Uglification: Embracing "the ugly" as a vehicle for healing


Tori Dudys, University of Ottawa

Nickolas Hrynyk notes in the previous abstract that internalized queerphobia is deeply rooted in internalized discourses of ugliness. Given centuries of ableism, racism, colonialism, queerphobia, transphobia, and sexism, that which is deemed ugly is conflated with disability, racialization, gender nonconformity, and femininity. And we are aware that both queer and cishet people enact violence on the most marginalized queers because of these cultural evaluations of “ugly.” Drawing from feminist, disability, and critical race studies scholars’ theorizations of the transformative power of ugly (Mingus 2011; Howard 2018; Henry 2020), I posit that divesting in beauty and embracing “the ugly” can be one way in which the queer community can begin to heal and doing so could be a path towards reducing violence in the physical sense and the anticipatory sense. This is not to say that radical shifts in legal, economic, medical, and educational realms are not needed. They are desperately needed. For the purpose of this paper, however, I concern myself with potential interpersonal and intrapersonal transformation that embracing the “magnificence” of ugly can and does offer (Mingus 2011). Some aesthetics scholars note the potential that ugliness has to elicit progress because of its fluidity, as opposed to the fixed state of beauty, typically viewed in contrast to ugliness (e.g. Eco 2007). However, scholars within different critical fields of study argue for the importance of recognizing the value in ugliness for ugliness’ sake. Critical disability activist and scholar Mia Mingus (2011), does some of this transformational thinking. She explains that a turn towards the ugly can help shed the confines that queerphobic settler colonialism has placed on colonized communities and tries to remove the stigma from ugliness by equating it with “magnificence.” The concept is that our (supposed) ugly feelings (e.g. anger) (see Ngai 2005), ugly bodies (e.g. scares, cellulite, fat) (see Ward 2020), ugly thoughts (e.g. resentment) (see Halberstam 1993), and so on, are positive in their own right, not simply transformational because they spark “beautiful” potentials. With roots in ableism, racism, and queerphobia, the concept of ugliness (and its many related terms) must be studied through a decolonial and anti-oppressive lens. To argue for a “turn to the ugly” as a means of healing from queer violence, I put two works in conversation with each other, Yetta Howard’s (2018) book Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground and Alvin J. Henry’s (2020) monograph Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel. These texts shed light on how turning towards the ugly might help to strip away colonial (and queerphobic) subjectivity to leave room for a rebuilding of the self. Howard and Henry similarly argue for the stripping of one’s subjectivity in order to heal from colonial, queerphobic, and patriarchal violence. Doing so allows one to reformulate the self outside of settler colonial constructs: patriarchy, queerphobia, racism, sexism. Through the use of art analysis (novels, poetry, and film), Howard and Henry develop theories for a deconstruction of self, one that might be harnessed on a practical level by queer people, Black people, and other marginalized individuals. Returning to Alok Vaid-Menon (see Orr and Mastrorillo’s abstract), Vaid-Menon (in Calahan and Zachary 2021) notes that “My beauty will still be here when I’m gone.” Vaid-Menon’s beauty is absolutely legendary and will continue to inspire people long after they are gone. I also wonder if all the possible generative ugly legacies that maybe all of us leave behind should be honoured as well. As the concluding presentation of a panel on (anticipating) violence and queerphobic violence, both past and present, this paper ultimately raises a discussion about how theoretical contributions to the topic of ugliness might be used to reframe the way queer people navigate healing from different forms of (internalized) oppression.

This paper will be presented at the following session: