BODY TALK
In her new book, Disobedient Bodies, author and academic Emma Dabiri encourages us to separate society’s ideals from how we really want to feel and live in our bodies. Here she tells us what she’s learned about beauty in the process
Beauty can be a verb. I’ve learned that beautiful isn’t necessarily something you are; it’s something that you do. While researching the way beauty is seen in different cultures, I came across this idea of it as something that is activated through harmonious relationships and a usefulness. That’s what is considered beautiful in some cultures: the way you move through the world. It’s not necessarily a passive thing.
The discourse around beauty waxes and wanes. There’s a traditional feminist argument that a concern with appearance is a frivolous distraction that feeds into sexist tropes and reinforces patriarchy. Then there’s another extreme – asort of choice feminism, that argues decisions in beauty are ‘empowering’ or feminist purely because a woman made that choice for herself.
I would argue that something isn’t feminist just because a woman does it; it has to in some way resist rather than further entrench patriarchy. But I feel that between those two arguments there’s a middle ground that acknowledges how these issues are tied up with the economic and social system we live under, where aspects of competition, judgement and a quest for constant self-improvement have infiltrated our beauty practices.
The question is: how can we disentangle something that could just be a source of pleasure, fun and joy from reductive beauty ideals? It’s fun to make yourself attractive. So how can we experience that without envy, competing, or feeling we need to diminish our bodies?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. Personally, when I stopped shaving my armpits and legs I started to be able to untangle what I actually liked from what I was conditioned to do. I learned that I’m comfortable having bushy armpits, even if that means I attract negative comments, because I don’t like how shaved armpits look on me. But I realised I do like my legs looking smooth, so I started shaving them again. I was able to assess that for myself by not shaving at all for a while. That strategy might not be for everybody; it’s about trying to unpack what you are doing because you’ve been conditioned to think a certain way and what you really want to be doing with your body.
Deciding to stop straightening my hair made me reassess my relationship with beauty. I didn’t want to do it. I liked how my hair looked straight. But it got to the point where I felt my politics and my presentation were unaligned in a way that was jarring internally. I thought, ‘I straighten my
