273

‘Because it is beautiful’
New feminist perspectives on beauty FT
Feminist Theory
Copyright © 2006
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
vol. 7(2): 273–282.
1464–7001
DOI: 10.1177/1464700106064424
Rita Felski University of Virginia http://fty.sagepub.com

Bonnie Adrian, Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal
Industry. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. 297 pp. ISBN
0–520–23834–6 (pbk)
Paula Black, The Beauty Industry: Gender, Culture, Pleasure. New York and London:
Routledge, 2004. 214 pp. ISBN 0–415–32157–3 (pbk)
Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture. New York
and London: Routledge, 2005. 180 pp. ISBN 0–415–97402-X (pbk)
Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. New
York and London: Routledge, 2005. 206 pp. ISBN 0–415–35183–9 (pbk)
Rebecca Popenoe, Feeding Desire: Fatness, Beauty, and Sexuality among a Saharan
People. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. 230 pp. ISBN 0–415–28096–6 (pbk)
Linda Scott, Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism. New York: Palgrave,
2005. 359 pp. ISBN 1–4039–6686–9 (hbk)

Feminist approaches to beauty have often taken the form of a calculus –

variable in its details, uncompromising in its ambitions – that converts
manifest signs of pleasure into irrefutable evidence of female pain. The
rationale for this negative hermeneutics is to expose the deep structures
that underlie captivating surfaces, to show that fleeting experiences of
enchantment and delight spring from long-standing histories of suffering
and subordination. The history and philosophy of art contains countless
testimonies to the ineffable nature of beauty, as a quality that eludes our
cognitive frameworks and resists conceptual framing. Feminists have been
eager to debunk such claims, to reveal the worldliness of the otherworldly,
the politics of the ostensibly apolitical, and thereby to expose the ugly
underside of beauty.
One question raised by this strategy is whether all manifestations of
beauty can be sufficiently accounted for in this way. Is every experience of
beauty also a source of harm? Is beauty intrinsically and inevitably wrong?
If not, what might feminists say about such counter-instances? Can
feminism only remain true to itself by insisting on the primacy of female
suffering? Or is there a place in feminist thought for what we might call a
positive aesthetic, an affirmation, however conditional, of the value of
beauty and aesthetic pleasure? And if so, what is the nature of that
274 Feminist Theory 7(2)

pleasure? Is it always already political (and what precise work is the adjec-
tive ‘political’ doing in this context)? And is it always possible to translate
every experience of beauty into precise calculations of either social benefit
or social harm?
Two recent books by Sheila Jeffreys and Linda Scott offer radically
diverging perspectives on such questions. Both are works of polemic that
seek to reach a general as well as academic audience; both position their
authors as embattled outsiders engaged in heroic struggle against a feminist
orthodoxy hostile to any expression of dissent. Each author, however,
conceives of this hegemonic feminism in entirely antithetical terms.
Jeffreys’s book will offer few surprises to those who know her work,
offering a forcefully argued indictment of beauty as a primary source of
women’s oppression. Encompassing themes previously canvassed by
Andrea Dworkin, Naomi Wolf, Sandra Bartky, Susan Bordo, and others, it
pushes them further to engage such recent manifestations of the cultural
Zeitgeist as pole-dancing, Brazilian waxing, and labiaplasty. In a nice
subversion of First World/Third World binaries, Jeffreys proposes that
current United Nations campaigns against non-Western cultural practices
harmful to women be turned around and applied to Western culture itself.
Make-up, fashion, high heels, shaving, and cosmetic surgery should all be
classified as ‘harmful cultural practices’ dangerous to women’s physical
and emotional health and, depending on their degree of severity, be subject
to either legal sanction or explicit censure.
One attractive feature of Jeffreys’s book is its forthright and unapologetic
defence of positions that the author knows to be unpopular. It seems super-
fluous to respond, therefore, by reiterating one more time feminist counter-
arguments that the author herself knows, discusses, and rejects. On a
methodological level, however, it must be said that the force of her case is
weakened by its circular and self-confirming logic. In weighing up the costs
of beauty, Jeffreys is anxious to document every perceived instance of
female harm and to deny every perceived instance of female pleasure.
When women describe their discomfort around fashion and beauty, they
are treated as reliable native informants; when they testify to their enjoy-
ment, their words are read symptomatically and diagnosed as clear-cut
evidence of misrecognition and self-deception. A similar dichotomy
defines the book’s engagement with questions of female agency. While
Jeffreys is surely right to criticize an often naïvely worded rhetoric of free
choice, her view of female consciousness as entirely determined by patri-
archal structures would render her own standpoint impossible. As it turns
out, Jeffreys allows for the exercise of agency whenever other women’s
actions and preferences coincide with her own. Hence Jeffreys’s decision
to stop dyeing her hair is portrayed as an authentic choice, whereas another
woman’s decision to reach for a bottle of Clairol can only be a pseudo-
choice steered by larger forces beyond her grasp and control. There is
something troubling, both ethically and politically, about a view that would
deny any genuine insight or agency to those with whom one disagrees.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Beauty and Misogyny is its silence
about male beauty (with the exception, that is, of its diagnosis of the
 Felski: Review article 275

purported pathologies of male-to-female transvestites and transsexuals and

the iniquities of ‘gay fashion designers’). While Jeffreys is impressively up-
to-date in documenting the latest excesses and extravagances of the female
beauty industry, she studiously ignores the interpellation of men as
consumers of fashion and beauty products, the sexualization of the male
body in the mainstream media and advertising, and the growing evidence
of body dysphoria and anxiety about physical appearance among young
men. No doubt such material would do significant damage to her descrip-
tion of men as despotic patriarchs able to manipulate every aspect of
women’s lives at whim. Her ability to make sense of the current cultural
landscape and to offer plausible explanations for women’s continuing
investment in beauty is also weakened by an unwillingness to explore its
relationship to female sexual pleasure, whether heterosexual, lesbian, or
auto-erotic. ‘Femininity’, Jeffreys states emphatically against what would
appear to be massive evidence to the contrary, ‘is not a form of sexual
fantasy for women’ (p. 46).
Whereas Jeffreys fulminates against the liberal and postmodern feminists
who have taken over the academy, Linda Scott is equally adamant that it
is Jeffreys and her ilk who have triumphed. Fresh Lipstick is primarily a
work of US cultural history that focuses on key episodes in the feminist
engagement with beauty and fashion ranging from Susan B. Anthony to
Gloria Steinem. In its heavy reliance on the biographies of individual
women, especially successful female entrepreneurs who marketed beauty
products to other women, Scott’s book clearly slots into a liberal feminist
tradition. (Her rendering of Marxist aesthetic theory is especially unfortu-
nate.) Nevertheless, Scott does a good job of delineating the Puritan origins
of American feminist thought, elucidating the class and race bias of much
feminist anti-fashion ideology, and showing how popular women’s maga-
zines played an important role in disseminating progressive, though not
radical, feminist ideas.
Scott threads into this historical argument a theoretical polemic against
contemporary feminism, claiming that it persists in alienating the vast
majority of women through its anti-beauty, anti-fashion ideology. Portray-
ing women as dupes of the patriarchy and collaborators in their own
oppression, feminists patronize those for whom they claim to speak, even
as they over-simplify and caricature the many-layered meanings of fashion
and beauty. Yet even as Scott presents herself as an iconoclast daring to
think what no feminist has thought before, she advances ideas that have
been commonplace, even banal, in feminist cultural studies for at least two
decades. Hence we are told, as if for the first time, that there is no such
thing as ‘natural’ beauty; that realism is a questionable criterion by which
to evaluate media content; that images need to be interpreted in their
historical context; that feminism itself is thoroughly implicated in fashion,
style, and the market.
Going over this familiar territory might be excusable in terms of genre
and readership, given that Fresh Lipstick has ambitions to speak to a
broader audience with little knowledge of debates in feminist media and
cultural studies. However, the silence about these debates in the endnotes,
276 Feminist Theory 7(2)

along with Scott’s repeated insistence that feminist perspectives on fashion

have remained static since the 1970s, suggests an unfortunate failure to do
her homework. Also misleading is the attempt to frame the history of
fashion as a clear-cut conflict between ordinary women and academic
feminism, a dichotomy guaranteed to fan the flames of the US culture wars,
with their frequent portrayal of feminist academics as pleasure-hating, out-
of-touch elitists. In fact, many of the influential anti-beauty critics she cites,
such as Naomi Wolf, Gloria Steinem, and Susan Faludi, are journalists and
popular authors rather than academics. If Scott had read more widely in
academic feminism, especially in cultural and media studies, she would
have seen virtually all her ideas pre-empted in the arguments of Elizabeth
Wilson, Joanne Hollows, Lisa Tickner, Liesbet van Zoonen, Debra Gimlin,
Jennifer Craik, Kathy Peiss, Angie McRobbie and many others. Admittedly,
most of these writers are not American, yet their work is certainly known
and discussed in US academic circles. What Scott’s work highlights,
perhaps, is a notable disjuncture between the frameworks of US women’s
studies and feminist cultural studies, and, in some cases at least, the lack
of dialogue between them.
Another new book on beauty more cognizant of the history of feminist
cultural studies is Paula Black’s The Beauty Industry: Gender, Culture,
Pleasure. Black’s title is a tad misleading insofar as her focus is not on the
beauty industry in its entirety but the localized space of the beauty salon.
Through a blend of sociological theory and ethnographic investigation
conducted in England, Black seeks to explain why women visit beauty
salons and the functions they serve. Her aim, she writes, is to apply a socio-
logical analysis that neither glamorizes beauty shop clients ‘as pleasure-
seeking liberated individuals, nor views them as over-determined ciphers
pushed along by social forces beyond their understanding’ (p. 188).
Black divides the treatments offered by salons into four main types:
health treatments, pampering, routine grooming, and corrective treatments.
She observes that notions of beauty play a minimal role in the narratives
of the salon clients, who commonly invoke such notions as ‘time for
myself’, escape, relaxation, luxury, or relief from stress. The beauty salon,
she observes, is a highly feminized and therapeutic space that is often
viewed with indifference or incomprehension by husbands and male
partners. Customers show few signs of internalizing media beauty stan-
dards and often comment sceptically on the unrealistic nature of such stan-
dards; instead, they rationalize their beauty salon visits through their use
of such phrases as ‘making the best of myself’. The Beauty Industry is a
useful addition to a strand of feminist scholarship that has challenged
sweeping claims about the gender politics of beauty by engaging in detailed
ethnographic, historical, or empirical investigation. (Other examples
include Sarah Banet-Weiser’s [1999] and Maxine Craig’s [2002] important
work on beauty contests.) Black persuasively deploys Bourdieu’s idea of
habitus to show how the space of the salon reproduces certain norms of
femininity, while also allowing women to negotiate varying and often
conflictual relationships to such norms. Moving beyond thick description
to broader theoretical argument, she shows how the role of the beauty salon
 Felski: Review article 277

is being altered and expanded by the aestheticization of the workplace and

the expansion of therapeutic concepts of healthiness and well-being.
Black ends her book with the provocative claim that ‘the world of the
beauty salon is not about beauty’ (p. 190). The realm of aesthetics, she
suggests, is of interest only insofar as it can be translated into categories of
gender, race, class or sexuality. To my mind, such a claim exposes the
limits of a sociological method that can only conceive of aesthetic experi-
ence in instrumental and functionalist terms. It also highlights the poten-
tial limits of ethnographic research. That interviewees do not invoke the
concept of beauty when talking to a sociologist does not justify the
conclusion that they are unaware of beauty; perhaps their perceptions are
not easily translatable into the conventions and idioms of their local
speech community. (In most parts of the UK, anyone who rhapsodized
about beauty in everyday conversation would be viewed as pretentious,
eccentric or worse.) Surely the pleasure of visiting a beauty salon is not
entirely unrelated to the sensuous rhythms of a massage, the scarlet glint
of a perfectly painted nail, the heady aroma of perfumes and richly scented
lotions. Such experiences are shaped by the pressures of gender and race
and class and sexuality, but they are also aesthetic experiences; to neglect
the visual and the tactile, to overlook the seductive interplay of colour and
pattern and form, is to risk losing sight of why beauty matters at all.
Feminist perspectives on beauty, it appears, often have much to do with
the discipline or methodological framework within which a scholar is
situated. What might anthropology add to the mix? Bonnie Adrian’s
Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal
Industry is a fascinating contribution to the project of a cross-cultural
aesthetics and debates over gender and globalization. On a visit to Taipei,
Adrian was struck by a gigantic bridal photograph displayed in a friend’s
bedroom that bore no physical similarity at all to the person she knew. Her
puzzled queries elicited the information that such photographs are oblig-
atory purchases for marrying couples, taken weeks or months in advance
of the actual wedding, and that they are exorbitantly expensive, requiring
the bride to undergo a gruelling three-hour make-up and hair-styling
session before a full-day professional photo shoot. The end result of this
ordeal is an elaborate portfolio of photographs of the betrothed couple,
with the bride posing in different wedding dresses and elaborate evening
gowns, her appearance transformed – thanks to a thickly encrusted mask
of make-up, wigs or hair extensions, breast and hip padding, specialized
lighting, and extensive retouching – into the flawless, unreal, glamour of a
supermodel or celebrity. In the best tradition of anthropological research,
Adrian seeks to tease apart the threads of a single phenomenon, in the hope
that these variegated threads will lead her deeper into the fabric of a
culture.
What she finds is that it is difficult to make sense of the ubiquity of
Taiwanese bridal photography via the frameworks of cultural imperialism
or feminist notions of objectification and the male gaze. On the one hand,
such images undeniably bear witness to a process of Westernization, both
in terms of their overt content – ornate white wedding gowns, medieval
278 Feminist Theory 7(2)

castle backdrops, pasted-on snippets of English prose – and their patent

subscription to Western notions of individualism and romantic love. Yet
Adrian shows that the Taiwanese are not simply passive consumers of
Western ideas, but active participants in the globalization process, appro-
priating media symbols and putting them to their own specific use. Hence
the fantasy worlds of bridal photography, she notes, bear virtually no
relationship to the daily lives of most Taiwanese couples, which continue
to be heavily scripted by the claims of family and kin. Such pictures are
symbols of status rather than windows into a way of life; free-floating signs
rather than reflections of deeper selves. She also takes issue with Western
feminist claims that the dissemination of media images of flawless
femininity must invariably engender profound feelings of inadequacy
among ordinary women. The very artificiality of Taiwanese bridal photog-
raphy, she notes, makes it clear to everyone involved that flawless beauty
is an expensive, elaborate, and time-consuming artifice impossible to
replicate outside a photo studio. ‘Experiencing first-hand what goes into
bridal beautification, women regard mass media beauty standards as so
alien as to be inapplicable to everyday life’ (p. 155). The bridal photograph
is both a poignant memorialization of a woman’s one-time achievement of
such beauty and a graphic reminder of its fundamental unreality.
Adrian comments on the puzzled response that her questions about
bridal photographs elicited among her Taiwanese friends, their struggle to
explain what seemed to them an utterly self-evident practice. Fellow
anthropologist Rebecca Popenoe encounters a similar bewilderment among
the Azawagh Arabs of Niger when she asks them why they prize a feminine
ideal of extreme fatness. ‘Because it is beautiful’ is the response she
constantly hears. What these anthropological studies underscore is that
ideals of beauty vary dramatically across cultures, yet that the lure of
beauty seems inescapable. Attentive to the subtle particularities of milieu
and context, yet eschewing functionalist explanations that would view
aesthetics as a mere displacement of material realities or power relations,
their authors seek to explain why beauty matters.
Feeding Desire, based on Popenoe’s fieldwork in an Arab village and the
desert beyond, describes a culture that fattens its women to the point of
virtual immobility. From the age of six, girls are encouraged, and in some
cases forced, to gulp down huge portions of milk and grain on a daily basis.
The goal of such feeding is to achieve a particular body ideal – expansive
thighs, rolls of belly fat, stretch marks – that is seen as sexually desirable.
Because such extreme fattening renders a woman unable to work, it is a
practice increasingly confined to wealthy families able to hire lower-status
servants to carry out chores. Self-fattening is both the main form of
women’s work and a sign of their freedom from work.
Popenoe positions this tribal practice in a larger context of models of
kinship, Islamic beliefs, nomadic culture, and the social organization of
Azawagh Arab life. She shows that it is linked, above all, to a radically
bipolar view of men and women as profoundly different kinds of persons.
Female fatness is highly desired because it highlights physical differences
between the sexes that feed into a larger symbolic and spiritual framework
 Felski: Review article 279

organized around dualities of open versus closed, hot versus cold, dry
versus wet, mobile versus immobile. Through her evocative descriptions
of the internal logic, coherence and richness of the Azawagh Arab belief
system, Popenoe succeeds in defamiliarizing Western assumptions about
gender that only inspire expressions of incredulity, disbelief, and mirth
among her informants. Rejecting the view that beauty ideals are unilater-
ally imposed on women by men, she argues that these ideals are actively
embraced by both sexes as a means to preserving the identity, well-being,
and honour of the individual and the tribe.
How does the meaning of female beauty change when entire groups of
women are precluded by racist ideology from being seen as beautiful?
Janell Hobson’s Venus in the Dark approaches this question via the
emblematic figure of Sara Baartman, the famous ‘Hottentot Venus’ who was
exhibited in England and France in the early 19th century and whose
skeleton, preserved genitalia, and brain remained in the Musée de
L’Homme until 2002, when they were returned to South Africa for ritual
burial. Detailing the European obsession with Baartman’s buttocks and
genitalia, Hobson argues that this history permeates the legacy of visual
representations of black women’s bodies, informing their association with
sexuality, deviance and the grotesque. After situating the Baartman exhi-
bition in its historical milieu and detailing the various public reactions it
inspired, Hobson shows how black female writers and artists such as
Suzan-Lori Parks and Renée Cox engage the mythology of the Hottentot
Venus to challenge the tradition of iconography she embodies.
In the latter half of her book, Hobson reflects more generally on the
history of representations of the black female body, from Josephine Baker
to Janet Jackson. A chapter entitled ‘The “Batty” Politic’ uses a colloquial
Jamaican term for the behind to explore its association with savagery and
lewdness, an association that is never fully effaced, she suggests, even in
the knowing and ironic self-presentation of Baker or Grace Jones. While
addressing both art and popular culture, Hobson is clearly more sanguine
about the emancipatory potential of the former, finding evidence of a
counter-aesthetic of the black female body in the work of photographer
Carrie Mae Weems, film-maker Julie Dash, and the New York dance
troupe Urban Bush Women. In the context of a history that has decreed
black women to be inherently non-beautiful, the reclamation of beauty
and desirability, she suggests, can be a subversive act. Venus in the Dark
thus further complicates mainstream feminist assumptions about the
nefariousness of beauty, even as some of the terms used by Hobson –
notably ‘black feminist aesthetic’ – would have benefited from further
elucidation.
This recent feminist cluster of books on beauty – part of a wave that is
still some way from cresting – suggests a new willingness to engage the
language of aesthetics in a spirit that is not just deflationary or demystify-
ing. Even if the terms of debate are often defined in ways that feminists
find problematic – it is remarkable how much new work on aesthetics still
fails to acknowledge gender – it is becoming clear that beauty is not about
to disappear any time soon, that its potency is not so easily vanquished by
280 Feminist Theory 7(2)

negative critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion. Moreover, while

particular beauty practices and ideals may strike us as problematic, the
disappearance of beauty from the world is hardly a goal that most femi-
nists would endorse. Several years ago, Wendy Steiner (2001) observed that
the feminist distrust of beauty risked replicating the misogynist ideology
of much modernist aesthetics. Priding themselves on their irony, negativ-
ity and cool sensibility, male avant-garde artists often equated women and
beauty in order to reject them both. ‘Embarrassed by our yearning for
beauty’, writes Steiner, ‘we demean it as something tawdry, self-indulgent,
or sentimental’ (p. 32).
Yet there is a noticeable lacuna in feminist discussions of beauty, both
critical and celebratory. Such discussions have zeroed in on the female
body, on the ways in which women perceive themselves, or are perceived
by others, as more or less beautiful. Yet women’s association with beauty
also extends to a long history of decorating and beautifying their surround-
ings. Women have created beauty not just in themselves but in the world.
Alice Walker and bell hooks have written eloquently on the aesthetics of
everyday life, showing how African-American women have achieved
extraordinary expressions of beauty and creativity in their homes under
cramped and impoverished circumstances (Walker, 1983; hooks, 1990). Yet
hooks creates a dichotomy between genuine aesthetic value and capitalism
that strikes me as untenable; increasingly, the beautification of the home is
mediated by consumer culture, which is largely responsible for the democ-
ratization of luxury and the widespread dissemination of sophisticated
design.
The growing importance of domestic aesthetics to the cultural imaginary
is everywhere in evidence: the iconic role of Martha Stewart in the United
States; the plethora of home makeover shows on television networks; the
rapid proliferation of home-decorating magazines catering to numerous
niche markets; the sprouting of ever more home-supply and decorating
warehouses in the suburbs. No doubt such phenomena reveal much about
class and gentrification, about shifting – or stagnant – notions of gender,
and about cocooning as a retreat from the public world; but they also speak
to a desire for beauty in the home and in daily life. Virginia Postrel’s The
Substance of Style (2003) will not find favour with feminist scholars, given
its libertarian politics and its defence of unbridled consumerism, yet
Postrel is one of the few authors to seriously engage the aesthetic dimen-
sion of consumer culture without resorting to Frankfurt School patrician
pessimism or postmodern clichés about simulation and spectacle. We
sorely need more feminist engagement with such issues, given that the
question of beauty is also closely tied to domestic aesthetics and the sexual
politics of taste (Sparke, 1995).
The trajectory of feminist work on beauty has shown a distinct (though
far from unanimous) shift from the rhetoric of victimization and oppres-
sion to an alternative language of empowerment and resistance. Cultural
forms whose meanings once seemed entirely self-evident – cosmetics and
cosmetic surgery, beauty pageants and bridal photography – are now being
subject to detailed exegesis and ethnographic research; what once spoke of
 Felski: Review article 281

female subjugation is being reinterpreted as a site of real, if constrained,

female agency. Such acts of redescription allow us to see that cultural
phenomena may have widely variant meanings, that the politics of aesthet-
ics is far from being predetermined or given in advance.
Yet even as we acknowledge the inescapable political dimensions of
beauty and recognize that our aesthetic judgements are always impure, it
is far from clear that every aesthetic experience can be precisely calibrated
in terms of its political consequences and effects. Indeed, it is worth asking
if feminism surrenders too much by assuming that beauty can only be
validated when it is socially useful, that aesthetic pleasure is only legiti-
mate insofar as it can be converted into the currency of political emanci-
pation. This is to freeze the dialectic of aesthetics and politics into the
domination of aesthetics by politics: a reduction of means to ends that
leaves no room for pleasure in its own right. Even as we acknowledge the
complex material histories of aesthetic representations, we would do well
to keep a certain distance from such a utilitarian and instrumental model
of culture. Eleanor Hartney writes in the important feminist collection
Beauty Matters:
Why does beauty matter? Beauty flies in the face of a puritanical utilitarianism.
It defies the reductiveness of both the political left and the political right in their
efforts to bend it to a mission. Beauty subverts dogma by activating the realm of
fantasy and imagination. It reminds us that the enjoyment of mere pleasure is an
important element of our humanity. And it knits the mind and body together at
a time when they seem all too easily divided. (Hartney, 2000: xv)
Even as images of beauty, like all cultural artefacts, broadcast a variety
of socio-political meanings, there is an irreducible aspect of aesthetic
experience that cannot be fully encapsulated in such terms. It is an element
only inadequately captured in terms like wonder, or enchantment, or
aesthetic delight; a pleasure in the expressive capacities of shape and form,
texture and pattern that often arises in everyday encounters with texts and
objects and not just in the pristine space of the museum. (Contemporary
aesthetic theory, I believe, has been led astray by its conflation of the
aesthetic with the artistic and its subsequent, virtually exclusive, focus on
the sphere of high art.) The challenge for feminism is to rein back its
compulsion to immediately translate aesthetic surfaces into political
depths; or rather, to keep both surface and depth in the mind’s eye, teasing
apart the multifarious socio-political meanings of texts while also crafting
richer and thicker descriptions of aesthetic experience. Only then can we
continue to reckon the political costs of being beautiful while also doing
justice to the reasons why all of us, women included, continue to seek out
and take solace in beauty.

References
Banet-Weiser, Sarah (1999) The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty
Pageants and National Identity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Craig, Maxine (2002) Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the
Politics of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
282 Feminist Theory 7(2)

Hartney, Eleanor (2000) ‘Foreword’, pp. xiii–xv in Peg Zeglin Brand (ed.)
Beauty Matters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
hooks, bell (1990) ‘An Aesthetics of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional’,
pp. 103–13 in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South
End Press.
Postrel, Virginia (2003) The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic
Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. New York:
Harper Collins.
Sparke, Penny (1995) As Long as it’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste.
London: Harper Collins.
Steiner, Wendy (2001) Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in
Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Free Press.
Walker, Alice (1983) ‘In Search of our Mother’s Gardens’, pp. 231–43 in In
Search of our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich.
Rita Felski is Professor of English and Chair of Comparative Literature at the
University of Virginia and the author of Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, The
Gender of Modernity, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture,
and Literature After Feminism. She is currently completing a Blackwell’s
manifesto on ‘Uses of Literature’.
Address: English Department, Bryan Hall, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, VA 22904–4121, USA. Email: [email protected]