On (Lesbian) Beauty

Gazing From Above and Below

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In her book Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom writes that “beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.” It’s a compelling and expository definition of the word, and it causes us to pause and think about the relative value of beauty as a descriptive (and prescriptive) tool. Certainly, upon considering beauty within this framework, one is liable to claim that while the concept of beauty may be oppressive for others, they don’t buy into this idea themselves. But can we ever get around this all-encompassing force?

We might put McMillan Cottom’s definition of the word into conversation with queerness. For example, we might ask, are lesbian beauty preferences different than the norm? Do they still reproduce an existing social order? There are several contradictory answers to these questions. When I spoke to people online about the topic, there wasn’t a clear consensus. Some said lesbian beauty standards are similar to beauty standards more generally, while others said lesbians are more accepting of things that are outside of the norm – body hair and fatness, for example. One person said lesbians have no beauty standards at all. 

This is a difficult concept to define. The topic is so complex, and so intellectually dense, that the Journal of Lesbian Studies dedicated an entire issue to the topic of lesbian beauty in 1999. The introduction of the issue asks, “by definition, lesbians find beauty in other women. But what is lesbian beauty?” While none of the authors answer the question definitively, the issue does posit some interesting ideas about how any answer to this question depends on many different social factors. Speaking from a lesbian feminist utopian mindset, one woman defined beauty as “the unfolding of the journey in each of us; the journey from oppression.”

To be sure, this utopian vision is invigorating, but how might this idea come into conflict with material reality? Various scholars have made attempts to find out whether or not being a lesbian or queer might “protect” someone from the harmful effects of the heterosexist norms of society. One study found that lesbians are just as susceptible as straight women to internalizing norms about women’s weight and appearance. Conversely, another study found that lesbians were less likely to report behaviors associated with eating disorders than straight women. A more recent study, published in 2019, found that “body dissatisfaction” was less of a barrier to sexual satisfaction for lesbians than it was for straight or bisexual women. 

First published in 1997, another study seems to combine the results of these other findings. The study found that lesbians still tend to value thinness and fitness, but that, at the same time, having sexual relationships with other women tended to encourage acceptance of one’s body. According to the authors of the study, “conflict between mainstream and lesbian values about the importance of weight and overall appearance was repeatedly voiced by the respondents.”

This conflict is undoubtedly still present within lesbian and queer culture. Some in the queer community purposefully work to disrupt dominant beauty standards through their own style of dress or through the type of aesthetics they valorize. At the same time, normative beauty is evidently still held in high regard when we think about the type of people and the type of content that is most celebrated by queer people. If the people held up as lesbian icons – especially by white lesbians – tend to be white and thin, then we are definitely not disrupting the existing social order of which McMillan Cottom speaks. Certainly, many of us still don’t have the power to shape the content we see on screen, but it’s something to consider nonetheless. Where is “our” definition of beauty located? And who is “us” to begin with? Such a question is directed as much at myself as it is at the reader. 

In “Beauty Laid Bare: Aesthetics in the Ordinary,” bell hooks writes that “learning to see and appreciate the presence of beauty is an act of resistance in a culture of domination that recognizes the production of a pervasive feeling of lack, both material and spiritual, as a useful colonizing strategy.” How might we define beauty in terms of empowerment or community building? Where and how do lesbians and queer women recognize beauty, and what is the function of this recognition? 

Tania N. Hammidi and Susan B. Kaiser write that “beauty is often formulated as a singular image, system, or narrative. Missing in these formulations are conceptualizations of personal desire, agency, and affiliation with community aesthetics.” It may be difficult to conceptualize beauty as something outside of normative aesthetics, but, as these authors suggest, there is something uniquely affirming about engaging with and celebrating forms of beauty that might be outside of or in conflict with these norms. 

Indeed, lesbian and queer beauty may have other uses outside of aesthetic or sensual pleasures. In a survey of lesbians in Sacramento, Jeanine C. Cogan found that while many lesbians seemed tied up in ideas about dominant beauty standards, beauty also had a unique purpose for many lesbians. As Cogan summarizes, “lesbians in this study also used beauty markers as a creative strategy to find and identify each other, suggesting that one purpose of lesbian beauty is functional.” While the images and the boundaries of the lesbian community have certainly changed since Cogan wrote this in the late 1990s, it remains a compelling discourse about beauty – not as something that is purely superficial, but as something with use or value. 

Hammidi and Kaiser suggest that beauty is not static, but rather exists as an ever-changing discursive category. Especially when we think of it in relation to community, it makes sense to consider beauty as a conversation rather than a concrete idea. Hammidi and Kaiser found that lesbians negotiated their responses to various discourses – from dominant media images to community norms – in order to define their own personal sense of style and beauty. For black women and other women of color, these negotiations are often more complex than they are for white women, as Jennifer Lyle, Jeanell Jones, and Gail Drakes write in their article in the 1999 issue.

Community belonging most certainly affects one’s conception of beauty. One 2014 article in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, written by Sarah Hanley and Suzanne McLaren, looks at the link between community belonging and the relative presence of depression and body dissatisfaction. Hanley and McLaren found that first of all, body dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms may be related, and, second of all, the link between these two afflictions was weakened by a sense of belonging in the lesbian community. They define the lesbian community in three “layers”: broad, “which provides an overarching ideology,” organizational, which involves groups or activities, and friendship. Hanley and McLaren found that the organizational and friendship layers “were particularly protective” in regards to body image dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms. 

This idea is not new. In All About Love, bell hooks writes that “self love cannot flourish in isolation.” While self love and beauty are not the same thing, there is certainly an overlap between self-image and beauty that affects one’s capacity for self love. While self love needn’t be connected to beauty – as McMillan Cottom might argue – there is clearly power in defining what’s beautiful within a certain community, especially when that definition isn’t held elsewhere. But, at the same time, when these standards are also held by the dominant society, it can be hard to disentangle our sense of beauty from theirs. The lesbian or queer community is not a monolith, and the sense of belonging that Hanley and McLaren describe may vary greatly from person to person. 

“I think of visibility as an emancipatory concept is much about autonomy.” Writes sociologist Benno Herzog. “It is about groups and individuals having the power to actively build their public image instead of being the passive object of discourses shaped by others.” Certainly, this quote is moving us away from a notion of beauty for beauty’s sake. But, it’s nearly impossible to separate the idea of beauty from visibility, especially since ideas about beauty are often created in conversation with or in opposition to images that have come before. 

For example, let’s think about fashion. Dominant fashion trends have a huge effect on what is considered beautiful, and fashion has always been important to the queer community. Visibility is central here, too. In her dissertation about queer women’s fashion, Elaine L. Pedersen explores how ideas about physical appearance and fashion can create anxiety for queer women who negotiate dominant and subcultural beauty standards. Pederson notes that “very few participants reported having ever seen fashion advertisements specifically targeted at queer women,” and that many participants had negative reactions to the queer imagery they did see in the media. 

For participants in the study, negotiating their own standards of appearance with those shown in the media and what was offered to them in clothing stores was at times an anxiety-inducing experience. As several authors in the 1999 Journal of Lesbian Studies issue noted, this negotiation is a central part of the lesbian experience, especially in regards to beauty and self-image. Certainly, visibility will not eradicate negative self-image nor destroy unattainable beauty standards, but, to Herzog and Pederson’s points, having the power to define one’s own image can be a powerfully affirming experience. 

The act of looking – and of being looked at – is, in a more intimate way, part of the structure of visibility. Visibility is often discussed on a macro scale, often as part of a discussion about representation in film and television, but it exists in smaller ways, too. As Jodi R. Schorb and Tania N. Hammidi write in their article about lesbian hairstyles, “much lies at stake when dykes look at each other.” The act of looking has several functional meanings. As Schorb and Hammidi put it, “we read perhaps for aesthetic inspiration or style tips, but more centrally for embodied reminders that lesbians actually exist, that there might actually be something visibly queer.” 

While beauty and style are certainly defined in larger, broadly ideological ways, these moments of looking are significant. We may not be able to escape the pervasive forces of the media-saturated structural order of things, but there is a sense of affirmation in these small moments. Beauty from within it is not, but perhaps this is beauty from around, rather than from above. 

Clearly, the function and the origin of beauty as a concept is multiplicitous. Communities and their supposed norms are porous, and necessarily so. No one belongs only to a single community nor claims only one distinct identity – these things tend to overlap. As such, it is difficult to define such a thing as lesbian beauty or lesbian style, as these things mean different things to different people and may be performed and received differently depending on one’s social location. But must we throw out the concept altogether?

One understanding of beauty maintains that beauty is an inherently oppressive concept – there are always people left outside of its formulation, even as its standards change and transform over time. Following this thread, it wouldn’t be outside the realm of reason to claim that we should stop focusing on or commenting on beauty at all, at least when it comes to an evaluation or description of human beings. 

Others see beauty as a more discursive concept, one that can even have emancipatory potential. In this vein, we might imagine beauty as an idea based less on aesthetics and more on a connection to individual truth. Keats once wrote that “beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” One reading of this famous quote might be that there is some universal definition of beauty, one that transcends space and time. Sociologists like McMillan Cottom would likely contest this notion, especially since the study of sociology looks at how social norms develop and change over time – beauty being one of these norms. (Though, to be fair, Keats was talking about a Grecian urn in this poem, not a person.)

A more expansive reading of Keats allows for this transformation. Poet and performer ALOK argues that “beauty is about looking like yourself, even in the face of social and cultural repression.” This definition of beauty is more individualistic, and aligns more clearly with bell hooks’ and Audre Lorde’s discussions of self love and self care, both of which have been theorized in relation to their radical political potential. Within this characterization of beauty, beauty is defined by the individual, in the face of oppressive standards of comportment. 

Within lesbian and queer communities, there is no one definition of beauty. We often find ourselves fighting to exist outside of mainstream beauty norms while also hopelessly tied up within them. Visibility can be an emancipatory strategy, but only when the tools of projection are equally distributed and made widely accessible. 

Who we hold up as icons of beauty matters, too. If our icons of lesbian beauty are primarily white and thin, that doesn’t bode well for the future of beauty as an emancipatory notion rather than a restricting one. 

Expanding beyond these norms has been difficult for us all, especially as lesbianism as an “aesthetic” has become more common in the mainstream in recent years. These shiny images are certainly a far cry from the women’s music festivals and feminist bookstores of the 1970s, even if these two images remain perpetually in conversation with one another. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but the bearers of the look will always exert power over those upon which they gaze. But perhaps, an emancipatory gaze is possible. Can we discover beauty in new places? One can only hope.