Skin and Bone: Beauty as Critical Praxis

Beauty repeatedly brings us face-to-face with our own powers to create, we know where and how to locate those powers when a situation of injustice call on us to create.

If ever there were a time, a place, a moment, a movement for the transformative power of beauty, that time is now. That time is now, when varied ways of knowing are being heuristically explored, articulated, and engaged, when embodied knowledges, post human knowings, and lines of flight continually deepen our understanding of being. That time is now, when utopian performatives ask us to engage in a critically reflexive “what if?” (Dolan, 2005; Spry, 2016) and to embody a “doing that is in the horizon, a mode of possibility” (Munoz, 2006, p. 10). And of course, that time is now, when beauty is systemically distorted, misogynistically defined, hunted, and attacked by a racist sexual predator in the White House. But the heretic beauty inherent in utopian performatives embraces and transforms this dangerous dystopia; utopian performatives, writes D. Soyini Madison (2009), “‘flip the script’ on danger through the ontology of performance” (p. 195).

But even now, on the pages of a scholarly journal, in the auspices of articulating knowledge, engaging beauty in scholarship as something other than a sociocultural tool of gender hegemony can still feel politically naïve, intellectually unsophisticated, academically inexperienced. In her essay On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry (1998) argues that in scholarship, “many people have either actively advocated a taboo on beauty or passively omitted it from their vocabulary” (p. 81). Such has often been the case when considering the socioculturally transformative power of art, of performance, of poetry, and its epistemic role in scholarship. And then the lionhearted beauty of Audre Lorde’s contention that “poetry is not a luxury” comes roaring: “It [poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence,” writes Lorde (1985), “It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (p. 36). And through the ferocity of these words I begin to see that beauty as only skin deep is a patriarchal sleight-of-hand, a bait and switch designed to do what hegemonic power is designed to do, co-opt a kind of power that might dismantle, to make a grab for the most powerful and intimate parts of the body, to dispel the kind of “hopes and dreams” that move us “toward survival and change.”

That so many hegemonic constructs have been devised to exoticize and belittle beauty should be evidence enough that something about beauty is devastating to power, something just below the skin. And in revealing the patriarch’s sleight of hand, we may begin to see that beauty is skin, deep as skin, moving into muscle, bone, marrow. Not a gender-only matrix, beauty’s critical strength is in the conscious sociocultural construction of bodies, their colors, shapes, sizes, and abilities. Beauty as a critical praxis is a personally, politically, willfully wanton utopian performative where we engage in “the making of art and remaking of culture” (Conquergood, 2002, p. 154).

Beauty is stunning. It stuns us into being; “at the moment we see something beautiful,” writes Scarry (1998), “we undergo a radical decentering” (p. 77). It suspends an instant, arrests a moment in time. It is the instant when the script flips and we see something differently. We see, perhaps, that seeking to belittle a woman by referring to her as “nasty” in a debate upon the world stage is an opportunity for radical decentering, an opportunity for “survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (Lorde, 1985, p. 36). And we see the strength of that woman as blood and bone beauty “because beauty,” writes Scarry, “repeatedly brings us face-to-face with our own powers to create, we know where and how to locate those powers when a situation of injustice call on us to create” (p. 79). We undergo a radical decentering, for example, upon seeing the performance “Black Rose” written and performed by an African American student who transformed the ugliness of repeatedly not being called upon in the junior high classroom into the stunning critique of voice and race and pedagogical space by her making of “Black Rose,” by her remaking culture. No luxury here, just the stunning beauty of body and language, survival, and change.

The blood and bone of beauty as critique is the embodied materialization of utopia where “the utopian,” as Bammer (1991) suggests, “is powerfully real in the sense that hope and desire are real . . . It is a force that moves and shapes history” (p. 7). In utopian performatives, we use what is at hand to critically create the possible (Spry, 2016). Rather than denying the racist, classist, heteronormative (and more) hegemonic structures in popular notions of beauty, we might use this as a critical platform from which to imagine the powerful heuristic possibilities of beauty—how it is perceived and constructed—as a critical praxis. We might gain a critical empowerment from rejecting, reimagining, and recuperating hegemonic performativities of women as “nasty,” of a girl in the classroom as a “Black Rose.”

Beauty as critical praxis constitutes a fierce comingling of Conquergood’s imagination, artistry, and critique where one might throw a glamour, a hex, an incantation to invoke utopic possibilities where they are needed most. Beauty as a critical praxis in utopian performatives creates a shimmer, a vibrational power where we might see through a hegemonic construct and “move forward,” as Scarry (1998) says, “into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring things into relation, and [beauty] does all this with a kind of urgency as though one’s life depended upon it” (p. 21). Life urgently depends on crafting beauty with Others out of the pathological lies and propaganda emanating from the executive branch of the United States government.

It was what I saw as the beauty of Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke, Victoria Barkley in Big Valley, and Annie Oakley that allowed me a measure of self-acceptance as a girl (2012 “Unseating”). And it was critically reflecting upon my attraction to such “stock character” beauty that revealed a simultaneous rejection and recuperation of them (and me) through the reflexive movement of creating performative autoethnography, as it is “the very pliancy or elasticity of beauty,” writes Scarry (1998), “hurtling us forward and back, requiring us to break new ground, but obliging us also to bridge back not only to the ground we just left but to still earlier, even ancient, ground” (pp. 31-32). The at once rejection and recuperation of ways of being in the world, moving “forward into new acts of creation,” is the complex artistic and ancient praxis of beauty.

And surely there is aching beauty in performative autoethnographic writing toward utopia. The ache we feel upon creating or witnessing artful critique. The ache of the critical imagination (Denzin, 2006) as it crafts pain into the blues. “The courage to hope,” writes Cornel West, “is the blues shining through the darkness” (p. 53). The blues is a criss-crossing of artistry, analysis, and activism (Conquergood, 2002) requiring that we reflect on the personal political pain of heartache and how it got there (Spry, 2011). But if you stay there, then it’s not the blues, it’s just pain. It’s not beauty as critical praxis, it’s just pain. Beauty is hard work. It requires craft. It requires rigorous reflexivity, composition, collaboration, and performance to be efficacious.

Beauty as critical praxis is performed on the dance floor studied by Ramon Rivera-Servera (2004) from his work in queerness and latinadad in dance clubs for a utopian performative that “is at once the articulation of something new, as well as an intervention in the histories and struggles of these identities” (p. 275), a “bridging back” as Scarry (1998) might suggest “to an earlier even ancient ground” (pp. 31-32). A utopian performative allows us to embrace both our skepticism and our longings in a kind of performativity that is a simultaneous rejection and recuperation of what is and of what can be, where hope and knowledge exist in the conflation of critique and desire, like “dancers who negotiate the club as both hegemonic discipline and utopian promise” (Rivera-Servera, 2004, p. 275). Here beauty through utopian performative is the incantation of hegemony and possibility, “a conjuring,” writes Munoz (2006, p. 15), “of both future and past to critique presentness,” an incantation of matter intra-activated and transformed through performance.

And perhaps most importantly, beauty as a critical praxis is not a solo endeavor. As in performative autoethnographic praxes, the critically stunning capacities of beauty are not about “I.” The challenge of beauty as critique is in how we create beauty coperformatively. Although I live within a material body, my knowing and being is constructed interrelationally through charting the connective tissues of how we move through the world with Others; it is with this relationship to and representation of others that we engage a radical decentering. Engaging beauty as a critical praxis is about articulating the relational effects of our differences, navigating the strange beauty of people trying to inhabit a hope filled existence. Scarry (1998) explains that an encounter with beauty

brings about an “unselfing.” It causes a cluster of feelings that normally promote the self . . . to now fall away. It is not just that she becomes “self-forgetful” but that some more capacious mental act is possible: all the space formerly in the service of protecting, guarding, advancing the self (or its “prestige”) is now free to be in the service of something else. (p. 78)

Through an engagement with beauty, in whatever form it might take for the beholder, “we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there” (p. 77). We are stunned and unsettled by beauty, and in that suspension of time, “we undergo a radical decentering” (p. 77), a transformation of what beauty is and what it is capable of. In the unselfing of beauty as critical praxis, we need not slap the perpetrator’s reaching hand; rather, we coperformatively create a culture where he does not image such a thing as an option, or that such a thing would ever be allowed.

The unselfing unsettling power of beauty as a praxis informs a utopian “idealist form of critique” (Munoz, 2006, p. 11) where hope exists in the both/and, where “performance, seen as utopian performativity, is imbued with a sense of potentiality . . . another modality of doing and being that is in process, unfinished” (Munoz, 2006, pp. 10-11). I find personal and methodological comfort in this utopian “unfinished” as it speaks to the continual partiality of knowing and knowledge, the fractious experiencing of hope and helplessness, and the always fluctuating process of political and personal rejection and recuperation. These are the places that performance has always lived, where the “making of art and remaking of culture” (Conquergood, 2002, p. 154) is not a luxury, where we intentionally methodologically ask “what if,” and where the beauty of skin is deep.