BeautY and ugliness

On April 15, we wrap up our Feminisms Unbound season with a vital conversation: How do beauty and ugliness function as tools of power, settler-colonial logic, and even resistance?

Is beauty the enemy of feminism? Feminists have examined the political economy of beauty; the ways beauty is commodified in gendered regimes of accumulation; the ways beauty furthers ethnonationalist, settler colonial, and imperialist projects; the embodied practice of creating and sustaining beauty; and the functions of beauty as a political concept, or tool of theorizing crisis conditions. Feminist theorists have also engaged ugliness as a settler colonial logic, a spatial imaginary, a tactic of othering, or even a radical ethic of liberation. This panel examines ways of exploring beauty and ugliness through feminist and queer theory, art, and activism, and considers the ways beauty and ugliness can form a bridge to conceptualizing a more just world.

Panelists:

Caleb Luna

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Studies at UC Santa Barbara

Caleb Luna is an Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara and a former UC President’s and Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the same department.

 They are the bestselling author of REVENGE BODY (Nomadic Press, 2022), an award-winning educator and scholar and co-host of the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back. Publishing, performing and teaching across genre and medium, Caleb's cultural work examines race size sexuality and disability in media and culture. Ultimately, they are interested in engaging embodied difference as a generative resource toward fatter understandings of collective freedom.

Caleb holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Their writing can be found in the journals Fat Studies and Performance Matters, the anthologies Queer Nightlife and Fat and Queer and more.

Ingrid Banks

Associate Professor of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara

Ingrid Banks is Associate Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women's Consciousness (New York University Press, 2000). Dr. Banks has published articles and book chapters in the following: Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/Body Politics in Africana Communities; Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire; Feminist Frontiers (Eleventh Edition); Feminist Teacher; Journal of Women’s History; Journal of Family Theory & Review; and Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair. Her commentary has appeared in a number of media outlets, including The New York Times, New York Newsday, Chronicle of Higher Education, Air America, the BBC, The Guardian (London), The Root.com, CNN.com, and Black Agenda Report, to name a few. Dr. Banks is currently completing her forthcoming book, Protective Style, that examines contemporary black beauty salon culture and more.

Mimi Thi Nguyen

Professor of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College

Mimi Nguyen’s research questions emerge from the theoretical and structural antagonisms between ethnic studies and transnational feminist theories on the one hand, and liberal and neoliberal political philosophies and institutional imperatives on the other. My engagement with ethnic studies and transnational feminist cultural studies is as methods for yielding insights about historico-philosophical concepts and ontological distinctions of the human through specific studies, for instance, of labor and capital, racial liberalism, aesthetics, war and empire. That is, I understand these fields to be defined not by their objects of scholarly inquiry, but by their arguments.

Tulasi Srinivas

Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Transnational Studies at Emerson College

Tulasi Srinivas, Professor of Anthropology, Religion and Transnational Studies, Marlboro Institute, is a recognized scholar of religion and ecology with a focus on climate justice.

Tulasi Srinivas is Professor of Anthropology, Religion and Transnational Studies at The Marlboro Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. Srinivas is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Indian Sociological Society.

Srinivas research focuses on comparative ethics and Hinduism. Her books explore themes such as wonder, beauty and grace through ethnographic explorations and her recent work considers climate justice and religious ecology in a post colonial context through the story of water in her hometown of Bangalore, India.

Srinivas is an award-winning teacher, most recently the 2015 Helaine and Stanley Miller awardee for teaching excellence at Emerson College.

Moderated by Gowri Vijayakumar of Brandeis University