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‘Expanding the idea of beauty’ without going all the way to BBW.

By RACHEL SHTEIR [Chronicle of Higher Education] – I’m all for expanding the idea of beauty, so long as it means that I can read fewer sentences that begin with the words “according to sociological studies” and more Chekhov. For while Freud wrote compellingly of the pleasure people take in looking at beauty, there is no modern writer who untangles its comic and disastrous effects better than the playwright. His Uncle Vanya revolves around the beautiful, idle, unhappy Yelena, who transfixes all the characters, including Vanya, whose dacha she is visiting. At the end of the drama, Sonya, the unattractive daughter of a rich old bore, an academic in fact, who is married to Yelena, longs for a beautiful afterlife. The unbeautiful girl dreams of beauty, while the beautiful girl seems to mourn her inability to feel.

At least LaFrance refreshingly suggests that a smile can transform a less-beautiful person into a beautiful one, which goes some way toward evoking what the critic Denis Donoghue calls beauty’s “recalcitrance.”

Those qualms aside, does the new beauty studies really add that much to the questions feminist studies has already raised? The idea that standards of beauty harm women dates back to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women and re-emerged forcefully in the 20th century…

But then came third-wave feminists, who stressed that beauty ideals need not oppress: You could, if you chose, look like (or be) a beauty queen, a prostitute, or a porn star. In 1997, Jan Breslauer, a former professor of feminist theory at Yale Divinity School, wrote about her breast augmentation for Playboy—albeit to much outrage and ridicule. Meanwhile, historians such as Kathy Peiss produced books like Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (Metropolitan Books, 1998), which, though acknowledging that the beauty industry might promote the idea that looks could always be improved upon through its potions and creams, argued that it helped sustain first-generation American female entrepreneurs. When my first book, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show (Oxford University Press), came out, in 2004, second-wave feminists attacked me for romanticizing strippers’ lives; third-wave feminists either blasted me for not celebrating strippers enough—or wanted my blessing for starting their own burlesque troupes, which, nearly all of them claimed, was empowering.

By 2010 the zeitgeist had clearly shifted…

Continued at the Chronicle of Higher Education | More Chronicle & Notices.

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