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Response to Lilly on politics of ugly


A diagram of noses, from Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India

Lilly, thanks for your great post on the politics of ugliness. This should be in the Response field, but my blogging skills are rusting; I couldnt get the images to load properly there. 18th and 19th century doctors, anthropologists, and others were obsessed with noses, especially of the “savage” world. And in the metropole, “intelligent” women were often synonymous with “ugly,” and there were medical theories that linked the two by chains of necessary entailment. And you could still see that in modern science (as for example the famous comments about Rosalind Franklin made by Watson and Crick; jokes about her tweedy clothes and supposed frumpiness effectively distracted people from the fact that she had the helix structure figured out before they did, according to some biographers).

Sianne Ngai’s work on ugly/aesthetics looks interesting; and Joanna Russ has, somewhere, a great essay on horror and gross stuff .. which is further afield, but you’ve opened up a great area of discussion for feminists in any field.

 

 

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