‘I feel pretty’: beauty as an affective-material process

Abstract

This article explores the potential of feminist new materialisms and theories of affect for reframing how we might think about beauty and the body. Through an exploration of girls, beauty and the school ball (prom), the article engages with Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action to conceptualise beauty as an affective-material process. This perspective involves an ontological shift in how girls, bodies and beauty are understood; from thinking about beauty and the human as discursively produced, towards a relational approach that conceptualises materiality and affect as co-constitutive forces. The article is interested in how such a framing might invite ways of understanding beauty that avoid binary frameworks, such as good/bad, subject/object and discourse/matter. I consider the potential this might offer feminist analyses of beauty, where the focus is less on what beauty is or what it means, and more on how it comes to be.

Primary School Teachers Misrecognizing Trans Identities? Religious, Cultural, and Decolonial Assemblages

“…Following Ingram (2021), I understand the teachers' narratives or verbal data as enactments where the socio-religious-cultural materialities are entangled and produce affective forces, intensities, and capacities as they talk about trans. Like Barad (2007), I view their talk as material articulations that intra-act within a specific moment and under specific social-historical positionings.…”

A New Materialist Analysis of Health and Fitness Social Media, Gender and Body Disaffection: ‘You Shouldn’t Compare Yourself to Anyone… but Everyone Does’

“…Clark and Thorpe [17] observe that whilst there is a growing body of work examining the affective and sensory dimensions of human experiences of the digital, the 'bulk of this research retains its focus on human experiences of technology and draws conceptual distinctions between the human and non-human' (p. 14). In terms of understanding what has been termed 'body image', these concepts reframe our understanding towards a move away from a fixed subject or emotion residing within an individual and towards what Ingram (p. 289) describes as an 'intra-active becoming' [28]. Bringing new materialist thinking into an understanding of digital health pedagogies [2] enables us a move beyond a human-centric or device-centric approach, to focus instead on the relationality and entanglement of learning about health and the body through social media intra-actions.…”

“…Thinking with and through new materialist theory, the analysis below seeks to trace the affects, sensations and embodied subjectivities that emerge through these pedagogical entanglements. Verbal data fragments are presented in the discussion below and are understood through Ingram's [28] articulation that 'verbal data enact specific material-discursive assemblages' (p. 288). Fragments presented in this paper therefore emerge from what Maclure (2011) describes as 'hotspots' [30].…”