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Wounded Beauty: An Exploratory Essay on Race, Feminism, and the Aesthetic Question Author(s): Anne Anlin Cheng Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 191-217 Published by: University of Tulsa Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464426 . Accessed: 12/05/2011 11:18
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Wounded Beauty:An Exploratory Essayon Race, Feminism,and the Aesthetic Question

Anne Anlin Cheng University California,Berkeley of

Was she beautiful or not beautiful?And what was the secret of form or expressionwhich gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or evil genius dominant in those beams?Probablyevil; else why was the effect that of unrest ratherthan of undisturbedcharm? George Eliot1 Was there ever a time when beauty delivered "undisturbed charm"? Recent intellectual efforts to rescue beauty in the field of cultural politics mourn the loss of our capacity to appreciate things beautiful and reveal a nostalgia for former delight.2 Yet has there ever been, in philosophical and literary traditions, a golden age when such pleasure was unequivocally celebrated? From Plato to Mao Tse-Tung, from George Eliot to Toni Morrison, beauty has always provoked unrest. The unease derives in large parts, if not solely, from the moral implications of beauty. Indeed, much of the writing about beauty over the centuries has pondered beauty as a dichotomy (articulated by Daniel Deronda in the famous opening of that eponymous novel) between good and evil, between absolution and curse. Yet has the contemplation of this dichotomy-both the attack on and the defense of beauty-prevented us from looking at beauty? This essay explores how the politics surrounding the discourse of beauty at the intersection (that is, the active collision, rather than mere parallel) between race and gender may have displaced or misrecognized the experience of beauty. In recent decades, the injurious effects of beauty as an ideal have been substantially documented in the disciplines of gender studies and race studies. In women's studies, feminists have long documented beauty's coercive and harmful effects on women. Feminist critics have argued that beauty exercises an excluding, privileged ideal or, alternately, that its discourse of ideality articulates a patriarchal society's fundamental distaste for (or fear of) femininity. The image of Medusa as the beautiful woman who is also unsightly serves as a classic trope for this ambivalence. The discourse of beauty, especially in mass/commodity culture, is seen to represent an attempt to discipline women's bodies (that which needs to be made beautiful), and, as such, the rhetoric of feminine beauty can be said

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to have also been a rhetoric about feminine ugliness. In the realm of race studies, beauty occupies just as unbecoming a history. The works of Meg Armstrong, Emmanuel Eze, Henry Louis Gates, Sander L. Gilman, and Paul Gilroy, among others, have demonstrated the historic complicity between the philosophical discourse of aesthetic judgment and a metaphysics of racial differencesince the Enlightenment.3Aesthetic standards have often been deployed by thinkers from Immanuel Kant to Thomas Jeffersonas literally the last moral groundon which to justifyracist practices.4 The idea that beauty's adverse function in racial politics duplicates beauty's debilitating role in gender politics, however, has been more assumed than theorized. Much of what has been written about beauty's relationshipto femininity speaks-sometimes with and sometimeswithout self-consciousness-to and from an exclusively middle-classwhite paradigm.5And much of what has been written about beauty'srelationshipto racism has presumedthat a racializedindividual'srelationship to gender discriminationsis analogousto, if it does not simplydouble, the burdensof racial oppression.6 at the conjunction of racial and genderdiscriminaBut tions stands the woman of color, for whom "beauty"presents a vexing problem both as judgment and solution. That is, between a feminist critique of feminine beauty and a racial denial of nonwhite beauty, where does this leave the woman of color?Can she or can she not be beautiful? Is her beauty (or potential for beauty) good or evil? It is unclear whether woman of color"would be disrupassenting to the prospectof a "beautiful tive of racist discourseor complicit with gender stereotypes.The demands and judgmentsof racial and gender politics are not necessarilyas compatible as they initially appear. The question of beauty for a woman of color is thus fraughtwith comis peting demands."Value" itself divided amongcultural,political, and personal interests. Because of the history of racialist inflections in aesthetic discourseand the Manichean differentiationbetween white and nonwhite women, the so-called woman of color's relationship to beauty does not merely replicate the white woman'srelationshipto beauty even if we were to understandbeauty as a discourseof abjection for all women. The effects producedby the intersectionof race, gender,and aesthetics are not merely additive, but interlockingand, at times, contradictory. In the aesthetic discourseof the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which draws from medical, anthropological, and scientific vocabularies, the black woman cannot be made beautifuleven in the imaginationsince her body is radicallyundisciplinable-consider EdmundBurke's figuration of the indescribableterrorof the sublime as the sight of black femininity or the Victorian attachment to the insistent, material,and "revealing" dif-

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ference of the black female body, condensed in the figure of the Hottentot.7 While Burkerelegatesblack femininity to a place beyond representation, the Europeandiscourseof the Hottentot consigns black femininity to nothing but representation-a display,moreover,that conjoins exhibition with unsightliness and distastefulness.The desire underlying the disgust further complicates aesthetic judgments about the racialized her woman and endangersthe project of reapproaching beauty.The much rehearsedand often cited Europeanexoticization of Asian female sexuality, also encompassinga pseudo-scientificrhetoric of physiognomicaldifference well formulatedby the eighteenth century,offersanother example of the complications surroundingthe revaluation of racialized, female beauty since the vocabularyof idealizationhas shown itself to be an integral part of the discourseof denigration. While the expectation that sexism and racismreinforceone another is both reasonableand in some respectsquite historicallyevident, the political answersto (that is, the political remedies for) sexism and racism are not consistent with one another.The fetishizationof the beauty of otherness can operate as problemand as solution. An equation designed to susand aesthetics tain simultaneouslythe three loaded terms of race,feminism, moral and political ramificationsthat far exceed the yields contradictory kind of resolutionswe currentlypossess. to A primaryreason why "solutions" beauty'sharmshave been ineffective or inconclusive has to do with the limited and frustratingly repetitive ways in which pious discussionof female beautyhas been framed,the ways in which it tends either to dismissthe experience of beauty or to revert to the very termsbeing unpackedin the firstplace. Forexample, it is not rare to witness in the media a righteousdenouncement of beauty accompanied by a wealth of luscious images designed to satisfy the very appetite being At reprimanded.8 the same time, the insurgenceof strategiesto combat the history of aesthetic denigrationthrough revaluingnotions of differenceor alternativebeauty offersonly short term cures since the fundamentallogic of aesthetic and moral judgment remains intact. A revaluation of "bad looks" as something positive inadvertently reconfirms the existence of "good looks."Similarly,efforts at racial reclamation through slogans such as "BlackIs Beautiful"seem to announce injurymore than remedy.Both strategiesreplacethe object of aesthetic value without questioningthe primacy of that value. We continually run into a double bind wherein liberal discourse wants to rehabilitate beauty without having to assent to its seductions. For all of our sophistication about understandingbeauty's ideological roots, we are no more comfortabletoday with the relinquishmentof ideals of beauty than we are at ease with living with their coercions. What

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remain formidableabout binding racial-cum-aestheticstandardsand their effects on women of color are the depth and tenacity of the rejection implied in those ideals. During the protracted 0. J. Simpson trial, the media paradeda seriesof spectatortestimonials,all of which demonstrated the speakers' genderor racialallegiances.There was one memorableimage of an African American woman being interviewed on television who believed Simpson to be guilty of wife abuseand murderbut who also spoke bitterly against his choice of "the white woman." It was clear that, although she felt sympathyfor Nicole Simpson as a woman, she in a sense felt murdered the erotic choice Simpson as a black man had made of the by white woman. The primacyof white beauty as a value continues to drive those who are most oppressedby it. In the 22 September 1951 edition of Amsterdam News, the Harlem weekly, we could find an ad for Dr. Fred Palmer'sskin whitening cream that spelled out without reservation:"Be Whiter, Be Better,Be Loved."Today,undermore sanitizedguises,products such as whitening creamsand hair straightenerscontinue to be profitable both domestically and internationally.In any given issue of Ebonymagazine today, one can find multiple ads for skin lightening creams and hair straighteners. (One of the first black millionaires in America, A'leila Walker, nee Sarah Breedlove, is heiress to a fortune made in black hair straighteners and skin lightening cream.) Statistics have demonstrated that the most popularaesthetic surgery for procedures women in America, Asia, and Africa involve some form of "ethnic corrections."9In an age of to globalization-that is, global Americanization-it is not surprising hear that women of various ethnicities and nationalities continue to be influenced by dominant ideals of white female beauty. What is astounding, however, is how reluctant our society is to examine the depth and implications of that influence. In one of the most dramaticmoments in American constitutional history, the ruling decision to desegregate America in Brown v. Board of Education(1954) turned on a question of beauty'swounding.'0Many may remember the social science evidence submitted by Thurgood Marshall and subsequentlycited by the SupremeCourt in its decision: the "dolltest" conducted by Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the thirties and forties. The Clarkswere social psychologistswho conducted a series of experimentsto test how African American children perceived racial difference, if at all. Interview after interview, they found that, given the choice between two kinds of dolls, the majorityof African American children, even the threedolls to be "bad"and preferredinstead to play year olds, found "brown" with "nice,""white"dolls. The children also went on to identify the white dolls as ones "mostlike themselves."1 This eccentric but key evidence in the Court's ruling marked a crucial moment when the legal system was

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willing to recognizethe psychical aspectsof racial injury,the web of internalized ideality and wounding that the Clark experiment evoked. Yet almost as soon as the Supreme Court credited this evidence, liberalsand conservatives alike vehemently disputed its legitimacy, fueling a contropotential versy that has lasted to this day.The formerfearedthe research's to pathologize and hence revictimize those sufferingfrom discrimination; the latter simplyfound such evidence inconvenient, though they managed to deploy the very same researchagainstcivil rightsreformin the yearsfolmade its lowing Brown.'2In short, this dramaof preference-and-wounding startlingappearanceand almost immediatelywas submergedin a quagmire of contestation. But the role of beauty in racial injuryhas not been arguedaway.In the fields of social psychology and even marketresearch,several revised versions of the Clarks'experiment have been conducted over the years,proIn ducing similarresultsand eliciting similarprotests.13 literature,women writersof color have restagedthis dramain orderto probe the largertradiThe in tion of "white-preference" nonwhite communities.Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye, published in 1970, features a black girl living in segregated browneyes America who would prayevery night for God to turnher "ugly" blue and whose own mother found peace, cleanliness, and tendernessonly in the blue-eyed, blond hair children she was hired to tend.'4A few years later,Maxine Hong Kingstonplaced in the center of her novel The Woman Warrior scene in a deserted school bathroom where we find the Asian a American girl narrator verballydenigratingand physicallyabusinganother child whose looks remind her of herself.'5The wound endures.Almost all final critics of the Morrisonand Kingston texts stressthe female narrators' few against the impedimentof "self-hatred"; have been willing "triumph" to acknowledge the unresolvableshadowsof that agony or the complicaof tions that it producesfor the notion of "agency" racedand feminine subjects in these texts. My purposeis neither to prove white preferencenor to lament that we have not "comevery far." Instead,I want to point out that it has been and still is deeply politically uncomfortableto talk about the depth of this history of idealizationand wounding. I also want to suggestthat looking into the heart of that injurymay reveal a more complex image of agency in the face or gripof beauty.This paperis thus an attempt to think throughsome or of the deeperissuesunderlyingour notions of "good" "bad" beauty,especially in the arenas of gender and race. My argumentis not a defense of beauty,for beauty can indeed humiliate and exclude as well as inspire and elevate.l6 Instead, I would like to shift discussion away from judging beauty'sjudgment and examine instead what it is about beauty that renders it such a likely conduit for racial-not just racist-imaginings and,

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within the history of the politics of that imagining, what it means for a woman of color to "possess" beauty. What has been missingis a sustainedlook at what it is aboutbeautythat rendersit such a likely excuse, false witness, or alibi for talkingabout something else (race, gender,morality,power,and so forth), as well as the ways in which beautyexceeds or falls short of sustainingsuch a demand.I would like to begin a conversationabouthow to approachbeautyas a perceptualpsychical activity,by which I do not mean the scientific, cognitive process of trying to determine what makes something or someone beautiful, the answerto which almost universallycircles aroundsymmetryand harmony. In fact, I often find that such effortsto "explicate"beauty end up displacing beauty as a phenomenon by replacingthat experience with a so-called objective or utilitarian explanation. The latter invariably distracts one from having to account for beauty'sforce. More problematically, fact that the perceptionof beautymay be said the to have multiple determinantshas often been taken, mistakenly,to mean that beauty is thereforenot real or does not really exist; that is, the fact that beautymay be indefinablehas allowed people to assumethat it is illusory or false. Instead, I am much more interested in proceeding from the assertionthat beautyas a perceptualphenomenon in fact exists and in analyzing what that perceptualphenomenon provokes at the level of psychical navigation. Thus I wish to focus on the fact of beauty as an experience, as distinct from the cause of beauty. I am much more interested in the natureof that experience itself, which I proposeis neither harmoniousnor harmony-sustaining.I will argue that beauty is a vertiginous experience, launched by and launching crises of identification in the eyes of the beholder.As such, beauty is too volatile to sustain either the evil decried by many or the solution hoped for by others. Fraudulent Love What is the psychical experience of perceiving beauty?And why is it that the moment of beauty-as-differentiation so often conflated with is gender and racial differentiations?If we think again of Burke'sfamous racially phobic moment in his account of sublime terror,we can see that the moment of distinction from beauty determines beauty. But the intricate conflation of aesthetic, racial, and gender differentiationshas yet to be teased out. While the racial, political, moral, and legal claims deduced from the Clarkexperiment-that racialpreferenceleads to psychicaldamage on the part of the raciallydenigratedsubject-attempt to outline the consequences of racial ideology, they do not addressthat ideology'ssubmerged,related implicationsfor private and public conceptions of beauty. The elision of the issue of gender in the Clarks' doll test is probablyas
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noticeable to readerstoday as the historic elision of Mamie Clark'sname in referenceto the researchshe in fact initiated. Lookingback on that doll test, genderposes a conspicuouslyabsent term. While racial differencewas the central and sole object of inquiryin the experiment, the issue of gender differentiationbegs for analysisas well. What remainsunexamined by both the social scientists and the lawyers is the potential interaction between gender and race. The original Clark experiment did not distinguish between boys'and girls'responsesto the test, and the male legal team of the NAACP who deployed the experimentwas not preparednor was it asked to examine the gender implications entangled with this evidence. This is not to say, however, that the researchand its userswere free from genderquestions or anxieties. In the uses of the experiment,we can detect the pressuresof gender as an unarticulatedterm. In his definitive account Justice:Brownv. Boardof Educationand BlackAmerica's Simple for Struggle Richard Klugerrecords-for dramaand for added "humaninterEquality, ests"-the incredulity and jokes that surroundedthe initial reception of Kenneth Clark and "his dolls" by NAACP lawyers.Not only were the lawyers initially skeptical about bringing such evidence into court, but Kluger records how, upon first meeting Kenneth Clark, the NAACP and "strange" that a grown man should be travellawyersfound it "funny" with a suitcase full of dolls; they were only "put at ease" when they ing were reassuredthat the dolls were "forbusiness."''17 With regardto the experiment itself, we are also provoked to wonder whether gender identification or disidentificationmight have playeda role in the children's responses, which were taken to signify only racial responses.Alternately, did those children's"racial" responseshold gender implications?While the dolls used in the experimentwere gender indeterminate (accordingto Kenneth Clark, ten-cent dolls bought from the drug store with no hair and dressedin shabbyinfant gowns), dolls as play objects for children both define and enable gender differentiation.They are frequently understoodto be objects through which children explore sexuality. At the same time, they of course also contribute to the discipline of gender differentiation:after all, everyone knows that "dolls are for girls." Thus there is a host of questions about gender that the experiment provokes but does not acknowledge.The relation of this particulardramatization of racial trauma in relation to potential gender trauma lingers on mutely. Both Morrisonand Kingstoncan be seen as imaginativelyrevisiting the drama of the Clarks' doll test. Indeed, The Bluest Eye and The Woman Warrior may be seen as working specifically toward articulatingthe connection between racial and gender trauma.In their "restaging" this hisof tory, both insist upon the gender components of racial preference and

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rejection. Morrisonspecificallysituatesthis problemas a problemfor black as girls, a problemof their "lovability" Pecola Breedlove believed and the adults of her community inadvertently proved. For Kingston, the Asian American girl narrator's hatredof her femininity (the dreaded"flowerstem neck," "softcheeks,""flowinglong hair")is conditioned by her fear of her "Chineseness"-that is, of that femininity'sinevitable racial-ethnic signification. By situating this scene of intersubjective and intrasubjective abuse (the scene is eerily and powerfullya mise-en-sceneof conflict within the narrator herselfas well as between the narrator another girl) in the and school bathroom, a classic site of gender differentiation, Kingston may even be suggestingthat racialdifferenceand its denigrationcondition gender differentiationratherthan the other way around.18 More productivethan prescribing priorityof genderversusracialdifthe ferentiation in any given child's development, however, is the pressing question raisedby their conjunction: how to "cure"the ills of that collusion between racial and gender differentiationused to supportracial and gender denigration? We recall how the child narrator of The Woman Warrior tried to turn herself "Americanfeminine"(p. 172) as an antidote against Chinese chauvinism, but "Americanfemininity" is surely a term not free from its own burdensof oppression.Thus the escape from one set of racial-ethnic tyrannies through the overevaluation of racial difference and (the idealizationof that which is "American" white) hardlyalleviates gender discriminationbut inherits another set of problems.The dilemma cannot be solved by replacing one ideal with another. The complication lies in the active but uneven ways that racial and gender differentiations condition specific, personalchoices in specific, social contexts for different individuals. In The BluestEye Morrisonlays out for us a range (ratherthan a single view) of psychicalformationsin responseto racialdiscrimination.In addition to Pecola Breedlove, we are also given Claudia, the most consistent narratorin the novel, who is another small black girl child. In contrast to Pecola, who desperatelysucks on her candied MaryJanes to borrowtheir magic of white, female beauty, Claudia tells us of her reactions to being given every Christmasby the adults in her family the "loving gift" of a "blond,blue-eyed doll":
I had only one desire:to dismemberit.... But the dismemberingof dolls was not the true horror.The trulyhorrifying thing was the transferenceof the same impulsesto little white girls. ... To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic they weaved on others. What made people look at them and say, "Awwwww," not for me? The but eye slide of black women as they approachedthem on the street, and the possessive gentleness of their touch as they handled them. If I pinched them, their eyes-unlike the crazedglint of the baby doll's 198

eyes-would fold in pain, and their cry would . . . [be] a fascinating cry of

this how repulsive disinterested violencewas,that it pain.When I learned becauseit was disinterested, shamefloundered was repulsive aboutfor my frompristine The best hidingplacewas love. Thus the conversion refuge. sadism fabricated to to love. hatred, fraudulent It wasa smallstepto Shirley I muchlaterto worship (pp.20;22-23) her. Temple. learned Morrison is giving us not the proof but the etiology of self-hatred.For a child coming to racial discriminationtaught by her own family, affective value and distinction (how one tells the differencebetween love and hate) and become so entangled that love and hate both come to be "fabricated" "fraudulent." racial-aestheticdiscrimination(acquiringa taste for Learning Shirley Temple) thus requiresradicalemotional unlearning. The key moment of coming-to-knowledge("When I learned .. .") that splits the narratorinto a Claudia before- and a Claudia after-knowledge poses something of a puzzle.According to Claudia, the pedagogicalpoint is not the realizationof the repulsivenessof violence as one might expect, of but the realization of the "disinterestedness" that violence. Yet how could that violence for little white girls who steal black mothers' loving when it would seem that jealousresponsesare most gazesbe "disinterested" interested?And in what sense can disinterest be repulsive?We certainly to distinctive choice of the word"disinterested" can understandMorrison's some psychicaldistance, some sense of dis-compassionon the partof imply Claudia, in which case her lesson would be the realizationof the negative social value placed on sadistic pleasure,her initial pleasure in the "fascinating cry of pain." But the passageremainstroubling,for does this mean violence would thereforenot be repulsive? that "interested" Since mattersof seriousinterest (maternaland racial) fuel the psychical a energy of this lesson, we must also read in Claudia's"disinterest" lesson about disavowal. What is it that Claudia is not acknowledging in her acknowledgedrejection of white femininity?To answer this question, we have to returnto a priorlesson takingplace in the scene: what it means for little black girls to watch "the eye slide of black women." The black women's"eyeslide"and tender handling of little white girlsreveal two different longings: the yearning to have and the yearning to be little white girls. For Claudia, the formermight be processed,even domesticated, as a formof sibling rivalry,wherebythe child sees but does not fully understand why Mother prefersthe other child. (And, indeed, Claudia meditates on the mysteriousattractions exerted by the "other.")Reframedas a family drama,the neglected child's rage is justifiable,fair, and, in this sense, disinterested. For Claudia before-knowledge,violence is a just compensation for such rejection. Indeed, Claudia'srage againstsuch maternalpreference for the other reveals a strong sense of "self-esteem,"as today'stalk-show rhetoric would propose. But what is more difficult for the black daughter 199

to process is black mothers' desire:the self-abandoning, identificatory yearning revealed in their reach for little white girls on the street. What Claudia cannot affordto see, what must not be acknowledgedin orderfor her to maintain her sense of her own interests,to maintain the justice of her rage, is the women's interest: their profound, affective, psychical investment in the promise-and-denialof whiteness-a specificity that excludes both Claudiaand the women themselves, a specificitythat insists upon the racial dimension of that rivalrybetween white and black girls in which the latter could never truly compete. The sight of those women's reach spells a rejection of black girlhood (a rejection not only of their potential black daughtersbut also of their own childhoods). In this light, the connection between black mothers and black daughtersis radically and historically severed. If black women are ideally models of identification for black girls, then that lesson is seriouslyjeopardized here, replaced by an identification (for mothers and daughtersalike) with an impossible third party. Claudia thus eventually learns to love Shirley Temple, I would argue, not merely or even primarilyas a gestureof social compliance, but rather as a responseto the call of the mother, as a perverseform of maternalconnection. Only by learning to love little white girls can little black girlsbe like their mothers. This lesson about social value, which constitutes the pedagogy of racism, travels a tortuous path of alienation, resistance, aggression,and then, finally,domesticationand identification. Even then, that final identification signals a continuous processof negotiating the painful distance between self and the other. The final capitulation to Shirley Temple embodies its own critique:"Itwas a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worshipher, just as I learnedto delight in cleanliness, knowing, as I learned, that the change was adjustmentwithout improvement" (p. 23). Beautyfor Claudia is a convoluted lesson in desire that, even as it reaches a goal (the new object of desire, Shirley Temple), nonetheless never quite achieves stable meaning. This last claim-"it was adjustment without improvement"-is also slightly puzzling.Is it a statement mourning the self's continued inability to assume fully that white ideal; an acknowledgment of the emptiness of such compliance; or even a larger allusion to the nature of social "improvement" African American comin munities?The answercan in fact be all of the above, or, at least, the statement's ambiguity informs us that, for the object of discrimination, it is impossibleto disentangle these meanings. Claudia'srelationshipsto ideal white beauty,to her own self-perception,to other black women, and to the larger African American community bespeak desire and critique-or
desire in spite of critique.

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Not surprisingly, then, Claudia's education in female beauty is fraught with respect to both the culturally iconic figure of Shirley Temple and the abject figure of Pecola Breedlove, the one who both resembles and remains other to Claudia herself. In one of the bleakest moments in the novel, Claudia describes, not dominant white society's construction of beauty through the rejection of the raced other and racial difference, but the black community's own access to such fantasies of beauty through the denigration of one of its own: We were so beautifulwhen we stood astrideher ugliness. Her simplicitydecoratedus, her guilt sanctifiedus, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardnessmade us think we had a sense of humor.Her inarticulatedness made us believe we were eloquent. Her povertykept us generous.Even her waking dreamswe used-to silence our own nightmares.... We honed our ego on her, paddedour characterswith her frailty,and yawned in the fantasyof our strength. (p. 205) Claudia is learning the logic of idealization and that logic's need for its inverse. The dreams of sovereignty and virtue-the fulfillment of social health, eloquence, and compassion-are realized through the alibi of the other, the negative image. Pecola's abjection embodies beauty and renders it visible. If Pecola's "ugliness" is a social construction forged out of a contrast with idealized whiteness, then this passage equally shows that the abjected community's access to reclaimed beauty is also a social construction ("the fantasy of our strength") forged out of the self-same contrast with whiteness, hypostatized in the figure of Pecola "Breed-love." In the Afterword written more than two decades after the publication of The Bluest Eye, Morrison tells us that the novel was inspired by a childhood relationship she herself had with another African American girl. When her elementary schoolmate declared to Morrison that she wanted to have blue eyes, Morrison tells us that she "got mad" at her: [My friend]said she wanted blue eyes.... I "got mad"at her.. .. Until that moment I had seen the pretty,the lovely, the nice, the ugly,and I although I had certainly used the word "beautiful," had never experienced its shockIt must have been more than the face I was examining: the silence of the street in the early afternoon, the light, the atmosphereof confession. In any case it was the first time I knew beautiful. Had imagined it for myself. (p. 209) Who stands under the light of the confession, the friend or Morrison herself? At what did Morrison "get mad"? Is she disappointed with her friend for having internalized dominant racial ideals, for proving Kenneth and Mamie Clark's research? Or for imposing on herself the apprehension of beauty?

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The moment of seeing through beauty in Morrison (of dismantling beauty'ssocial source and construction) is also, curiously,the moment of finding beauty. This moment is ambiguous,markingeither an instant of critical separationor psychical identification (or both) between the young girls. This exchange between them instantiates a moment of knowledge: the postlapsariandistinction of beauty,the "shock"of its recognition and presence. One may even go as far as to locate in this vertiginousblend of critical alienation and profound intimacy the kernel of what is "mad"in this memory.Counterintuitivelyto the frequentlycited notion that beauty comes from an objective condition of symmetrythat produces pleasing harmony to the mind, Morrison's"confession" begins to suggestthat it is difference-specifically, difference as the very question of harmony and disharmony-that beauty evokes and that engendersthe consciousnessof beauty. StunnedintoVirtue In a sense, I am interested in beauty'sfirst moment-the moment anterior to the mind'sevaluation. Priorto a viewer'spronouncementon beauty as either inspirationalor humiliating, beauty produces in its beholder a kind of consternation:the "shock" beauty.Indeed, the dangerof owning of up to beauty, aside from its political-moralimplications, may have something to do with the confusion that it causes. The shock of beauty for Morrisonremains in the registerof ambivalence and ambiguity,a disorienting moment of denial and discovery,an ideological critiquethat reconfirms what it unpacked. Morrison'sconfession is also paradigmaticof the ways that the confrontation with beauty throws one back to self-assessment: "hadimagined it for myself."It is this turn to the self in the face of beauty that I wish to examine in the second half of this essay,for it may shed light on an ongoing problem in the treatmentof beauty in racialdiscourse: that is, the elision of the subjective implications of perceiving beauty. Since beauty has been mostly conceived of as a judgmentthat objectifies the other, it has often been discussedin termsof what it does to someone or something that is the object of perception. Consequently,the possibility of beauty as an active, confounding confrontation with the "self' has not been much examined. Yet when we analyzethe traditionalassumptions underlyingviews of beauty-as-object,we begin to find some unsettling complications. For example, let me begin with the common opinion that beauty representsan object of value, operatingwithin a value economy. This view frequently associates beauty with a fetishistic economy. Beautyseems to offeritself as a quintessentialobject of fetishization.(After all, it seems to be beauty'smain job to affix the viewer-we call it enthrall202

ment.) One might even say that, for manypeople, the perceptionof beauty is the mode of fetishization.Whether it is the beauty of commensurability (that which constitutes the standardto be comparedwith) or the beauty of difference (that which is exotic, unique, and cannot be compared), beauty seems made for the service of incarnatingthe fetish. For many,this representsone of the more pejorative aspects of beauty and may also be why we have mostly understoodbeauty in the racial imaginaryas a formof fetish. Indeed from Comte to Freud to Marx, "fetish"is a term that is almost alwaysnegatively inflected. Yet is beauty'seconomy merelyfetishistic? Conversely,does the elimination of fetishistic desire liberatebeauty? I am thinking too of the dilemma in political discourse about beauty where the assertionof the "politicallycorrect"ends up skirtingclose to the fetish it is designed to chastise. Consider, for example, the controversy swirlingover Alex Wek, a twenty-year-oldSudanesemodel who has taken the Western (and traditionally very white) fashion world by storm and for who has been either exalted as a breakthrough or denigratedas a stereotypical re-evocation of conceptions of African beauty. Or, more disturbingly,consider how a recent article in A. Magazine,a "hip" Asian American periodical, heralds the end of Asian female fetishization in the pornographicindustryby pointing out that Asian women are now enjoyrather than anonymity,in that profession.19 this asser(In ing "stardom," tion, we easily see how racial success has been acquiredat the expense of feminist considerations.) Indeed, the tendency to revalue beauty (from something bad to something good or vice versa) elides an examination of beauty'sinternal, identificatorylogic: that is, we have yet to examine the relationship that the fetish bears to the type through which we represent, understand, and identify ourselves. Consequently, the symptom of and antidote against beauty often fold into one another. The question of fetishizingbeautyreallypartakesof a largerproblemof how we understand and deploy the continuum that connects, even as it divides, the stereotype and the representative.We must also explore the role of subjectivity and self-identification in relation to this continuum. We often fail to acknowledge how the fetish as a form of perceptual logic may be crucial to any experience of pleasure.I do not mean to suggest that if we universalizethe notion of the fetish, we can then depathologize it. I am interestedrather in askingwhether the very processof pleasure might be inherently objectifying and whether such so-called objectification might compromise-or constitute-the observer'sown subject position more than the viewer would like or can afford to acknowledge. Indeed, I suspect that once we allow the subject-objectdiscretion implied in the fetish-scopic structure to be potentially an unstable distinction, then we will see that beauty operates most like a fetish economy at the

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point where the fetish economy fails-that is, at the point where the consumerand the object of consumption merge. versusa cultural"other," If the fetish structureimplies a cultural"norm" then beauty is alreadya strangeterm that straddlesboth. What is the distance, if any, between the beauty of the familiar and the beauty of the exotic-what earlier I called the beauty of commensurabilityand the beauty of difference? Beyond the idea of how they might define each other through mutual exclusion, can we imagine them as simultaneous,coexisting values in one individual?How do we evaluate the pleasureof such juxtaposition?Upon closer examination, the fetish, as a traditionallynegatively connoted term, in fact embodies several contradictions.In conventional wisdom, the fetish symbolizesthe "improper" valuation of beauty in both racial and sexual imagination; in psychoanalyticterms, it embodies both the representativeand the exotic. (Thus the fetish can referto both sexual and racial fixation, and it conflates the typical with the atypical:as in Freud,a fetish is a very specific object that can be projectedand found everywhere.) In his extensive archaeologyof the term, anthropologistWilliam Pietz proposes that the history of the fetish is a history of the convergence between imperialisteconomy and value.20He traces the fetish as an idea and a problem to the cross-cultural space of the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and sees it specifically as a problem of value in the constant themes of transaction on the Guinea Coast between the early Europeantravelersand the "natives." The fetish, as a symbol of how a very differentculture assignssocial value to material objects, became for the European imagination a quintessential sign of African irrationalityand otherness. As Pietz notes, "the Europeantraders constantly remarkedon the trinkets and trifles they tradedfor objects of real value" (p. 5)-a fact they both derided and took advantageof. Pietz notes that Kant in 1764 would explain African fetish worshipas based on a principle of "trifling," what he calls "the ultimate degeneration of the principle of the beautifulbecause it lacked all sense of the sublime"(p. 6). The ability to discriminatepropervalue, therefore,marksthe sign of aesthetic taste and hence "true" civility. The aesthetic/philosophicaltruth of beauty is value: although the aesthetic has historically claimed an ideal exemption from the crassconsiderationsof materialismand utilitarianism (consider the aphorismthat "beautydoes not have to work for a living"), beauty has in fact been workingfor its keep for a long time. Hence, at the height of Victorian civility, we find in Prideand Prejudice one of Jane Austen'scoarsercharactersutteringwhat finer mannerswould have left unsaid, the social truth of beauty,when Mrs. Bennet exclaims to her eldest daughterupon the announcement of her engagement:"Oh, my

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dear dearJane ... I was sure you could not be so beautifulfor nothing!"21 By naming the value of Jane's beauty, Mrs. Bennet has simultaneously reduced and consigned her daughter'sbeauty to a market economy-in this case, the marriage market. According to such calculations, Jane's beauty could not, or at least should not, survive after fulfilling its valuethat is, after marriage.Indeed, Mrs. Bennet reminds us early in the same novel, "When a woman has five grown up daughters,she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty"(p. 4). Beauty'smarketvalue thus both inscribescivility and circumscribesbeauty'seffects within the boundaries of that civility. For the woman of color, however, there are several competing economies exercising their demands:racial, gendered,and political valuations that are at times contradictoryand especiallyrevealingof the ways in which beautyas a phenomenon might exceed those very values assignedto domesticate it. For the racialized woman, the possibility of "owning" beauty is worth nothing and everything. On the one hand, it is worth nothing because the prospect is impossible in the context of a Western philosophical tradition that has specifically defined beauty as whiteness and has used beauty to define whiteness. On the other hand, the prospect of beauty for the woman of color is worth everything since the cultural mythology of feminine beauty tells us that its guaranteeof plenitude can erase or cover over signs of any lack or difference, even racial difference. (Perfection, after all, promisescompletion: the lack of lack.) This latter prospectis what the characterClare Kendryin Nella Larsen's novel Passingcounts on and what, in another genre, the Asian American showgirl Linda Low, played by Nancy Kwan, means when she informsus in the musical FlowerDrum Song that, for a woman, the most important In thing to be is "a success in her gender."22 light of the racializationand commodification of Asian and Asian American women in Hollywood, which has historicallyensuredthat the only access to any kind of stardom for a woman of color must be through her gender (that is, her feminine beauty that compensates for her racial lack), Linda Low's politically and embarrassing frivolous-we might even say "trifling"-statement is in fact full of pathos. In other words,although it may seem as if the character Low has but uttered a gendered truism about beauty in the 1960s, she is also articulating a fervent aspiration for that truism to serve as a stay against the racial reality of the day. Let us rememberthat this image of Linda Low celebratingherself in front of the three-waymirrorharksback to a traditional representation of female narcissism made cinematically more than unforgettableby MarilynMonroe in How to Marrya Millionaire a decade ago. According to Richard Dyer in his study HeavenlyBodies, "one of the most reproducedstills from any of [Monroe's]films is a shot

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that lasts only a few seconds in the film itself. . . in the pose, one hand thrown back behind her head in self-consciousabandon,and in the multiple mirrors,offering her an orgy of delight in her own reflection."23 Dyer that the image goes on to proposein a separateessayentitled "Whiteness" of Monroe connotes not only a gender ideology (the idea, for instance, that a beautiful woman must be narcissistic)but also a racial one.24Dyer suggeststhat Monroe'sblondnessexposes an ideology of whiteness embedded in the codes of cinematic beauty.Within this context and againstsuch a comparison,how can Nancy Kwan persuadethe movie viewers of 1961 to accept her as a substitute for Marilyn Monroe (whom Dyer calls the apotheosisof Hollywood'scelebrationof whiteness) in front of that proverbial three-waymirrorexcept through the equally proverbialfantasy of an extravagant female beauty that can erase racial disparity and except That such through the sincerity of her song "I Enjoy Being a Girl"?25 melodic euphoriashould finally be judgedinsufficientby the musical itself, which diegetically pronounces Linda Low's failure (she loses out in the competition for the leading man's love), should tell us much about the ambivalencegeneratedby a "raced" beauty,no matterhow successfullyshe performsthe certitude of femininity ("When I have a brandnew hair-do, and my lashes all in curls, I float as the clouds on air do-I enjoy being a girl!"). It may be beauty'stask to banish the twin spectersof race and castration, but it accomplishesthis job only by offeringan unforgivingidentity predicated on an equally complusive reminder of the haunting potential of lack. In psychoanalyticunderstanding, woman (whether white or nonno white) can overcome the uglinessof castration.This suggeststhat there are two reasons why Linda Low's strategy fails: first, "girlness" cannot overcome nonwhiteness;second, girlnessas beauty (as that which negates castration) cannot overcome girlness as ugliness (castration). Thus even for the white woman, even for Marilyn Monroe, girlness and its performed fetishization fail. Yet although both women in front of those mirrorsmay be said to have failed to overcome "female lack" in the psychoanalytic sense, Linda'sfailure is, unlike Monroe'scharacter,diegetically confirmed and socially validated.Her "feminine" failureis thus validatedthroughher failure:she is the wronggirl becauseshe is raciallywrong,both for "racial" the "pure" Chinese community imaginedin the movie and for mainstream Hollywood who finally wants her to be the emblematic "pure"Asian woman in spite of her biracialbackground.So far,we are witnessing a case of the woman of color bearingthe double "castration" gender and racial of differences-the familiarunderstandingof the woman of color as bearing a double lack. As both Clare Kendryand LindaLow discover,racialdifference will triumphover beauty'spromise.Clare gets thrown out a window

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while Linda gets exposed as a fraudand as obscenity itself in a strip act. This is the traditionallesson about beauty,femininity, and race. But do the connections among beauty,femininity, and race yield only this kind of lesson?When we take a closer look, we see that such a lesson has distractedus from the more provocative and perhapsmore dangerous work of examining the affinities as well as the antagonismsamong these terms.Rather than seeing these narrativeresolutionsexclusively as confirmations of how insurmountableracial categories are, I propose that there is another effect as well: beauty as a spectacle also paradoxicallyscrambles the racial codes operating in both works about beauty's"passing." Upon closer examination, what is beautifulabout both Clare and Lindaturnsout to be precisely their doubleness:their presence as not purity,but melange. In Passing,Larsenrepeatedlynotes Clare'sbeauty,not for its appearanceof hair against whiteness, but for its contrast against darkness:her "bright" her startling "dark" eyes (pp. 173, 177, 191). What is most "compelling" of (p. 190) about Clare is the "mystery" her beauty,the unlikely combination of "ivory" and "blackness" 191). Jack Bellew'snickname for Clare, (p. "Nig,"reveals more than his own contradictorydesires;it also names the "difference" that is Clare'sloveliness. In FlowerDrum Song,Nancy Kwan, the biracial,Asian-British actress,plays an Asian woman in America who is also paradoxicallyvisually and fantasmaticallycoded as white; thus narrativity,visuality,biography,and symbolismall converge to limn a convoluted and racially indeterminatebody. She is at once the American standard (the "L.L.D.": "long legged dame") and the Asian exotic ("FanTan Fanny"). Similarly, Clare is at once a beauty that all can agree on (her and apparent"whiteness")and a beauty that is exotic (the "unusualness" unlikeliness of her darkeyes). What is seductive about both bodies is their potential for alterity-the body that is different from its skin, the body The busily denouncing yet revealing the difference that it embodies.26 of "value" Lindaand Clare'sbeauty is not that it affordsthe viewer the luxury of a fetishistic logic-"I know, but.. ." (such as the fetishistic logic so often assigned to Bellew'sdesire for Clare); instead, it rendersimpossible the distinction between values, between the contents of that which is being recognizedand that which is being denied. Is Clare Kendrythe concentrated object of desire in the novel for her whiteness in spite of her darkness,or vice versa?The answer is precisely something beyond that binary distinction. Beauty in the racial register is always in danger of obscuringthe distance between the standardand the exotic; indeed, the standardis only beautiful when it embodies-barely beneath the skin-the exotic, and vice versa. What was the condition of vital distinction thematizedby these plots turnsout to be none other than the condition of the impossibilityof distinction.

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Clare and Linda'sdifferentand differingbeautiesdo not solidifyboundaries. Instead,they initiate a confrontationwith boundary. The prospectof it is about witnessing it or having it) interiorizesfor the beauty (whether viewer a topographyof distance and approximation,and as such it enacts a simultaneous process of identification and estrangement that remains central to-yet alwaysdisplaces-racial difference.We might think about the experience of beautyas an experience of topographical navigation durwhich the subject travels the distances between self and ideal in an ing effort to situate him/herself. Beauty as a phenomenon calls into being in the viewer an instantaneous,complex processof identification, disidentification, projection, and rejection. There can be no untouched, discrete "self"contemplatinga beautywithout; the experience of beautyhas always alreadycalled that "self"into profoundrelation with beauty.This journey or navigation makes the experience of beauty an easy analogue for racial identification, a processof self-definition that is predicatedon identification and disidentification, a constant negotiation between "self" and "other." This analogybetween perceivingbeauty and perceivingracialdifference, however,should highlight the unsteadinessratherthan the stability in both processes.Insofaras both are processesof negotiation, they also render impossiblethe notion of discrete differenceon which any identity is formed.In other words,the fetishizationof beauty,like the fetishization of race, involves a complicated psychical procedure that encompasses identificatorycomplicity as much as identificatoryothering. Looking intently at the effects of beauty on the mind, Elaine Scarryin On BeautyandBeingJust points to beauty'sability to producewhat she calls an "un-selfing"and a "radicaldecentering" (p. 11) on the part of the beholder.For Scarry,such departures from the self form the basis of a nonself-referentialethics necessaryfor imaginingjustice. I would like to reformulate her premiseto proposethat beauty indeed solicits a radicaldecentering but does so by effecting a simultaneousprocessof unselfing and selfing. In the face of beauty,one becomes intensely awareof all that the self is not and is. It is this dynamic of becoming least and most like oneself (one might say the processof identification itself) that rendersbeautysuch a likely conduit for racial imagining,which is also a processof selfing and unselfing, identity and disidentity.27 (Indeed, is not the most beautiful of Scarry's treatise itself not so much the conclusiveness of its theaspect sis as the displayof a quicksilver,mobile mind that calls the readerat every turn to gauge his or her own experiential and perceptual identification with the visions evoked, to approximatehis or her distance from or intithat palmscan be found everywherein macy with claims such as the "fact" Matisse and in the world?) What both seduces and generates anxiety aroundfigureslike Clare Kendryand Linda Low is preciselythe unavoid-

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able solicitation of questions like, "How am I like or not like her?""Could I have or be her, and what would that make me (raciallyand sexually)?"in short, Irene and Jack'squestions in Passingand the questions of almost all the charactersin FlowerDrum Songwho contemplate Linda'sbeauty. Scarrytells us that the experience of beauty solicits three responses:the desires for replication, education, and, finally, justice. The beholder of beauty,one might say,is stunned into virtue. Yet what is happening in that moment of being "stunned," priorto moraljudgmentor action?Some profound psychical disorientation and self-inquiry is taking place, which moral, utilitarian, and other socioculturalvalues are then summoned to contain. We can now see Daniel Deronda'sfamousquestion about beauty as not really a question about beauty at all, but about the afterthoughtsof beauty:he would not have been asking the question if he had not already found Gwendolyn Harleth to be beautiful, if he had not alreadyfelt the blow-the shock-of those "beams." is precisely his relations to those It shafts that he is tryingto negotiate via moraljudgment.And it is precisely Eliot'srelation to Gwendolyn'smesmerizing beautythat Derondaas a character has been solicited to cure. (Consider the novel's obsessive comparison between its two female and male leads, between Gwendolyn'sparticularly "feminine"beauty and Deronda'smoral and masculine beauty as its antidote.) To be able to identify beauty (in the guise of judging it) is to have already experienced the self-identification and disidentification of beauty. We are so used to thinking about beauty'sinjuriouseffects that we overlook beauty as a phenomenon of solicitation and rejection, inducing the psychical processesthat inform identification. Beauty as a phenomenon is provokedby and encouragesthe processof assessmentand comparison.My point is not to claim that those cultural values that become attached to beauty as an experience do not have actual social consequences. On the contrary,I would argue that we can only understandthose consequences by examining how the "beautiful" groundon which they are built is anybut stable, how it never ceases to generatetensions that social meanthing ing continually laborsto stabilizeand fix. Beautyfor the woman of color must be seen as a sign of the possibilities and impossibilitiesof occupying a certain subjectposition. Forthe woman of color looking at herself,beautyas a processof identification registersher relationship to the education of beauty and to her history of negotiating that education-a negotiation of distancesratherthan an act only of internalization or compliance. Beauty as a question, as much as it may exclude her, also grantsher an access to the intensities of its demands and its posand sibilities. Both Clare'shaunting "brightness" Linda'sinfectious "joy," even as they serve as signs of subjection, also exceed the racial lesson they

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have been called upon to evidence. If, as Joseph Roach argues,aesthetics denotes a nostalgiafor presence28 if the fetish is commonly considered and an impoverishmentof presence, then the racializedwoman'srelationship to herself as a perceptualobject-as a "fetish"-must involve both symptomization and management of a presence historically yearned for and invariablycompromised. It is then at the initiatory,mobile, and continually contested site of loss and lack that beauty as value and as perception collides and transforms most powerfullyinto ideals of gender and race. To see beauty as injurious without also seeing its own wounded conditions for being is but to repeat the values created to acculturatebeauty.While beauty as a processof difference-and-identificationserves as a likely discursivealibi for racial and gender ideologies, it also operates at a level beyond the values (however contradictoryat times) institutedby socioculturaleconomies. Thus beauty can be a powerfultool for exercising racial ideology,but it is also a symptom of that ideology'sdesire to be seduced into indeterminancy. Concluding Speculations Ancient Greeks called beauty charis,which means both beauty and derives. Beauty thus bears an intigrace, from which the word "charity" mate, if not identical, relationshipto grace. In what sense is beauty grace itself?One possibilitymust be beauty'sgivenness:a gift that asksfor nothing in return.This may be what is most terrifyingabout beauty:the possibility that it might askfor nothing and want nothing of us. (Is this fearnot what Freud translatesinto the specifically gendered, dreadedprospect of female narcissisticbeauty?)The fear in the face of beauty is that we may
not be able to own it, buy it, give it, or refuse it, even as we are profoundly

moved by it. Yet the unmanageabilityof this experience, while threatening, may also be its most profoundgift: that is, it is preciselybeauty'simmanence (not to be confused with harmony)-the way it gives itself, its surplus value-that renders it unmanipulatable.Thus we might imagine we can contain or deal with beauty within a market economy (be it a marriage, racial, or gender economy) wherebybeauty is tradedor stands in for something else, but there is a dimension of beauty as experience that exceeds those assignments. RichardTitmussand LewisHyde have theorizedwhat they call the "gift economy"as an economy radicallyunlike a marketor commodityconception of economics.29 The Gift: Imagination theEroticLifeof Property, In and Hyde, for instance, opens his treatise with the fascinating origins of the term "an Indian giver,"a proverbialexpressionsignifyinga giver who is so uncivilized, or so without caritas, as to ask for the return of a given gift about the (p. 4). Hyde tracesthe term to a fundamentalmisunderstanding
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gift economy between the English colonial and the Indian. For the former, a gift's value resides in its value-as-possession. For the latter, a cardinal property of the gift is its demand to be given away again. "In fact," Hyde explains, "it is better if the gift is not returned but is given instead to some new, third party" (p. 4). Thus the colonials, locked in their perceptions of market and commodity economy, could not suspect or understand this alternative economy that is not about profit and loss, but about circulation and the creation of an unseen bond.30 Indeed, the main thrust of Hyde's argument highlights an alternative economy of gift giving that reveals values that do not participate in a commodity or market logic. Can we think of beauty, even in the realms of racial and gender exchanges, as producing a kind of gift economy: a gift not of peace, harmony, or justice, but a gift that brings us back into intense and lived contact with all the uneasy, multiple, and continuous psychical processes that go into the making and remaking of our own boundaries-the grace of perceptual questioning in a world of unremitting differences? NOTES 1George Eliot, DanielDeronda(New York:OxfordUniversity Press,1998), p. 3. There has been an increasingperception that the advent of culturalstudies, in focusing on the sociopolitical aspects of the phenomena of popular culture, has undermined the place of literatureand literarystudy and has exiled questions of aesthetic considerations.Accordingly,a number of recent works attempt to recuperate the aesthetic for progressivecultural analysis and to understandcultural studies' own complex relations to aesthetics. See Scott Heller, "Wearyingof Cultural Studies, Some Scholars Rediscover Beauty," in Chronicle of Higher Education,September 1999; Elaine Scarry,On Beauty and BeingJust (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Peter Schjeldahl, "BeautyContest: The Perilsof Pleasure," New Yorker, November 1999, pp. 108-10. Subsequentref1 The erences to Scarrywill be cited parentheticallyin the text. I stresshere that the urge to "rescue" beautyonce again for literarystudiesmay be misleading:that is, the idea that literatureand literarystudiesonce enjoyed the pleasuresof beauty is deceptive since literature and literary criticism have in fact never been that at ease with beauty.The dichotomy of politics versusaesthetics has alwaysbeen with us. 3 Meg Armstrong,"'The Effectof Blackness': Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burkeand Kant,"Journalof Aesthetics Art Criticism, and 54, No. 3 (1996), 213-36; EmmanuelChukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment Reader(Cambridge:Blackwell, 1997); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The History and Theory of Afro-American LiteraryCriticism, 1773-1831: The Arts, Aesthetic Theory and the Nature of the African,"Diss. Clare College, CambridgeUniversity, and Stereotypes Sexuality, of 1978; SanderL. Gilman, Difference Pathology: Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Comrnell University Press, 1985); and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modemrnity Double Consciousness(Cambridge: Harvard University and
2

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Press, 1993). 4 In Notes on the Stateof Virginia (1787), Thomas Jeffersonmakes the startling move of questioning the problematic inconsistency between American claims of liberty and its own prejudicialpractice of slavery,but he quickly consoles himself on the groundsthat such "ugly" people as the Africans cannot possiblybe considered as human beings with rightsto liberty:"And is this difference[betweenblacks and whites] of no importance?Is it not the foundation of a greateror less share of beauty in the two races?.. . The circumstanceof superiorbeauty,is thought worth attention in the propagationof our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals;why not in that of man?" Reader, 97-98. Quoted by Eze, in RaceandtheEnlightenment pp The BeautyTrap:Exploring Woman's GreatestObsession(New 5 Nancy C. Baker, York: Franklin Watts, 1984); Karen A. Callaghan, Ideals of FeminineBeauty: Social, and CulturalDimensions(Westport,Connecticut: Greenwood Philosophical, Press, 1994); Wendy Chapkis, BeautySecrets:Womenand the Politicsof Appearance (Boston: South End Press, 1985); Simone de Beauvoir,Le DeuxiemeSexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); Madge Garland, The ChangingFace of Beauty: Four Hundred Years FemaleBeauty(Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Kim F.Hall, "Beautyand the of Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender,"Shakespeare 47, Quarterly, No. 4 and the Beauty (1996), 461-75; Ellen Zetel Lambert,The Face of Love: Feminism Question(Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Iris Murdoch,The Sovereignty Good over of Other Concepts: The Leslie StephenLecture (Cambridge:Cambridge University On Simone Weil, Waiting God, trans. Press, 1967); Scarry, Beautyand BeingJust; for EmmaGraufurd (New York: Harperand Row, 1951); and Naomi Wolfe, The Beauty Myth: How Imagesof Beauty Are Used Against Women (New York:Doubleday,
1991).
6 Consider, for example, Gilman'swork in "The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Towardan Iconographyof Female Sexuality,"in Difference Pathology, 76and pp. 108, which examines the figure of the Hottentot in the nineteenth-century Europeanracist imagination. Historicizing the ways in which "the black female thus comes to serve as an icon for black sexuality in general" (p. 83), Gilman demonstrateshow black female sexuality became the point de capitoninto which Europeanracist desiresand fearswere gatheredand concentrated.Sexual and sexist projectionson the black female body thus echo or serve as a conduit for racial and racist projections. In contemporarycritical discourse, the evocation of the phrase"the intersectionof race and gender"more often than not refersto the compatibility of these terms. into 7 EdmundBurke,A Philosophical Inquiry the Originof the Ideasof theSublime and the Beautiful(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 85-131, and Gilman, "The Hottentot and the Prostitute," 5. Burkeoffersas an exampleof the p. terrorassociatedwith the sublimethe storyof a blind white boy who, upon regaining his vision through surgery,felt uneasy with darkness and then experienced "greathorror at the sight" of a black woman (p. 85). FrantzFanon restages this encounter in his essay "The Fact of Blackness,"in BlackSkin, WhiteMask (New York:Grove, 1991). It has been noted that Fanon'swriting is infamouslyuninterested in the black woman, but Fanon puts himself in the place of the black woman in his rewriting of the Burkemoment. What is telling about Gilman's essay is the elision of the black male body and

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his contention that imperial Europeandread of (and fascination with) African "primitivism" expresses itself invariablyin the language of sexuality and, specifically, in the voice of the white (and heterosexual) male looking at the black female. Becauseof the historiesof the feminizationof racialdifferenceand the feminization of the aesthetic question, how a woman of color reclaimsbeautyregisters a differentset of considerationsfrom how a man of color might reclaim beauty. I should note at this point that men are not exempted from the beautyquestion although they have differentrelations to it. On the one hand, beauty in contemto porary society, when "masculinized" encompass handsomeness, build, and so forth, may be said to haunt men as well as women. We are familiarwith the culturalview that segmentsof the male homosexualculturehave coopted mainstream feminine beauty culture with all its coercive and exclusive ideals. On the other itself historically,specifically,and trenhand, insofar as the discourseof "beauty" chantly roots itself in notions of femininity and does so to install a genderedpower structure, I would suggest that beauty is still primarilyan insistent question for women in ways quite unlike its question for men. (One could easily imagine, for act instance, a man performingan "effeminizing" of vanity in front of a mirror nonetheless retaining all the assurancesof male privilege. Consider, for example, the iconographic image of patriarchal impenetrability and dandyism in Elie Nadelman'ssculpture"Manin the Open Air,"c. 1915.) Beautythus remainsa specific question for women because of the weight of its rhetorical,cultural, and sexual history and because of the power inequality it helps to install between the sexes-an inequalitythat is not necessarilyoffset by men equallysubmittingthemselves to the beauty question. Furthermore,aside from the sexual difference between men and women, there are also sexual-racialdifferencesbuilt into the historic composition of "the black man" versus "the black woman."See bell hooks, BlackLooks:Raceand Representation (Boston: South End, 1992). 8 There is plenty of evidence in mainstreammedia where the supposeddenunciation of beauty disguises an indulgence in beauty. For instance, in the midnineties, the television news-formattedshow 60 Minutesfeaturedan expose about how beautiful people unfairly receive better treatment both socially and professionally. A series of tests was conducted with a groupof "beautifulpeople" in situations similarto those of a groupof "lessattractive, normal"people. But the audito ence did not requirethe dramatizedresultsof the "experiments" believe in the truthof that claim. What was startling-and was not examined-was the judgment of beauty itself, which had alreadybeen confirmedby the unquestionedassumption that everyone knew or agreedon who constituted the "beautiful" groupin the first place. Another common critique of beauty aims at demonizing the use of cosmetics. But is beauty about make-up?That is, cosmetics and the beauty industryare often decriedas the guilty partiesin coercive beautyregimes,and, of course,the cosmetic industrydoes capitalize on women's insecurity as well as perpetuatean unspoken discourse about women as ugliness. However, does the refusalof make-up free a woman from the question of beauty?Indeed, is not the idea of a "naturalbeauty" itself part of expectations about beauty?The discourseagainstcosmetics and other "beauty aids," while not unjustified, misses some of the more intricate issues involved and often ends up reifyingthe very termsof beauty it meant to criticize.

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A 9 See Gilman, Makingthe BodyBeautiful: CulturalHistoryof Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 10 Brown v. Boardof Education,347 U.S. 483 (1954) and Brown v. Boardof 349 Education, U.S. 294 (1955). 11 Cited by RichardKluger,Simple Justice:Brownv. Boardof EducationandBlack America'sStrugglefor Equality (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1976), pp. 317-18. and YourChild Kenneth B. Clark describes the doll tests in his book Prejudice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 44-46. See also his Effect of Prejudiceand on Discrimination Personality Fact-findingReport,Mid-CenturyWhite Development, House Conference on Children and Youth (Washington,D. C.: Children'sBureau, FederalSecurity Agency, 1950). 12 See Stell v. Savannah-Chatham 220 F. Supp. 667 County Boardof Education, (1963), 669. In Stell, almost a decade after Brown,white segregationistsinvoked the psychological evidence used by the NAACP in order to make the argument that black children'sself-esteem (and "naturally inferiorminds")could only be nurtured in an all-black, that is, segregatedenvironment. For a more extensive examination of the Browncase and its legal, social, and psychologicalimpacton the discourse of racial damage,see my studyThe Melancholy Race(forthcomingOxford of University Press,December 2000). 13 Subsequent researchin the 1960s confirmed the Clarks'experiment and the conclusion of a direct correlation between oppressionand self-esteem. See Ralph Mason Dregerand Kent S. Miller, "Comparative PsychologicalStudies of Negroes and Whites in the United States,"Psychological Bulletin, No. 5 (1960), 361-402; 57, and Harold Proshanskyand Peggy Newton, "The Nature and Meaning of Negro Development,ed. Martin Self-Identity," in Social Class, Race, and Psychological Deutsche, Irwin Katz, and Arthur R. Jensen (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968), pp. 178-218. In the 1970s, when blacks were encouraged to internalize the "Black Is Beautiful"credo and to fight actively againstdiscriminationratherthan to permit degradationof the self, researchbegan to find few consistent differences in selfesteem between the races. See MorrisRosenbergand RobertaG. Simmons, Black and White Self-Esteem:The Urban School Child (Washington D. C.: American Sociological Association, 1972); Gloria Powell and MarielleFuller,BlackMonday's Children: Studyof the Effectsof SchoolDesegregation Self-Concepts Southern A on of Children(New York:Appleton-Century-Crofts,1973). This change in results, as arguedby Simmons, reflects the changing ideologies of the researchers. According to Simmons in her article "Blacks and High Self-Esteem: A Puzzle,"Social 41, Psychology, No. 1 (1978), "more recently, the champions of the oppressed emphasizethe resiliency of minority groupmembersand often view discussionsof 'impairment'in family structureand in personalityfunctioning as racist"(p. 54). Most recently, the work of Claude M. Steele reemphasizesthe psychological threat"that haunts aspectsof racisteffects by positing what he calls the "stereotype black college students, irrespectiveof their economic statuses. See his "Thin Ice: 'StereotypeThreat' and Black College Students,"The AtlanticMonthly,284, No. 2 (1999), 44-54. As my essay goes on to suggest in relation to the works of Toni Morrisonand Maxine Hong Kingston, what is missing from this debate are: (1) a sustained analysis of what it means to have "internalized" image and what it an

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means to "replace" that interior image; and (2) a reexamination of the binaristic assumptiondividing complete oppressionon the one hand and complete agencyon the other. 14 Toni Morrison,The BluestEye (New York:Plume, 1994). Subsequent references will be cited parentheticallyin the text. 15 Maxine Hong Kingston, The WomanWarrior: Memoirsof a Girlhood Among Ghosts(New York:Vintage, 1979). Subsequentreferenceswill be cited parenthetically within the text. 16 In On Beautyand Being Just,Scarryis exquisitely sensitive to those aspects of beauty that are elevating or inspiring,but she is less attuned to the ways in which beauty can exclude or humiliate. Her treatise is a reminderthat the history of aesthetics has always been as much about denigratingas celebratingbeauty, that, in fact, far from having "lost"our appreciationof beauty,we have never been at ease
with it. Justice,p. 328. '7 Kluger,Simple
18 See ElizabethAbel's essayon the politics of Jim Crow signs, "Bathroom Doors and Drinking Fountains:Jim Crow'sRacial Symbolic,"in CriticalInquiry,25, No. 3 (1999), 435-81. Abel highlights how racial differentiationmay influence gender differentiation,rather than the other way around as has been assumedin psychoanalytic discourses.Consider,too, Michele Wallace'smeditation on the conflation of gender and racial differentiation in "Anger in Isolation: A Black Feminist's Search for Sisterhood,"in Invisibility Blues:FromPop to Theory(New York:Verso, 1990). Wallace writes:"On rainydays my sisterand I used to tie the short end of a scarfaroundour scrawnybraidsand let the rest of its silken mass trail to our waists. We'd pretend it was hair and that we were some lovely heroine that we'd seen in movies. There was a time when I would have called that wanting to be white, yet the real point was being feminine. Being feminine meant white to us" (p. 18). 19Karl Taro Greenfield, "The X Files,"A. Magazine,August/September1995, pp. 32-36. 20 William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, I," RES, 9 (Spring 1985), 5-17. Pietz also traces how the term "fetish"emerges in the nineteenth century in the worksof Marx and Freud. 21 in Jane JaneAusten, PrideandPrejudice, The Illustrated Austen(Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 348. Subsequentreferenceswill be cited parenthetically within the text. 22 Nella Larsen,Passing, An Intimation ThingsDistant:The Collected in Fiction of of Nella Larsen(New York:Anchor, 1992). The musical FlowerDrumSong(1960), with music by Rodgersand Hammerstein,was basedon the novel of the same name by C. Y. Lee. It was made into a movie by Universal Pictures in 1961, directed by Henry Koster and producedby Ross Hunter. This paper refersto the film version, because the film version stars the biracial actress Nancy Kwan, whose racial "mixedness" complicates, in symbolic and pragmaticways, the racial and gender codes at work in this movie. 23 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 53. Dyer is referringto the movie How to Marry a Millionaire(1953), made by Twentieth Century Fox, starringMarilynMonroe. 24Dyer, "Whiteness," Screen,29 (August 1988), 45.

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25 Do we not still today imagine, with political correctness or not, that beauty in a woman is her cache againstracialbarriers? this not what the beautypageant as Is a kind of internationalistpropagandais about: an assertionof national differences and uniquenessthroughbeautythat is commensurate,that everyone can recognize and agree about?Critics have pointed out that these "international" beauties in fact tend to conform to white standards beauty,remindingus that women of varof ious nationalities and ethnicities continue to be influenced by dominant, white, European ideals. See Sarah Banet-Weiser, "Crowning Identities: Performing Nationalism, Femininity,and Race in U. S. Beauty Pageants,"Diss. University of California 1995, and Natasha B. Bamrnes, "Faceof the Nation: Race, Nationalism, and Identities in JamaicaBeautyPageants,"in The Massachusetts Review,35, No. 3 (1994), 471-92. It is, however, importantalso to realize that even the "beautiful white woman" is not white enough, and the representationof her beauty-what makes her beautiful-is often attached to notions of racial difference. 26 Indeed, even when we returnto that quintessentialsymbolof ideal white femininity, MarilynMonroe,we see that her beautytoo is not raciallyimmutable.Dyer in Heavenly Bodies shrewdly demonstrates Monroe to be the apotheosis of but Hollywood'scelebrationof "whiteness," afterthe workof Gilman on the figure of the Hottentot, how can we not note that in one of her most famous movies, Some LikeIt Hot (1959), Monroe'sscreen character is not immune from hints of racial darkening? The much-noted (and much-cited) first sight of Monroe in that film is in fact a diegetic and cinematic fetishizationof her "blackbehind."As if to underscoreher racial-ethnic indeterminancy,the plot tells us SugarKane is indeed for "passing," she has "whitened"her name from the ethnic Kowowskito Kane in order to play in the all-girl (and implicitly all-white) band. 27 In Identification Papers(New York:Routledge, 1995), Diana Fuss points out identification's inherently unstable character,making the important distinction between identification and identity. Fuss stressesidentity as a secure, stable "end result"of a series of multiple, continuous, and layeredpsychical activities that go into the process of identification. In short, identity is a fiction that hides all the contradictions and ambivalences of identification. Beauty, I am suggesting,is an experience that provokes-throws the viewer into-an intense contact with those contradictoryand ambivalentprocessesthat condition identity. 28 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic (New York: Performance Columbia University Press, 1996). 29 Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy and (New York:Pantheon, 1971), and Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination theErotic (New York:Vintage, 1983). Subsequentreferencesto Hyde will be Lifeof Property cited parentheticallyin the text. 30 A humorous dramatization of this notion of a gift economy that cannot be recognized by (and hence seems ridiculous to) a market-dominatedculture is a scene from the Marx Brothers'Duck Soup in which Chico and Harpo Marx give each other identical gifts of sticks of salami. We laugh because the exchange of identical objects seems absurd,but it is only absurdif we think that nothing was gained or lost, that nothing "really" changed hands. If we were to understandthe gift economy as the creation of a bond or the gift object as no more than a vessel carryingsuch an intention, then this exchange between brotherswould not appear

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so irrationalor useless after all. To see the absurdityin this exchange is to reveal our own bondage to commodities.

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