Non-hegemonic beauties: a critical approach to beauty in (trans)national contexts

Abstract

In 2006, the Feminist Theory special issue edited by Claire Colebrook posed a pivotal question: not whether beauty is good or bad for women, but how beauty is ‘defined, deployed, defended, subordinated, marked or manipulated, and how these tactics intersect with gender and value’. This pragmatic approach to beauty set the tone for a new strand of feminist inquiry. In 2013, a second special issue extended this challenge, focusing on how beauty intersects with race in Latin America and the Caribbean. It emphasised that theorising gender and beauty requires close attention to race and its entanglements with sexuality, class and nation. This third special issue picks up that intellectual thread while pushing it further: we explore how beauty is not just shaped by colonial and capitalist legacies but is also a space actively reimagined from the margins by those whom dominant beauty norms exclude. Here, in this new special issue, we ask how beauty is weaponised, contested, resisted, pursued and persisted as a site of lure and ambivalence. How is beauty an ideological apparatus and a space for counter-hegemonic practices? And crucially, how is beauty reconfigured by Black, fat, trans, queer and negatively racialised subjects across different geographies and cultural contexts? This special issue expands the scope of feminist beauty studies by incorporating body size, gender diversity and transnational perspectives into ongoing discussions about decolonisation, intersectionality and self-making. By foregrounding the lived experiences of those often marginalised by dominant beauty norms, this issue insists on beauty's role not only as a system of power but also as a tool for self-determination and survival.