Aberrations in Beauty

Working at the intersections of art history, trans theory, and ethnic studies this panel is interested in taking seriously the seeming aberrations of beauty—scars, leakages, pain—as a fleshy mode of knowing and relation. The panel emerges from auto-theoretical reflections on gender-queering and aesthetic surgeries that reveal the ways the body’s unruliness defies the ideal of control or intention that elective, “plastic” surgery promises. Defined so much by its contingencies—variously narrated as complication or risk— the bodily interventions staged in surgical encounters demand consent to a kind of body horror in service of becoming beautiful in one’s own image, or, said another way, getting free.

We invite scholarly and artistic presentations that explore the doubling of beauty and monstrosity, injury and freedom. How does the human and more-than-human ecological porosity of trans bodies transform our practices of figuration, alter the visuality of surface and depth, or shuffle crystallized assemblages of beauty? For example, how can the unruly aesthetics of scarification help us attend to the reparative possibilities that unexpected coagulation and disturbances might afford? How might we think between medicalized, surgical practices and the material engagements of artists? In what ways could aberrations of beauty, perhaps thought first through the human body, be refracted through other bodies of knowledge such as land, archive, text, or inorganic materialities? How do race, ability, and other relational factors inform how we approach these questions?