Ugliness is a pejorative marker for bodies, things, and feelings that
fall beyond or outside the limits of acceptability. Ugliness has long
been indirectly deployed in order to mark, collect, and exclude that
which is determined to be aesthetically intolerable (Garland-Thomson;
Grealy; Schweik), disgusting (Meagher), dirty (Douglas), abject
(Kristeva), monstrous (Braidotti; Haraway; Rai & Puar; Schildrick;
Sharpe), revolting (Lebesco), grotesque (Russo), or even simply plain
and unaltered (Bartky; Bordo; Morgan; Wolf). While aesthetically
ugliness has been positioned both against beauty and as a distinct
category for art and art-making (Adorno; Ranciere), there has been
little sustained engagement with the ways that ugliness operates
alongside identities, bodies, intimacies, practices, and spaces
(exceptions include Danticat; Kincaid; Athanassoglou-Kallmyer).
Part of the reason for this absence might be that ugliness is at once
too broad and too diffuse, serving, as art historian Nina
Athanassoglou-Kallmyer has pointed out, as "an all-purpose repository
for everything that [does] not quite fit," a marker of "mundane reality,
the irrational, evil, disorder, dissonance, irregularity, excess,
deformity, the marginal" (281).

A repository for many socio-cultural feelings and attitudes, ugliness
operates in ways that have dangerous and deadly consequences for bodies
and those who inhabit them. When a body is labeled or understood as
"ugly," it is subsequently positioned as up for expunging, destruction,
and affectively motivated terror (Fanon). For example, the "ugly laws"
of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America demonstrate the
visceral discomfort that "ugly" bodies evoke, justifying their exclusion
from public spaces on account of their "polluting" effects (Schweik).
This demarcation of ugliness is inextricably bound with
taken-for-granted ethical, epistemological, and ontological assumptions
about the value of bodies. Further, ugliness is infused with dominant
discourses of ability, race, heterosexuality, gender, body size, health,
and age. At the level of ideas, relations and institutions, deployments
of ugliness can have lethal effects on a body's horizons and the
possibilities for visibility, intimacy, and thick life.

On the Politics of Uglinessseeks to provide the first anthology that
centralizes ugliness as a political category. It explores the various
ways in which ugliness is deployed against those whose bodies, habits,
gestures, feelings, expressions, or ways of being deviate from social
norms. It argues that ugliness is politicalin at least two ways: (1) it
denotes inequalities and hierarchies, often serving as a repository for
all that is "other;" and (2) it is contingent and relational, taking
shape through the comparison and evaluation of bodies. This collection
asserts that it is only in facing ugliness as a political category that
we can agitate routinely harmful ways of seeing, understanding and
relating.

We are seeking an array of contributions that will center the politics
of ugliness as it relates to bodies, feelings, gestures, habits, things,
spaces, sounds, intimacies and their operations alongside ability, race,
gender, class, sexuality, body size, age, health, or animality.
Specifically, we invite submissions of academic papers; however, we will
also consider art-based work, memoirs, cultural scholars, writers, and
artists. We welcome approaches informed by (but not limited to) critical
disability studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, feminist
theory, literary theory, art history, cultural studies, queer and
sexuality studies, science and technology studies, critical psychology,
environmental studies, musicology, and performance studies.

Submissions should engage with the politics of ugliness. Topics of
inquiry may include:

- interrogations of ugliness as violence against bodies
- the ethics of engaging with ugliness
- feminist explorations of ugliness, "ugly" engagements with feminism
- ugly methodologies, reading practices, and modes of inquiry
- representations of ugliness, "ugly" bodies, body parts, and "ugly"
behaviors
- phenomenological encounters with ugliness: feeling ugly, being "ugly,"
embodying ugliness
- ugly intimacies, feelings, and dispositions (e.g., Ngai; Sharpe)
- genealogies, archives, temporalities, and histories of ugliness
- the fashionizing of ugliness, ugly fashion
- ugly development practices, environmental ugliness
- visual, sensorial, and tactile pollution in relation to spaces and
geographies
- theoretical considerations of ugliness as a political category
- reclamations and tactical repositionings of ugliness (e.g., Eileraas)

The deadline for chapter proposals (maximum of 500 words) is 15 January
2015. Please forward proposals or questions to Ela Przybylo
(przybyloyorku.ca) and Sara Rodrigues (sararodyorku.ca) with the
subject heading "On the Politics of Ugliness."