S. Chen, Hannah McCann
Feminist approaches to beauty can largely be understood along two lines: a major strand that emphasizes the punishing and harmful aspects of beauty practices; and a more minor strand that attempts to reclaim beauty practices via appeals to agency. As queer feminists working on research related to beauty we have been struck by this impasse, and have found ourselves both agreeing with the defence of beauty practices and feeling uneasy about the implications of this defence. In this paper we draw on autoethnographic reflections, which detail our histories of engagement with beauty practices, as a source for critically analysing the feminist defence of beauty. We identify three discursive tendencies in the defence of beauty: an emphasis on agency, claims that the spectacular is radical, and an appeal to queer beauty as exceptional. Drawing on our autoethnographic reflections, we critique these tendencies and what they miss in relation to lived experiences of beauty practices. We argue that what counts as agentic, spectacular, and exceptional is slippery, and that relying on these frameworks for the defence of beauty misses much of the texture of feminist ambivalence that reflects the reality of beauty practices in everyday life.