through numerous other grants and residencies internationally.
Sigman was trained in classical ballet, modern dance, art history, and analytic philos-
ophy. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University, and has published in
The Journal of Philosophical Research, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, TkH (Journal for
Performing Arts Theory), and Contact Quarterly. Sigman is Artistic Director of jill
sigman/thinkdance, founded in 1998 and based in New York City: <http://www.
thinkdance.org>.
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xvi list of contributors

Shirley Anne Tate is Associate Professor in “Race” and Culture and Director of
the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS) in the School of Sociology and
Social Policy at the University of Leeds. She is also a Research Fellow and Visiting
Professor in the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the
Free State, South Africa. She is author of Black Women’s Bodies and the Nation: Race,
Gender and Culture (Palgrave, 2015), Caribbean Racisms (with Ian Law; Palgrave,
2015), Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics (Ashgate, 2009), Black Skins, Black
Masks: Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity (Ashgate, 2005), and several articles
about feminism, gender, Black identity and “mixed race,” including “Playing in the
Dark: Being Unafraid and Impolite” (European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2011),
“Not All the Women Want to be White: Decolonizing Beauty Studies” (Encarnación
Gutiérrez Rodríguez et al., eds., Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary
Approaches, Ashgate, 2010), “Translating Melancholia: A Poetics of Black Interstitial
Community” (Community, Work & Family, 2007), and “Black Beauty: Shade, Hair
and Anti-Racist Aesthetics” (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2007).
Edward B. Weiser, MD, FACOG, FACS, is a gynecologic oncologist who is
Adjunct Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Department of Obstetrics
and Gynecology, Indiana University School of Medicine. He retired from the active
practice of medicine in 2007 after more than thirty years. He is the author of many
research articles on women’s reproductive health and clinical oncology in journals
including Gynecologic Oncology, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Radiology. He cur-
rently writes on topics in medical ethics, feminism, and aesthetics.
Peg Brand Weiser is an artist, Emerita Associate Professor of Philosophy and
Women’s Studies at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI),
editor of Beauty Unlimited (Indiana University Press, 2013) and Beauty Matters
(Indiana University Press, 2000), and co-editor with Carolyn Korsmeyer of Feminism
and Tradition in Aesthetics (Penn State University Press, 1995). Her articles on femi-
nist art and aesthetics have appeared in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, and various
anthologies. She currently chairs the Feminist Caucus Committee of the American
Society for Aesthetics.
George Yancy is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. He received his BA
(with honors) in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh, his first Master’s
degree from Yale University in Philosophy, and his second Master’s degree in Africana
Studies from NYU, where he received a distinguished Fellowship. His PhD (with dis-
tinction) is in Philosophy from Duquesne University. He has authored, edited, or
co-edited seventeen books. His first authored book received an Honorable Mention
from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, and
three of his edited books have been selected as CHOICE Outstanding Academic
Titles. He is editor of the Philosophy of Race book series at Lexington Books. His
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list of contributors xvii

series of interviews on race that appears in The Stone at the New York Times is well
known. He has twice won the Duquesne University McAnulty College and Graduate
School of Liberal Arts Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship. His most recent
edited book is entitled White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-Racism: How Does it Feel to
be a White Problem? (2015).
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Introduction
Why Body Aesthetics?

Sherri Irvin

The body is a rich object for aesthetic inquiry. Bodies feature in many everyday
­aesthetic experiences: our own body is always available to us for aesthetic assessment
(for better or worse), and we assess and respond to the bodily appearances of others
both consciously and unconsciously. This practice can be a source of delight for both
the subject and the object of the gaze. The body, whether depicted or actively perform-
ing, features centrally in aesthetic experiences of many art forms and sports as well.
A crucial thing about bodies is that they are not detachable from the persons whose
bodies they are. The body is deeply intertwined with one’s identity and sense of self,
and aesthetic consideration of bodies thus raises acute ethical questions. Notoriously,
the aesthetic assessment of bodies can perpetuate a variety of forms of oppression.
Women are disproportionately subject to narrowly defined standards of beauty that
are, for many, difficult, costly, or impossible to meet; and compliance with these stand-
ards is unfairly used as a criterion for the allocation of a wide variety of social and
­economic goods (Rhode 2010). Standards of attractiveness in white-dominated socie-
ties are derived from norms related to white bodies, leading to judgments of exoticism
and/or ugliness for members of other racial groups (Craig 2002; Hobson 2005;
Tate 2012). People with visible disabilities may be seen as freakish and treated as asex-
ual by virtue of the ways in which their bodies differ from societal norms of attractive-
ness (Garland-Thomson 1997; Wilkerson 2002). And people whose gender expression
is thought not to fit with their presumed biological sex are sometimes subjected to
harsh aesthetic judgments that motivate social penalties ranging from shunning to
physical violence (Valentine 2007).
Aesthetic standards thus serve a disciplinary function, maintaining oppressive
norms of race, gender, and sexuality. They also condemn those judged ugly to penalties
in domains seemingly unrelated to attractiveness: worse education, parental care, and
healthcare; diminished employment prospects and earnings; harsher punishment in
schools during childhood and in the criminal justice system in adulthood; and reduced

Financial support was provided by the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Office of the
Provost, and the Department of Philosophy, University of Oklahoma.
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2 Sherri Irvin

likelihood of receiving needed help, among many others (e.g. Hamermesh 2011;
Hatfield and Sprecher 1986; Rhode 2010).
Aesthetic theories focused on artworks and natural environments have tended to
strive for objective standards of beauty, linked to an expectation that apt aesthetic
judgments about particular objects will converge. Evolutionary psychologists have
sometimes promoted a similar approach in relation to the body. We have evolved, it is
suggested, to find specific bodies attractive because these bodies are the most repro-
ductively fit; apt judgments about the aesthetic value of bodies will thus converge. But
convergence of aesthetic judgments about bodies simply magnifies the unjust effects
discussed above by concentrating them on a few people. Moreover, temporal and
cross-cultural variability in standards of attractiveness may lead us to question the via-
bility of objective standards of aesthetic value when it comes to the body—and perhaps
when it comes to other objects as well. Since the nature and grounding of aesthetic
value are fundamental questions in aesthetics, thinking about the body from an aes-
thetic perspective may thus occasion a fresh look at some of the most basic theoretical
issues in aesthetics.
The aesthetics of the body goes beyond bodily attractiveness to include assessments
of the body’s performance and functioning. This is obviously true in the arts: in dance
and often in theater, the performer’s style of movement and physical presence may be
crucial to the aesthetic success of the work. In sports, aesthetic assessment of the body’s
functioning and sheer physical attractiveness can be tied up in complex ways with our
evaluation of athletic performance. And in everyday life, the way in which one deploys
the body can be more aesthetically efficacious than one’s looks narrowly construed.
The aesthetic potential of the performing body thus deserves vastly more attention
than it has received, particularly within philosophy.
The aesthetics of the body is not only about bodies assessed from the outside. It is
also about how aesthetic experience is felt “from the inside.” While philosophical dis-
cussion of aesthetic experience was long focused on the visual and auditory domains,
with other senses treated as too crude to be of interest, contemporary aestheticians
have defended the idea that deeply somatic experiences involving the tactile and pro-
prioceptive senses can also be genuinely aesthetic (e.g. Irvin 2008; Korsmeyer 2002;
Montero 2006; Saito 2007; Shusterman 2008, 2012). The aesthetics of felt bodily expe-
rience is a rich vein for further philosophical attention.
This volume is divided into four sections which offer a sampling of several intellec-
tual paths down which an aesthetics of the body may lead us, with special attention to
connections with ethics and social justice.

Representation
Representation of the body in art, media, and culture shapes identities and oppressive
practices. Representation can also be used to resist, reform, or undermine such practices.
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Why Body Aesthetics? 3

As Maria del Guadalupe Davidson discusses in “Black Silhouettes on White Walls:


Kara Walker’s Magic Lantern,” photography and even cartography have long been
used didactically to propagate stereotypes about and forms of oppression against Black
women. When contemporary artist Kara Walker deploys those same stereotypes in her
work, she is sometimes accused of being complicit in white supremacy. But as
Davidson argues, Walker’s works have an antiracist didactic function: in making visi-
ble the simultaneous violence and absurdity of the objectification of Black subjects,
Walker instructs viewers that the copious residue of historical stereotyping must be
not swept aside as an irrelevant relic, but actively faced and eradicated. Walker’s most
recent work also lures viewers into expressions of racialized objectification, thereby
forcing us to confront the fact that anti-Black violence remains fully alive today and
cannot be dismissed as a mere figment of a racist past. Davidson thus demonstrates the
power of representations both to reinscribe and to expose and undermine oppressive
practices.
In “Taste in Bodies and Fat Oppression,” A. W. Eaton takes on anti-fat bias. Aesthetic
preferences for thinness are often constructed as natural and founded in evolutionary
pressures, when in fact body-type preferences are culturally variable and historically
malleable over the course of just a few decades. While concern for others’ health is
sometimes used as a justification for fat-shaming and other forms of anti-fat discrimi-
nation, these forms of oppression impose health costs of their own, and are founded on
ill-substantiated beliefs about the connection between fat and health.
Eaton advocates resistance to fat oppression via an Aristotelian strategy of alter-
ing bodily taste through the skillful selection and use of representations. As she
notes, the strategy of consciously altering the kinds of representations consumed by
an individual or a society can be extended to other forms of appearance-related
oppression based in race, disability, age, gender identity, and other visible markers
of “difference.”
Media representations are a major force in the construction of gender. As C. Winter
Han argues in “From ‘Little Brown Brothers’ to ‘Queer Asian Wives’: Constructing the
Asian Male Body,” the media shape our understanding of masculinity both by present-
ing exemplars thereof and by indicating who is excluded: particularly Asian men, who
are systematically feminized. The construction of masculinity is thus also an exercise
in the construction of gendered and racialized stereotypes. These stereotypes target
both gay and straight Asian men: from Korean pop star PSY, whose heterosexual
encounters in the wildly popular video for “Gangnam Style” are packaged as comical
and asexual, to an ad by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, in which a gay
Asian man is presented as the loving “wife” who supports his white husband wishing to
serve in the military, Asian men are used to define the boundaries of masculinity by
their placement outside those boundaries. The issue is not that these images are problem-
atic in themselves. It is, rather, that media representations of Asian men are narrowly
circumscribed within the domain of the feminine, and that feminized self-presentations
and feminine roles are broadly stigmatized, especially when assumed by men. We thus
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4 Sherri Irvin

need not only a much more varied repertoire of media representations of Asian men,
but also a dismantling of the evaluative judgments that accompany ideas of femininity
and masculinity.

Look
Aesthetic judgments of the look of bodies are deeply woven into other domains of life.
As Deborah L. Rhode argues in “Appearance as a Feminist Issue,” discrimination based
on appearance is rife, with women bearing a disproportionate burden. Norms of
appearance siphon attention away from women’s accomplishments, and attempts to
comply involve substantial financial and health costs. Because norms of attractiveness
are gendered, racialized, and classed, discrimination against those judged unattractive
tends to reinforce gender, racial, and socio-economic class disadvantage.
Resistance to the norms creates a misogynistic backlash, as Rhode herself experi-
enced through the hate mail she received after she authored a book (Rhode 2010) on
the topic. Moreover, women have internalized societal norms of attractiveness, and
may comply both because they find it pleasurable and because they wish to avoid the
penalties for non-compliance. Rhode concludes that feminist attention should focus
more on undermining appearance-based pressure and discrimination and less on
condemning women’s individual choices.
Shirley Anne Tate inquires into how looks function as a signifier, especially of
national identity and citizenship. In “A Tale of Two Olympians: Beauty, ‘Race,’ Nation,”
she examines the use of two elite athletes, Jessica Ennis and Jeanette Kwakye, in brand-
ing campaigns for commercial products and for the Great Britain Olympic team. The
body and face of Ennis, a relatively light-skinned mixed-race woman, were embraced
as signifiers for beauty and national identity, whereas Kwakye, whose skin is darker,
was selected to advertise cleaning products and to represent a campaign to clean up
London prior to the 2012 Olympics—a troubling connection given the history of
women of color as domestic workers within the power structures of white supremacy.
As Tate argues, the relative positioning of Ennis and Kwakye conveys a complex
message about Great Britain as a tolerant, post-racial nation that is willing to offer the
benefits of full belonging to some who have been previously designated as “other”—
but only some. Kwakye, with her darker skin, is not eligible to represent the nation in
the way that Ennis can. While these athletes’ deployment in branding campaigns is
meant to send a message of inclusiveness, it in fact reveals the ongoing racialization of
notions of beauty and national identity.
In “The Merrickites,” Glenn Parsons considers the viability of one possible solution
to the problem of oppressive and racialized standards of beauty. Parsons draws both on
Naomi Wolf ’s (1990, 291) idea that discourses of beauty should shift to “radiance,” or
“light coming out of the face and body, rather than a spotlight on the body, dimming
the self,” and on the wish of Joseph Merrick, known as the “Elephant Man,” to be judged
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Why Body Aesthetics? 5

based only on his mind or soul and not on his body. Parsons asks what it would mean
to care only about the self as it is expressed through the body and to abandon attention
to beauty in the conventional sense, which he defines as “pleasing perfection.” To live
up to Wolf ’s and Merrick’s ideal, Parsons suggests, would require that we focus only on
those aspects of the body that are naturally expressive of one’s self, soul, or character
and cease to admire perfection of any other aspects of the body. If we consider a society
of “Merrickites” governed by this ideal, Parsons argues, we should find it deeply flawed:
since many aspects of bodily perfection, such as health, strength, and speed, are relevant
to survival and autonomy, to abandon the pursuit of bodily perfection is to abandon
ideals of a desirable life that are typically central to the structures of a well-formed
society. We thus do have reason to strive for, and to prize, aspects of bodily perfection
that may not be expressive of the soul or self.
In “And Everything Nice,” Stephen Davies offers a survey and critique of the current
landscape of thinking about sexual attractiveness within evolutionary psychology.
Davies argues that, in its focus on such things as facial symmetry and female hip-to-
waist ratios, evolutionary psychology has tended to overemphasize universality and
minimize the factors that promote idiosyncrasy and divergence in preferences for
sexual partners. Moreover, evolutionary psychology tends to construe sexual attrac-
tiveness as almost exclusively a matter of physical markers of appearance and scent,
and pays little attention to the way that things like a person’s behavior, intelligence, and
social interaction play into our judgments about them. Davies suggests that by evolu-
tionary psychology’s own lights, sexual attractiveness should be a matter not just of
who is genetically fit in a narrow sense, but of who will be a good parent, able not just to
contribute gametes to healthy offspring but to nurture those offspring and foster in
them the qualities that will make them into good parents themselves. Moreover, of
course, evolutionary influences on our preferences are far from decisive; both culture
and individual choices may play a very significant role in who we find sexually attrac-
tive. Davies concludes sexual attractiveness would be better understood as having less
to do with looks (and smells) and more to do with a broader range of social and behav-
ioral criteria that are associated with full personhood.

Performance
This section considers bodies in performance and how they function both aesthetically
and ethically. In “In/Visible: Disability on the Stage,” Tobin Siebers begins by interro-
gating the very notion of visibility as it pertains to disability. Disabilities that are often
spoken of as “visible” may go unnoticed in a context where observers lack experience
with disability or have been socially conditioned to expect that everyone present is
nondisabled. On the other hand, when an actor’s disability becomes visible on stage, it
may be hypervisible, obscuring attention to other aspects of the production. Most
often, however, disability is made invisible on stage by its very exclusion, because disa-
bility is understood as an aesthetic disruption or obstacle.
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6 Sherri Irvin

The theater, then, may seem to be governed by an aesthetic of “passing”: disabled


actors can play nondisabled characters only if they are able to “pass” as nondisabled.
In fact, though, when nondisabled actors play disabled characters, it may be aes-
thetically crucial that they not pass: the audience’s ability to manage the disruptive
­emotions associated with disability may depend on knowledge that the disability is
only performed. Through the example of Mary Duffy’s performance as the Venus de
Milo, Siebers advocates that we move beyond an aesthetics of passing and toward an
exploration of the distinctive aesthetic effects that arise through the incorporation
of disabled bodies in performance, resulting in a recognition of disability itself as a
positive aesthetic value.
In “Live, Body-Based Performance: An Account from the Field,” artist Jill Sigman
discusses why, in a society that prizes efficiency, the creation of cost- and labor-intensive
works of dance and performance art, which must be seen live and can be presented
only to a limited audience, is worthwhile. Sigman argues that live bodily presence plays
an irreplaceable role in the cultivation of empathy, something that cannot be dupli-
cated through the mediation of video. Live performance also lends itself to real-time
experiences, since it cannot simply be fast-forwarded; and such immersive, durational
experiences may lead viewers to be more connected to what is happening around
them and more willing to engage with and through their own bodies. These forms of
connection have a powerful ethical dimension, combatting forms of distance and dis-
engagement that characterize much of contemporary life.
The role of body in these effects is complex. The “look” of body, in the traditional
sense, may be of minimal relevance, and even the most specific details of bodily
movement and functioning may not be crucial. Sigman suggests that the most critical
aesthetic effect may, instead, be the performing body’s power to effect a change in the
space itself, or in how we perceive that space.
In “Aesthetic Effortlessness,” Barbara Gail Montero examines a specific feature that
is often identified as aesthetically relevant to performance. Finding neither Bergson’s
(1889/2001) nor Spencer’s (1852/1892) account of effortlessness fully satisfactory,
Montero offers a new account that considers the relationship of effortlessness with
difficulty. Often, she suggests, we particularly prize the appearance of effortlessness
because we know that the performance is in fact difficult. The full aesthetic effect, then,
may require that difficulty be simultaneously revealed and concealed. The viewer’s
epistemic position may be crucial: knowledge that the performance is difficult may
make the appearance of effortlessness more impressive; yet if one sympathizes with the
performer’s true effort too closely, one’s immersion in effortlessness, which may
involve a sympathetic experience of ease in one’s own body, may be blocked. When one
believes that the performer’s movement is genuinely without effort, this may prevent
one from experiencing the movement as aesthetically effortless, unless one is indexing
it to the level of difficulty it would have if one tried it oneself. Though effortlessness is
somewhat out of fashion in contemporary dance, Montero suggests, we find it natu-
rally rewarding; effortlessness thus deserves deeper aesthetic inquiry.
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Why Body Aesthetics? 7

In “Misleading Aesthetic Norms of Beauty: Perceptual Sexism in Elite Women’s


Sports,” Peg Brand Weiser and Edward B. Weiser examine how race and gender
interact with standards of attractiveness to produce injustice, specifically against
female athletes. When athletes train for elite sports, their bodies undergo predictable
changes as they become stronger and faster. One might expect that these changes
would be seen as expressions of beauty, since they represent a honing of the body’s
capacities. Instead, Weiser and Weiser note, increased muscularity and other changes
in the appearance and style of movement of the female athlete’s body come to be read
as “masculine,” and thus as incompatible with both beauty and femaleness. Since
norms of beauty in white-dominated contexts are racialized white, this effect is
exacerbated for Black athletes. Many athletes, as a result, have been subjected to inva-
sive scrutiny and even excluded from competition because their bodies failed to satisfy
aesthetic norms of what female bodies should look like.
Weiser and Weiser propose a new aesthetic approach to the athlete’s body, one that
recognizes a unique form of beauty that is the result of intense athletic training and
may bear little relation to conventional gendered and racialized beauty norms. We
should reject gendered restrictions on what can count as beauty or as appropriate
appearance, they argue: if we wish to tie beauty to aspects of identity while showing
respect for persons, we should recognize that athletic identity may be far more relevant
than gender identity.

Practice
Aesthetic body practices are extremely diverse, comprising cultivation of somatic aes-
thetic experiences, forms of aesthetic self-constitution, intentional reshaping of our
aesthetic judgments of bodies, and practices of using the body aesthetically to achieve
moral ends.
In “Body Aesthetics and the Cultivation of Moral Virtues,” Yuriko Saito discusses
the moral resonance of aesthetic practices of bodily movement and performance.
The moral quality of our actions lies not just in what we do, but in how we do it—or,
to put it differently, how we do something is part of what we do, not separable from
it. The style and manner with which we act is aesthetic: it consists of the perceptible
qualities of our actions, including how they look, feel, and sound. Our style of action
can be expressive of care and respect over and above the “what” of our action as it
is generally construed. As Saito demonstrates, the separation between the “what”
and “how” of action is much less prominent in several Asian traditions than it has
often been within Western ethical and aesthetic thinking (though Schiller 1882 is a
notable exception).
Concern with the style of our actions should motivate us to engage in active, physical
cultivation of aesthetic practices of the body, Saito argues. Such practices may change
our attitudes, as Nancy Sherman (2005) has observed, and also improve the quality of
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8 Sherri Irvin

our own experiences. But most crucially, they affect others by improving the experi-
ences we cause for them; and this improvement may have a rippling effect, causing
them to extend caring, respectful forms of engagement to others. Ultimately, Saito
suggests, engaging in aesthetic practices of the body is a way to make a positive contri-
bution to the world-making project in which we are all collectively engaged.
In “White Embodied Gazing, the Black Body as Disgust, and the Aesthetics of
Un-Suturing,” George Yancy takes on the complex aesthetics of race relations. White
gazing, he argues, is a perceptual practice embedded within white supremacy that con-
structs the Black body as an object of disgust and fear. Disgust, or the “white embodied
revulsive response,” is an aesthetic response (cf. Korsmeyer 2011) corresponding to
whites’ experience of the “disrupt[ion of] the harmony and symmetry of white space”
when the Black body enters it: an aesthetic response that can and does erupt into vio-
lence that has taken the lives of Jordan Davis, Trayvon Martin, and Renisha McBride,
among many others.
The practice of white gazing, Yancy suggests, is deeply woven into the fabric of the
white self. Whites must, therefore, engage in a practice of self-making—or, rather,
self-unmaking—that he terms un-suturing. Un-suturing involves embracing our
mutual entanglement and somatic vulnerability, rather than reaffirming the impreg-
nability aspired to by whiteness. White antiracism, then, necessarily involves an
ethico-aesthetic project of self-reconstruction to root out racist practices of perceiv-
ing and responding somatically to the Black body. Yancy’s account functions as both
exhortation and lament, given the many failures of white police officers and citizens
to allow themselves to become un-sutured in acknowledgment of Black dignity
and humanity.
While Saito and Yancy take on the aesthetics of world-making and self-making, the
final three chapters consider aesthetic body practices in specific domains: eating and
sexuality. In “Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating,” Richard Shusterman encour-
ages us to think of eating as an aesthetic practice of the body. As Shusterman notes,
most aesthetic attention to food has focused on the act of cooking and the qualities of
the food itself. However, eating, the actual act of ingesting food, has its own aesthetic
qualities that are far from fully determined by what is eaten. Eating is a deeply multi-
sensory experience, involving, in addition to the taste, smell, and look of food, the
sound of one’s own eating, and tactile and proprioceptive experiences generated by
one’s posture, by the contact of food and eating implements with one’s body, and by
one’s own bodily movements in the act of eating. Attention to eating as an aesthetic
practice, then, is a way to hone one’s perceptual acuity, particularly regarding somatic
experiences of inner parts of the body such as the mouth, throat, esophagus, and stom-
ach. Moreover, each meal has its own structure, dependent on choices about what (and
what not) to eat, how to time one’s eating, the sequence in which things are eaten, and
choices about when to pause or stop eating. Specific aesthetic attention may be directed
toward the construction and experiencing of this structure. Shusterman also notes
that eating with others may generate a form of “communal choreography” that creates
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Why Body Aesthetics? 9

pleasing aesthetic experiences that promote social cohesiveness. Eating itself, then, is
worthy of aesthetic attention and of cultivation as a complex aesthetic practice.
The final two chapters in the volume deal with aesthetic practices of reforming one’s
sexual tastes for certain kinds of bodies, where those tastes are found to be oppressive.
In “Sexual Desire, Inequality, and the Possibility of Transformation,” Ann J. Cahill
argues that while sexual tastes have often been treated as givens that are immune to
criticism, they should in fact be subject to ethical assessment. In the service of her
argument, Cahill expands the notion of sexual orientation beyond attraction to bodies
as sexed or gendered, to include other aspects of sexual preference that may be even
more powerful but often remain unnamed: for instance, preference for people of a cer-
tain age range, economic class, race, or range of physical or cognitive ability. Borrowing
from William Wilkerson’s (2007) account of the dynamic process by which sexual ori-
entations are formed, Cahill argues that sexual preferences are partly a product of
interpretive acts which can be assessed ethically and reformed without feeding into the
Western tendency to endorse a hierarchy of mind over body. While expressly rejecting
the ethical or practical viability of “conversion therapy” that aims to undermine homo-
sexual desire, Cahill advocates an autonomous aesthetic practice of transforming one’s
sexual desires for the purpose of undermining structural inequality.
In thinking about the process of transformation, Cahill adopts, with Karen Davis
(1990), an analogy between sexual desire and laughter. Though laughter is a somatic
phenomenon and is often experienced as automatic, it occurs in a social and interpre-
tative context and is subject to choice and reconsideration. Laughter, like sexual
desire, can function either in concert with or in opposition to oppression; and where
our laughter is oppressive, it seems we are obligated to change not just the laughter
itself but the underlying disposition to find certain things humorous. Cahill supports
her analysis through appeal to Shannon Sullivan’s (2006) and George Yancy’s (2008)
arguments that anti-racism involves a deep commitment to somatic and affective
retraining.
In “Sex Objects and Sexy Subjects: A Feminist Reclamation of Sexiness,” Sheila
Lintott and Sherri Irvin take on the idea that sexiness, as an aesthetic attribute, may be
compromised by its history of implication in patriarchal, racist, ableist, and heteronor-
mative systems of objectification. Like Cahill, Lintott and Irvin see sexual recognition
as an important affirmation of one’s humanity, and thus better reclaimed than dis-
carded in light of feminist concerns. After rejecting two oppressive notions of sexiness,
the biological and the purely prurient senses, Lintott and Irvin propose that sexiness
should be reformed through a concerted aesthetic practice. Rather than seeing sexi-
ness as an aesthetic attribute of the body alone, they argue, we should treat it as an
assessment of the whole embodied person that takes into particular account the per-
son’s expression of sexual subjectivity. Moreover, while seeing someone as sexy
involves aesthetically appreciating their body, this aesthetic appreciation should take
the form of encountering each body with wonder (as Cahill 2011 proposes) rather
than assessing it in relation to societal standards of physical attractiveness.
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10 Sherri Irvin

As Lintott and Irvin acknowledge, one cannot simply think one’s way into new kinds
of aesthetic experiences of embodied persons. One must, instead, undertake a true
aesthetic practice whereby one finds respectful ways to engage with and appreciate the
embodied sexual subjectivity of others.

Conclusion
Philosophical inquiry into the aesthetic potential of the body has been sparse, even as
inquiries into the body—aesthetic and otherwise—have exploded in other disciplines.
Feminist philosophy, and particularly work by Peg Brand Weiser (Brand 2000, 2013),
has urged us to take the body in general, and standards of bodily beauty in particular,
more seriously; but the uptake by philosophers, even within aesthetics, has been quite
limited. Scholars in other areas of philosophy or other academic disciplines have
treated the aesthetics of the body much more extensively (e.g. Bordo 1993; Garland-
Thomson 2009; Hobson 2005; Siebers 2010; Tate 2005), but their work remains largely
unknown within philosophical aesthetics. By bringing philosophical aesthetics into
conversation with other disciplines, this volume points toward the rich potential of an
interdisciplinary aesthetics of the body.
Despite the great diversity of topics addressed here, this volume scarcely scratches
the surface of what a fully developed discipline of body aesthetics could be. Given the
potential of systematic inquiry into the aesthetics of the body to challenge oppression
and injustice, to enrich everyday life, to enhance social cohesion, and to deepen our
understanding and experiences of art, as well as to refine our thinking about classic
questions about aesthetic experience and value, it is puzzling that body aesthetics is
not already well established as a line of inquiry bringing philosophy together with
other fields. Fortunately, it is not too late.

References
Bergson, Henri. 1889/2001. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness. Translated by Frank L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Bordo, Susan. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Brand, Peg Zeglin, ed. 2000. Beauty Matters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Brand, Peg Zeglin, ed. 2013. Beauty Unlimited. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cahill, Ann. 2011. Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics. New York: Routledge.
Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of
Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davis, Karen Elizabeth. 1990. “I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A New Paradigm for Sex.”
Journal of Social Philosophy 21 (2–3): 5–24.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in
American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Beyond our
control
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Beyond our control

Author: Randall Garrett

Illustrator: Richard Kluga

Release date: October 6, 2023 [eBook #71821]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1957

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed


Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEYOND


OUR CONTROL ***
Beyond Our Control

By RANDALL GARRETT

Illustrated by RICHARD KLUGA

The "technical difficulties" on Satellite


Four became a menace to the entire Earth!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from


Infinity January 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CHAPTER I
The big building stood out at night, even among the other towering
spires of Manhattan. The bright, glowing symbol on its roof attracted
the attention of anyone who looked up at the night sky of New York;
and from the coast of Connecticut, across Long Island Sound, the
huge ball was easily visible as a shining dot of light.
The symbol—as a symbol—resembled the well-known symbol of an
atom. It consisted of a central globe surrounded by a swarm of
swiftly-moving points of light that circled the glowing sphere endlessly.
It represented the Earth itself and the robot-operated artificial
satellites that whirled around it. It was the trademark of Circum-Global
Communications.
But it was more than just a symbol; it was also the antenna for the
powerful transmitters that kept constant contact with the satellite relay
stations which, in turn, re-broadcast the TV impulses to all parts of
the globe.
Inside the CGC Building, completely filling the upper twenty floors,
were the sections of the vast electronic brain that computed and
integrated the orbits of the small artificial moons and kept the
communication beams linked to them. And below the brain,
occupying another four floors, were the control and monitoring rooms,
in which the TV communications of a world were selected and
programmed.
In Johannesburg, South Africa, the newly-elected President spoke in
front of a TV camera. His dark, handsome face was coldly implacable
as he said: "They wanted apartheid when they were in power; we see
no reason to believe they have changed their minds. They wanted
apartheid—very well, they shall continue to have apartheid!"
His image and his voice, picked up by the camera and mike, were
transmitted by cable to the beam broadcaster in the old capital of
Pretoria. From there, it was broadcast generally all over South Africa;
at the same time, it was relayed by tight beam to Satellite Nine, which
happened to be in the sky over that part of the Earth at that time.
Satellite Nine, in turn, relayed it to all the other satellites in line of
sight. Satellite Two, over the eastern seaboard of North America,
picked it up and automatically relayed it to the big antenna on top of
New York's Circum-Global Communications Building.
There it was de-hashed and cleaned up. The static noise which it had
picked up in its double flight through the ionosphere was removed;
the periods of fading were strengthened, and the whole
communication was smoothed out and patched up.
From the CGC Building, it was re-broadcast over the United States. A
man in Bismarck, North Dakota, looked at the three-dimensional, full-
color image of the President of South Africa, listened to his clear,
carefully-modulated words, and said: "Serves 'em right, by George!"

Besides the world-wide television news and entertainment networks,


CGC also handled person-to-person communication through its
subsidiary, Intercontinental Visiphone. If the man in Bismarck had
wanted to call the President of the Union of South Africa, his
visiphone message would have gone out in almost exactly the same
way, and the two men could have talked person-to-person, face to
face. (Whether the President of South Africa would have accepted
the call or not is another matter.)
From all over the world, programs and communications were picked
up by the satellites and relayed to the CGC Building, where they were
sorted and sent out again.
The man in charge of the technical end of the whole operation was a
short, stocky, graying man named MacIlheny.
James Fitzpatrick MacIlheny, Operational Vice-President of Circum-
Global Communications, was one of those dynamic men who can
allow their subordinates to call them by a nickname and still retain
their respect. His wife called him "Jim"; his personal friends called
him "Fitz"; and his subordinates called him "Mac." He knew his own
job, and the job of every man under him; if one of the men slipped up,
he heard about it in short order, but, on the other hand, if the work
was well done, he heard about that in short order, too. MacIlheny was
as free with his pats on the back as he was with the boot a little lower
down. As a result, his men respected him and he respected them.
MacIlheny liked his work, so he was quite often found in his office or
in the monitoring rooms long after his prescribed quitting time. On the
evening of 25 March 1978, he had stayed overtime nearly four hours
to watch the installation of a new computer unit. As a matter of cold
fact, since the day was Saturday, he needn't have been in the office
at all, but—well, a new computer isn't put in every day, and MacIlheny
liked computer work.
It was exactly 1903 hours when the PA system clicked on and an
operator's voice said: "Is Mr. MacIlheny still in the building, please?
Mr. MacIlheny, please call Satellite Beam Control."
MacIlheny stood up from the squatting position he had been in,
handed a flashlight to one of the technicians standing nearby, and
said: "Hold this, Harry; I'll be back in a minute."
The installation crew went on with their work while MacIlheny went
over to a wall phone. He picked it up and punched the code number
for Beam Control.
"This is MacIlheny," he said when the recog signal came.
"Mac? This is Blake. Can you come down right away? We've lost
Number Four!"
"What happened?"
"Don't know. She was nearly overhead, going along fine, when we
lost contact all of a sudden. One minute she was there, the next
minute she was gone. We've lost the beam, and—just a second!"
There was a pause at the other end, then Blake said: "We just got a
report from some of the ground stations within range. Satellite
Number Four has quit broadcasting altogether—there's no signal
from her at all!"
"I'll be right down," MacIlheny snapped. He hung up the phone and
headed for the elevator.

It wasn't good. Number Four, like the other satellites, was in a nearly
circular orbit high above the atmosphere of Earth. She should follow a
mathematically predictable course, subject only to slight variations
from the pull of the other satellites and the pull of the moon, plus the
small perturbations caused by the changing terrain of the Earth
beneath her. She'd have to be badly off course to be out of range of
Beam Control.
The elevator dropped MacIlheny down from the computer level to the
monitor and control level. The men at the monitor screens didn't look
up from their work as MacIlheny passed, but there was a feeling of
tension in the air. The monitors knew what had happened.
To the man in Bismarck, North Dakota, or the housewife in Tampa,
Florida, the disappearance of the satellite meant nothing more than a
slight irritation. If the program they were watching happened to be
one that was shunted through Number Four, their screen had simply
gone dark for a moment. Then, with apologies for "technical
difficulties beyond our control," another program had been switched
into the channel.
For the businessman in San Francisco and the government official in
New York, the situation was worse. Important intercontinental
conferences were cut off in mid-sentence, and vital orders were left
hanging in the air.
For seven transcontinental stratoliners, the situation was almost
tragic. The superfast, rocket-driven, robot-controlled ships, speeding
their way through the lower ozonosphere, fifteen miles above the
surface of the Earth, were suddenly without the homing beams they
depended upon to guide them safely to their destinations. Their
beam-detection instruments went into a search pattern while alarm
bells shattered the quiet within. Passengers in the lounges and in the
cocktail rooms looked suddenly wide-eyed.
On one of the ships, there was a near panic when one fool screamed:
"We're going to crash! Get parachutes!"
Not until the flight captain caught the hysterical passenger on the chin
with a hard right uppercut and explained that everything was in good
order did the passengers quiet down. He didn't worry them by
explaining that there were no parachutes aboard; at eighty thousand
feet of altitude and a velocity of over forty miles per minute, a
parachute would be worse than useless.
Each of the stratoliners had to be taken over by the flight captain and
eased down manually.
MacIlheny had a pretty good idea of what was going on all over the
United States, and he didn't like it. He pushed open the door of the
Beam Control Section and strode in. Blake met him halfway across
the room.
"Nothing yet, as far as contact goes," he said. "We've heard from the
spotter station in Topeka; they missed it at the same time we did—
1702 hours, two seconds."
MacIlheny glanced at the chronometer on the wall. The satellite had
been missing for nearly four minutes now.
"Get the Long Island Observatory; tell 'em to keep an eye peeled for
Number Four. It ought to be out of Earth's shadow," MacIlheny
ordered. "And start a sweep search with the radar. Cover the whole
area. Get a prediction from the Orbit Division; find the cone of
greatest probability and search it carefully. Unless the damned thing
just blew up, it's got to be up there somewhere!"
"I've already called Orbits," Blake said. "I'll get Long Island on the
line." He headed for the phone.
MacIlheny went over to one of the control boards and looked over the
instruments. He swept his eyes across them, reading them as a
group, in the same way an ordinary man reads a sentence. Satellite
Number Four had vanished, as far as the Beam Controls were
concerned. Data from the electronic brain indicated that the
acceleration of the satellite had been something terrific, but whether it
had slowed down or speeded up was something the brain couldn't tell
yet.
A thin, sandy-haired man at a nearby board said: "What do you think,
Mac?"
"There's only one thing could have done it, Jackson," MacIlheny said.
"A meteor."
"That's what we figured. It must have been a doozie!"
"Yeah. But which direction did it hit from? If it hit from the side,
Number Four will be twisted around; its new orbit will be at an angle
to the old one. If it overtook the satellite from behind, the additional
velocity will lift it into a newer, higher orbit. If it was hit from the front,
it'll be slowed down, and it may hit the atmosphere."
"Not much chance of its being overtaken," Jackson said. "A meteor
would have to be hitting it up at a pretty good clip to shove Four
ahead that fast!"
"Right," MacIlheny agreed. "And meteors just don't travel that fast in
that direction."
"No—no, they don't."
MacIlheny felt a sense of frustration. The satellite was gone, vanished
he knew not whither. It had disappeared into some limbo which, at the
moment, was beyond his reach. Until it was located, either visually or
by radar, it might as well not exist.
There was actually nothing further he could do until it was found; he
couldn't find it himself.
"What's our next contact?" he asked.
"Satellite Number Eight. It'll be coming over the horizon in—" Jackson
glanced at the chronometer. "—in eight minutes, twenty-seven
seconds. We'll just have to hold on till then, I suppose."
MacIlheny thought about the stratoplanes he knew were up there.
"Yeah," he said tightly. "Yeah. Just wait."
CHAPTER II
Four minutes came and went, while MacIlheny and the others
smoked cigarettes and tried to maintain a certain amount of calm as
they waited.
At the end of the four minutes, the phone rang. Blake, who was
nearest, answered.
"Yes. Good! Okay, thanks, Dr. Vanner!" He cradled the receiver and
turned to MacIlheny. "The Observatory. They've spotted Number
Four. She's slowed way down and dropped. They're feeding the orbit
figures to Orbits Division now, by teletype. She evidently hit a fast
meteor, head on."
MacIlheny nodded. "It figures. Tell Orbits to feed us a computation we
can sight by—feed it directly into the Brain first, so we can get things
going. We've got to get that satellite back up where she belongs!"
As the figures came in, it became obvious that the orbit of Number
Four had been radically altered. Evidently, a high-speed, fairly
massive meteor had struck her from above and forward, slowing her
down. Immediately, the satellite had begun to drop, since angular
acceleration no longer gave her enough centrifugal force to offset the
gravitational pull of the Earth. As she dropped, however, she picked
up more speed, and was able to establish a new, different orbit.
With this information fed into it, the electronic brain in the top twenty
floors of the CGC Building went smoothly to work. Now that it knew
where the satellite was, it could again focus the beams on her. Since
the direction and velocity of the artificial moon in her new orbit were
also known, the trackers could hold the beam on her.
MacIlheny rubbed his chin with a nervous forefinger as he watched
the instruments on the control board come to life again as contact
was re-established.
Meanwhile, Orbits Division was still at work. In order to re-establish
the old orbit, the atomic rocket engines in the satellite would have to
be used. Short bursts, fired at precisely the right time, in precisely the
right direction, would lift her back up to where she belonged. It was
up to Orbits Division to compute exactly how long and in what
direction the remote-controlled rockets should apply their thrust.
As the beams again locked on the wayward satellite, MacIlheny kept
his eyes on the control board. Lights flickered and rippled across the
panel; needles on various meters wavered and jumped. MacIlheny
watched for several seconds before he said:
"Blake! What the hell's wrong there?"
Blake watched a set of oscilloscopes, four green-glowing screens
which traced and re-traced bright yellow-green lines across their
surfaces. His dark brows lowered over his eyes.
"We can't get anything to her, Mac. She's dead. Either that meteor hit
her power supply or else it did more damage than we thought."
"No control, then?"
Blake shook his head. "No control."
MacIlheny frowned. If the remote controls wouldn't work, then it
wouldn't be possible to realign the orbit of the satellite. "Keep trying,"
he said. Then he turned from the control board, went to the phone,
and punched the number of the Orbits Division.
"Orbits Division, Masterson here," said a gruff voice from the other
end.
"This is MacIlheny. How does that orbit on Number Four look now?"
"We've got it, Mac. I'll send the corrective thrust data to the brain as
soon as—"
"Never mind the corrective thrust," MacIlheny interrupted impatiently.
"We can't use it yet. We don't have any positive contact with her;
she's dead—no response to the radio controls."
"You mean you can't get her out of that orbit?" Masterson's voice was
harsh.
"That's exactly what I mean. She's stuck in her new orbit until we find
some other way to change it. It can't be done from here."
There was a pause at the other end, then Masterson said: "Mac, I
hate to say this, but you've got a hot potato on your hands. That
thing's in a cometary orbit!"
"Cometary?"
"That's right. Instead of a normal, near-circular path, she's going in an
elongated ellipse. At perigee, she'll be less than a hundred and fifty
miles above the surface."
"Uh!" MacIlheny felt as though someone had slugged him. If the
satellite went that low, the air resistance would slow her even more
before she broke free again. Each successive passage through the
atmosphere would slow her more and more until she finally fell to
Earth. If she fell into the ocean, that would be bad enough; but if she
hit a populated area....

Fortunately, by that time her velocity would be considerably cut down;


if she were to hit the atmosphere with her present velocity, the shock
wave alone would be disastrous.
"Okay," said MacIlheny at last. "Notify every observatory within sight
range of her orbit! Keep a check on her every foot of the way! We'll
have to send up a drone."
"Right!" There was a subdued click as Masterson hung up.
MacIlheny turned. Blake was standing beside him. "I've got White
Sands on the line, Mac."
MacIlheny flashed an appreciative grin. "Thanks, Blake." He went to
Blake's office and closed the door. In the screen of the visiphone, he
saw the face of Paul Loch, of Commercial Rockets, Inc., White
Sands.
"How's it going, Mac?" Loch asked. "I understand you're having
trouble with Number Four."
"It's worse than just trouble, Paul," MacIlheny told him. He carefully
explained what had happened.
Loch nodded. "Looks rough. What do you figure on doing?"
"How much will it cost me to rent one of your RJ-37 jobs with a drone
robot in it?"
"Fully fueled?" Loch thought a moment, then named a figure.
"That's pretty steep," MacIlheny objected.
Loch spread his hands. "Actually, it's just a guess; but I'm pretty sure
we won't be able to get insurance on her for something like this. What
do you plan to do?"
"I want to take an RJ-37 up there to Number Four and use it to put
the satellite back in a safe orbit. It'll have to be done quickly or we'll
lose the satellite and a few thousand square miles of Earth."
Loch paused again, turning the idea over in his mind. MacIlheny said
nothing; he knew how the mind of Paul Loch worked. Finally, Loch
said: "Tell you what; get the Government to underwrite the insurance,
and we'll give you the RJ-37 at cost. Fair enough?"
MacIlheny nodded. "Get her ready. If the President won't okay the
insurance, we'll have to pay the extra tariff. We absolutely can't afford
to lose that satellite."
"It'll be ready in half an hour," Loch promised as he cut off.
MacIlheny began punching the code numbers for Washington, but the
phone rang before he was through.
Pure luck, MacIlheny thought to himself as the President's face came
onto the screen.
"Evening, Fitz," said the President of the United States.
"Good evening, Mr. President."
"Fitz, I understand you're having a little trouble with one of your
satellites. The Naval Observatory tells me it's in a collision orbit of
some kind. Where will it come down?"
MacIlheny shrugged. "I don't know, sir. It'll depend on how much
resistance it offers to the atmosphere at that altitude, and that will
depend on how badly it was torn up by the meteor."
"I see. What do you propose to do?"
"I'm going to try to get one of Commercial's RJ-37's up there to put
her back on course. I don't want to lose a twelve-million-dollar space
station."
"I can understand that, but—" The President looked off his screen
suddenly as though someone had attracted his attention. "Hold the
line a minute, Fitz," he said. And the screen went blank. MacIlheny
waited. When the President came back, he wore a frown on his face.
"The French government has been informed of what has happened.
They want to know what we intend to do."
"Did you tell them, sir?"
"Not yet, but I will. But there are going to be other governments
interested pretty quickly. Nobody wants something like that falling
down on their heads. We may have to send up a hydrogen bomb and
blow it out of existence if you can't get it back into a safe orbit."
"I know." He paused. "Mr. President, I have an idea. Suppose we load
the RJ-37 with a thermonuclear warhead. If we can't change the orbit
of the satellite, we'll blast her."
A slow grin spread across the face of the Chief Executive. "Very neat,
Fitz; it'll also mean the government will have to underwrite the full
insurance cost of the RJ-37 if you have to detonate the bomb."
MacIlheny grinned back. "It will, at that. But don't worry, Mr. President;
I won't set off the warhead unless I absolutely have to. I want to save
that satellite—not destroy it."
"All right, Fitz. I'll call White Sands and authorize the whole project.
And I'll try to keep the foreign governments happy."
"Fine, sir. We'll know more after her first passage through perigee. If
her orbit changes too much—"
"I'll leave it up to you, Fitz. Good luck."
The special controls for remote operation of the RJ-37 were in a room
just off the main monitors. It was set up just like the control cockpit of
the ship itself, with all the instruments in their proper places. If a pilot
moved a control knob here, the same knob would move the same
amount in the ship. Instead of the heavy paraglass window in the
nose of the ship, the control room in the CGC Building had a wide,
three-dimensional color TV screen. It gave the illusion of actually
being in the ship.
The remote control cockpit was occupied by a Space Service officer
—a Major Hamacher, who had been ordered up from a tour of
inspection at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He was a square-faced, clear-
eyed, prematurely graying man in his early thirties.
MacIlheny was relieved when he saw the major; the officer looked as
though he could do the job. MacIlheny had wanted to use one of the
Company pilots, but the President had vetoed that idea. If the ship
was going to be insured by the government, then piloting it would be
the government's job, too.
It had been nearly an hour, now, since the accident which had
disabled Satellite Number Four. She had been carefully tracked by
several observatories across the face of the Earth, and the figures
had been carefully checked and rechecked.
Lower and lower the satellite dropped, as it spun around Earth in its
elongated orbit. At a hundred and fifty miles altitude, the air is thin—
thinner than the air in any but the very best vacuum tubes. But it is
still dense enough to slow down anything traveling as fast as the
satellite. The slight friction would be enough to alter the course of the
flying moon.
Major Hamacher sat in the control chair, his hat off and his sleeves
rolled up. As soon as the satellite started up again and her new orbit
stabilized, the major would take off the RJ-37 and guide it to Number
Four.
The men waited tensely. MacIlheny gnawed impatiently at the stem of
his pipe, which had gone dead minutes before without his noticing it.
They waited. Very soon, now, Number Four would hit perigee.
It never did.
The observatories saw what happened. As the satellite came lower
and lower, it looked as though it were following a perfectly normal
path. Then, quite suddenly, there was a flare of light from beneath
her! She leaped up again, under the driving thrust of her underjets.
Number Four had—somehow—changed her own orbit before the
tenuous atmosphere could even begin to drag her down.

CHAPTER III
After a few short bursts which lifted the satellite up into a higher orbit,
the jets stopped. The artificial moon went on coasting innocently
around the Earth.
"Well—I'll—be—damned!" said MacIlheny softly. The others, either
silently or verbally, agreed with him.
"Get a reading on that new orbit!" MacIlheny snapped after a
moment. Blake was already on the telephone.
MacIlheny turned to Major Hamacher. "Be ready to take that bird up
as soon as we get orbital readings and bearings. There's something
screwy as hell going on up there, and I want to find out what it is!
Those jets shouldn't be working at all. What could have turned them
on at exactly the right moment?" He was talking more to himself than
to the major, who was busily making last-minute adjustments on the
instruments.
The computations on the new orbit came in, were run through the
computers, and then fed into the autopilot section of the remote
controls for the RJ-37.
"Any time you're ready, Major," MacIlheny said.
The major adjusted his controls, threw a switch, and pressed a stud.
Over two thousand miles away, in White Sands Spaceport, New
Mexico, the atomic-powered, fully armed RJ-37 squirted a tongue of
white-hot flame out of her rocket motors, climbed into the air, and
launched herself toward space.
Over Major Hamacher's shoulder, MacIlheny and Blake watched the
screen that showed the scene from the forward port of the space
rocket.
For a while, there was nothing to see. As the ship gained altitude, it
burst through a layer of low-hanging clouds, then there was nothing
but the blue sky overhead. Gradually, as the air thinned, the sky
became darker, more purplish. Stars began to appear, and finally the
ship was in the blackness of space.
The major's hands glided smoothly over the controls, guiding the ship
along its precalculated orbit, slowly overtaking the runaway satellite.
At first there was nothing to see—only the distant, fixed stars,
glittering like tiny shards of diamond against a spread of blackest
velvet. Then it became apparent that one of the shards was moving
with relationship to the others. It became brighter, bigger. Then it was
no longer a point of light, but a globe of metal floating in the infinite
darkness of space.
Under the careful manipulation of Major Hamacher, the remote-
controlled RJ-37 moved cautiously up to Satellite Number Four. As
the details of the globe came into focus, every man in the room
gasped involuntarily.
"What the hell is that?" asked Blake.
No one answered. It was obvious to everyone there that whatever it
was that had crashed into Number Four and driven it off course, it
was most certainly not a meteorite.

At last, MacIlheny said: "I'll be willing to bet my last dollar that that's a
spaceship of some kind."
From a gaping hole in the side of the satellite, there protruded a long,
cigar-shaped shaft of bluish metal. It looked almost as though
someone had shoved a fat blue cigar halfway into a silver tennis ball.
Major Hamacher said softly: "I wonder what kind of metal that ship is
made of?"
"Yeah," said MacIlheny, "I wonder."
It was a good question. The steel hull of the Number Four had
crumpled and torn like cardboard around the hole where the impact of
the ship had melted and volatalized the metal. But the hull of the alien
spaceship wasn't even dented.
"What now?" asked the major.
"Take the RJ-37 in carefully, and lock on with magnetic grapples,"
MacIlheny ordered.
Blake glanced at him. "What if the pilot or crew of that ship is still
alive?"
"They probably are," MacIlheny said. "But we've got an H-bomb in our
ship; if they try anything funny...."
"What makes you think they're alive?" the major asked as he eased
the ship in.
"Somebody set off the atom jets when Number Four approached
perigee," MacIlheny reminded him.
The RJ-37 approached Number Four closely, then the magnetic
grapples were turned on, and the ship stuck to the hull of the battered
space station with a metallic clank. The RJ-37 was only a few yards
from the edge of the gaping hole that had been torn in the hull of the
satellite. In front of them loomed the queer blue shaft of the alien
ship.
"Okay, hold it," said MacIlheny. "Let's see what happens next. Surely
they felt the jar when the ship landed." Forcing himself to be calm,
MacIlheny struck a match and fired the tobacco in the bowl of his
pipe.

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