The Gaze

Hey gang, 

I hope this week has treated you well! 

WWPCDN is in its final stages before print, I've been working on little tweaks all weekend. Instead of  the weekly round-up this evening, I'm going to share a piece I wrote on beauty and the gaze. I ended up having to rewrite it completely as it drew too much on philosophy, art history and African Studies for the publication but I far preferred the original which I share with you now. 

Hope you enjoy. Would love to know your thoughts !

Our culture is one that values physical beauty - to an almost oppressive degree. If you are deemed to have it, you better work hard to maintain it, if you ain’t got it, you better work hard to achieve it!

It's a culture that privileges the sense of sight, as well as the concept of individualism. Our culture views things, whether its objects or people, as existing in isolation from each other. As a result of these cultural norms we are taught that beauty is something that is first and foremost seen, and moreover that beauty can exist in isolation, an entity unto itself, removed from its context.

Much of our visual world is mediated through advertising and social media. While these mediums are very much part of our modern lives, the laws that govern them, the ones that construct “the gaze” through which we see one another and ourselves, find their origins in the 17th century.

Since European global conquest and expansion in the 1600s, we have lived in the world according to René Descartes, the “Father of Modern Philosophy”. It is from him that we inherited the perception of reality as divided into Cartesian binaries: men/women, black/white, gay/straight, beautiful/ugly. It is in many ways a narrow and tyrannical way of living, yet is one that is increasingly questioned and challenged as is apparent in today’s contestations around gender binaries.

Another division created through this binary tradition was the separation of the body and the mind. Man became associated with the lofty pursuits of the intellect while women were condemned to the fleshy subjectivity of the body. Cast as mindless creatures, our physical appearance became our primary value. The way women’s bodies looked was given much more importance than men’s.  In his iconic text Ways of Seeing the radical scholar John Berger argued that modern representations of women could be traced to the depiction of the nude female form that became popular with the birth of oil painting, another 17thcentury innovation. The nude was always a woman and she was always aware of being seen by a spectator.

Around the time that oil painting was emerging as the most important Western art form, the system of capitalism that we live under today was developing. As Berger writes: “Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became interchangeable because everything became a commodity”.

Beauty as a commodity was something upon which women were now judged, and beauty became fiercely competitive. Today we are taught that this way of seeing and judging beauty is both “natural” and universal. It is neither.

In contrast the West African cultures that were now coming into contact with the expanding European powers understood the world very differently. The Yoruba of South-Western Nigeria, like many other African people saw a thing’s value in its relation to other things. This meant that to look at physical beauty entirely isolated from any context made little sense. Beauty was more contextual, and value judgements of what was beautiful couldn’t be made in an entirely superficial way. Furthermore, in addition to sight, other senses were privileged just as much. There was no need for the old adage about not judging a book by its cover, it was already a given! The beauty standards that emerged from such a world-view were subsequently very different; less standardised, less homogenised and more inclusive. For example a person would not be considered attractive or not, based on anything as arbitrary as height or complexion. A short person who was attractive might be described as a kuru ye jo (one who is short and perfectly elegant when dancing) but equally they might be eniyan kukuru biliisi (a short devil). While an arched foot was considered a thing of great beauty for a woman, not having an arch was not enough to preclude one from beauty. Those with lighter complexions were not perceived as more beautiful than those who were darker. Both light and dark skin could be attractive but equally both could be unattractive. Even smallpox scars might be deemed beautiful, on the right person: eni-sasa-soju-e-lewa-ferefere (a person whose facial beauty is enhanced by smallpox spots).

Today as we begin to see long overdue progress in the recognition and celebration of diverse forms of beauty, we must remember that merely replacing the old standard with a new one isn’t enough.In addition to considering diverse beauty, we could benefit hugely from considering diverse ways of seeing, and new ways of evaluating beauty. It is in this way that we might enshrine a representation that operates beyond the tokenistic, that exists as more than just a “trend”, towards something more meaningful, and ultimately enduring.