Beautyism as ableist eugenics and the mystique of “choice feminism.” (original) (raw)

2022, BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

I recently came across this article on Vice.com asking filmmakers to “stop making hot actors play normal people” (linked). The author indicts filmmakers for casting too few “normal” people. I think that this is a much-needed critique, but it lacks philosophical nuance, which I intend to provide here. My analysis will explore the harms of mainstream beauty culture and the related concept of beautyism (i.e., prejudice in favor of ‘beautiful’ people and against ‘ugly’ people), and then attempt to explain why so few philosophers, even in feminist philosophy where one would expect to find such critiques, seem to care about these harms. I argue that beauty culture is part of a broader eugenics regime that stigmatizes and seeks to eliminate disabilities and disabilized traits (queerness, Blackness, etc.), leading to an increasingly homogenous population of ‘normals.’ I invoke Rosemarie Garland’s concept of the “normate” – “the corporeal incarnation of [Western] culture's collective, unmarked, normative characteristics” – to illustrate how Blackness, queerness, gender-variance, disability, and ugliness are conflated and co-constructed as impairments to be ‘cured,’ eliminated, and managed under the modern eugenics regime. Finally, I claim that “choice feminism” – the view that women should “embrace the opportunities they have in life and to see the choices they make as justified and always politically acceptable” – normalizes beautyism by treating body-modification (particularly in service to a normate aesthetic) as a personal choice with no biopolitical ramifications. Choice feminism thus obfuscates the reality of compulsory able-bodied beauty.