Reading About Beauty

Mark your calendars: I will be in conversation with best-selling author Isabel Wilkerson on January 6 to discuss the legacy of Zora Neale Hurston. Join us for the conversation by signing up here.

I wrote a short piece about Lizzo for Harper’s Bazaar this week. I have said it before and it remains true that nothing riles up readers more than beauty. I’m still getting letters from a nearly decade old Miley Cyrus essay and then new letters about “In the Name of Beauty” in my book THICK and then all the angry messages about my thoughts on AOC.

It is interesting how deeply we hold that beauty is natural and our desires are immune to capitalism and racism and colonialism and sexism and ableism and politics and, well, social construction.

I have a lot of thoughts about why even the most radical among us become Archie Bunker when we talk about beauty. Some of those thoughts are in my latest essay on Lizzo in Harper’s Bazaar:

From health care to celebrity, our culture’s ideas about what constitutes a body worthy of being in public has one imperative: Protect the idea of white bodies at all costs.

I have written before about what we mean when we label some bodies “ugly”. That is one way to surface the…