Beauty

Beauty

Volume 46, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2018
Elena Glasberg and Elizabeth Wissinger

Excerpted from the Board’s Note

Beauty is a killer. It hurts. That is the consensus of the authors collected here. It hurts to be beautiful. And it hurts even more not to be beautiful. This conundrum may explain why the conversation around beauty keeps lingering: the more you critique beauty, the more its mask, its allure, becomes real. If beauty is the hazy cultural fantasy that has real consequences, insisting on its materiality and on the materiality of the female body might kill beauty—before it gets you. But do the authors in this issue want to kill beauty, really? No. Because, for them, beauty is a real, and necessary, enemy.