Feminist Pleasure and Feminine Beautification
SE03 E01: Feminist Pleasure and Feminine Beautification (Ann Cahill 2003)
Episode preamble
[Jaunty piano music reminiscent of an 80s sitcom]
Kristin
This episode of thinking bodies was recorded in front of a live audience. Stay tuned to the end of the episode for audio notes from audience members Cressida Heyes and Katy Fulfer.
[Jaunty music ends]
Episode begins
[theme music fades in]
Kristin
[confessionally] Anna,
Anna 0:41
[seriously] Yes.
Kristin 0:42
I'm at a 10.
Anna 0:44
We can do this. It's okay.
Kristin 0:45
We can do this.
[music plays]
Kristin
So, welcome to thinking bodies: a feminist philosophy podcast. Western philosophers have separated the mind and body, and here on thinking bodies, we are pulling on the threads that have always held them together.
Anna 0:59
To do this, we crowdsource voice clips to discuss works in feminist philosophy that deserve more attention. Our podcast collages with these clips as a feminist DIT experiment.
Kristin 1:09
That's right. This is a Do It Together podcast, sharing the sounds of feminist philosophy.
Anna 1:15
I'm Anna Mudde. I'm here only a few hours from the place of my birth, on the traditional territory of the Chonnonton, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples, on the Haldimand Tract, the Land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.
Kristin 1:29
And I'm Kristin Rodier, sitting right next to Anna in front of a live audience.
Anna 1:34
Right, because we. are. live.
Kristin 1:35
We are live, and we have help.
Anna 1:37
Yes. We have help from our friend and colleague, Ramanpreeet Bahra!
Kristin 1:41
Raman is a consulting producer on this episode and will also be helping us a little bit later on.
Kristin and Anna together:
Thank you, Raman!
[music plays]
Megan Dean 1:57
I'm Megan Dean.
Helga Varden
My name is Helga Varden.
Allison Wolf
I'm Allison Wolf.
Christine Hamel
My name is Christine Hamel.
[music plays]
Anna 2:13
We are here at the 43rd Annual International Social Philosophy Conference hosted by the North American Society for Social Philosophy and the Canadian Society Working for Inclusion in Philosophy, better known as CSWIP.
Kristin 2:24
CSWIP! Lots of societies, lots of acronyms in there.
Anna 2:28
Yep, and in previous episodes, we talked about philosophy conferences.
Kristin 2:32
We did.
Anna 2:32
So go check out our Field Notes series to hear about academic conferencing.
Kristin 2:36
Yes, and Anna, you and I met at CSWIP many, many years ago.
Anna 2:40
We did! Many years ago.
Kristin 2:40
If not for this particular conference, I wonder, would thinking bodies exist?
Anna 2:46
[reluctantly] Oh… You know how I do with counterfactuals.
[inserted canned sitcom laughter]
[theme music fades out]
Kristin 2:48
I think we should say, it does feel different recording with an audience. Usually I have just your face to respond to and now there's people everywhere.
Anna 2:57
There are people… but I might just look at you.
Kristin 2:59
That's fine, I've scanned for friendly focal points. Okay. I feel okay. I'm going to be okay.
[Anna giggles]
Today's episode is on Ann Cahill's 2003 article, “Feminist Pleasure and Feminine Beautification.” I have always wanted to read this piece together.
Anna 3:16
Yeah, and when we talked about doing this piece, we also asked one another if we had read Cahill's other piece called “Getting to My Fighting Weight.”
Kristin 3:23
Oh, so good. “Getting to My Fighting Weight.” That piece is one of the first to develop a feminist, like, critical perspective on eating and changing body size directed specifically at strength, right? Really thinking about, what if I change my body to get more strong?
Anna 3:39
Yeah. Yeah, so maybe there are more Cahill episodes to come. Ann Cahill is professor of philosophy and an American feminist philosopher at Elon University. She's written about objectification, consent, unjust sex, miscarriage, and philosophy of the body. She's currently working on questions involving voice with one of our contributors to this episode, who we'll hear from later, Christine Hamel.
Kristin 4:01
Mm! Yeah, I remember early in my feminist philosophy training really thinking a lot about beauty, like, philosophically. [Anna expresses agreement] Philosophically, and then thinking about beauty ideals, you know, ideal womanhood, beauty norms, and how they support mostly restrictive gender norms and what we can do to resist them. That was kind of the discourse, you know. And this article just opened up so many new thoughts for me about when and how beautification can be a positive. Maybe even a feminist experience… [Anna giggles]
[thoughtful piano loops fade in]
Anna 4:36
What, if anything, do you do to feel beautiful?
Do you feel like you have to, or do you want to?
How does that change based on where you will be appearing?
Who do you beautify for?
Kristin 4:48
In beautifying who do you imagine you are becoming? A new you or revealing a part of yourself?
What role, if any, does beautifying play in being or becoming your gender?
[music fades out]
Kristin 4:59
Anna, I have an anecdote that I think can cue us into this material really well.
Anna
Oh, fantastic.
Kristin
Okay, so I would say I'm on the low maintenance side of things. Uh, like, not a big makeup wearer.
Anna 5:19
[chuckles] Yeah, me too, I yearn for, like, smooth, blemish-free skin, but I was raised by lipstick-only white women, so…
[Real audience laughter]
Kristin 5:30
Well, uh, when I was preparing to get married so many years ago, uh… and, you know, this article specifically unpacks, like, getting ready for a wedding…
Anna 5:40
Yes! yeah…
Kristin 5:40
okay. So, Cahill's experience with her mom and sister's getting ready for a family, family wedding. So, for me, back in 2011, and I got my mom's permission to use this anecdote, um, yeah.
Anna 5:53
[curious] Does, does mom listen?
Kristin 5:54
Mom does listen.
Anna 5:55
Hi, mom! Hi, Kristin’s mom!
Kristin 5:59
Bernie. Hi Bernie.
Anna 5:59
Hi, Bernie!
Kristin 6:02
Okay, very good. Uh, well, my mom pulled me aside before the wedding, uh, you know, her non-makeup-wearing, feminist daughter, and, you know, this stands out for me because it's, it's very rare that she would get this directive.
Anna 6:15
Right.
Kristin 6:16
But, she had some concern in her voice and asked whether I would be wearing makeup for my wedding.
Anna 6:21
[surprised] Oh. [unsure] Uh… okay. I mean, all respect to mama, but like, have you seen you?
Kristin 6:27
[surprised] A-nna! That's not in the script!
[Kristin, Anna, and audience laugh hard]
Kristin
Damn! Hoo! [getting us back on track] Anyway, ah… I'm glad she did because I didn't have any, and I hadn't thought about it. But, you know, the way she convinced me to do something was to pull me aside and say, “you're going to want to have makeup on in your pictures.”
Anna 6:53
Oh, okay. [laughs] And did you want to, you in the end?
Kristin 6:56
I did.
Anna 6:57
You did, okay.
Kristin 6:57
But, but – there's so many connections here – but what I did, was I turned to a friend, a more knowledgeable other. And at that time we were in grad school together. Our very own Megan Dean,...
Anna 7:09
Ahh. Hmm. [thinks about Megan fondly]
Kristin 7:10
… friend of the pod, contributor on today's episode, audience member, took me makeup shopping! Because she had worked in sort of makeup retail.
Anna 7:21
So, ohhh, I feel like Megan would strike exactly the right tone for this sort of activity.
Kristin 7:26
Yeah. Like, understood my limits for still feeling like me. So, this made me think about how those, those pictures, they're great, they're great. But, you know, they do represent a kind of like the ideal of myself, you know, as a… [said with significance] as a bride [Anna eeeeeps], as a woman, as beautified.
Anna 7:47
And so, yeah, no, that's so interesting. That really does hit on a lot of, um, a lot of the distinctions that Cahill makes. First of which is the process of beautification versus the product of beautification. So it sounds like your process was relational, and going shopping with Megan, having her help you select colors and products. And there must have been, like, testing…
Kristin 8:08
Well, yeah, I was a blank canvas!
Anna 8:10
[laughs] And then your pictures and you in those pictures are sort of, I don't… would you say like product? the result?
Kristin 8:29
Right. So there's the process of beautification and then there's the presentation.
Anna 8:33
Right. Yep. And a lot of literature and feminist theory didn't, um, make this point, or point to this distinction in this way. Separating how beautifying might be a positive experience, might be the site of artistry or connection, creativity. Um, even if the presentation of beauty is often objectifying and kind of ucky. Yeah.
Kristin 8:56
And, you know, and to really get into my mom's imperative, like “you're going to want to have make up on in your photos,” right? That's for me.
Anna 9:05
Ah! Okay.
Kristin 9:05
You know, like she didn't say like “your wedding guests will be horrified” or, you know, uh, “you don't want to disappoint me as your mother.” You know, it was very, like she was trying to give it to me as, as a goal, you know?
Anna 9:18
That’s a really good distinction to make. And the question of who is… who beautification is for kind of comes up a lot in this piece. Cahill and, um, and her sisters, describe feminine beautification as this is Ann Cahill quote, "the source of both intense anxiety and deep pleasure." Yeah.
Kristin 9:38
Yeah. The day of the wedding. I mean, all eyes on me, like that was, that was anxiety to the max. That was like being a 10. Yeah.
Anna 9:47
I… yeah.
[both laugh]
Kristin 9:47
Uh, Uh, it's such a compulsory institution, so many expectations and norms.
Anna 9:53
Yeah. Yeah, [thinking] and this is probably why I opted out of that, actually. [both laugh] Cahill is dealing, though, with, as we were saying, getting ready for a wedding, and that's where these gender norms, you might notice, are often really in, um, in sharp relief, so thinking about, um, beautification and beauty as this rich site for thinking about coercion and internalized misogyny, but also aesthetic creativity.
Kristin 10:20
Mm-hmm! Yeah, the article resists the notion of beautification as just this work we do as dupes of the patriarchy, right? There's a lot more going on, especially intersubjectively, in collective, or her word is “communal,” communal work of beautification.
Anna 10:36
Yeaaah, and there's a section of the paper, which we'll get to in a minute, that is titled, “The Cahill Women Get Beautiful,” which, I just… I love feminist philosophy so much.
Kristin 10:44
I know.
Anna 10:44
What a wonderful subtitle! yeah.
Kristin 10:47
This methodology is also unique, you know, the paper is an analysis of a really cool piece of audio-video. So, Ann deliberately recorded this process of getting ready, um… seems to have taken it as an opportunity to question the Cahill women about different meanings of the beautification they were undertaking. I was thinking, I was thinking people are very lucky when they have philosophers in the family. [laughs]
Anna 11:13
[skeptical] Are they? Uh. Yeah. I… sure! That's possible.
Kristin
Mine are!
Anna
Yours are, yes, yours certainly are. They absolutely are. They absolutely are. So, uh, in the video of the four sisters, Mary, Maggie, Sarah, Abby, and Ann, and then her mom, Ann Senior, um, they had this period of time where they're discussing outfits and doing each other's hair and makeup, and sort of, um, generally attending to one another's bodies in these pleasurable ways. And I can sort of relate to this experience, but I think maybe a little bit more ambivalently.
Kristin 11:45
Hmmm. I'm very curious what you mean by “ambivalently.”
Anna 11:46
Oh, hmm. Yeah. I mean… I don't have a lot of experiences of women attending to one another. So, mostly, I have experiences of being in these rooms, but we sort of all get ready very separately. Um, but my life has been, like, you know, WASPy in a lot of ways, and we're repressed, y'all. Like, it's, you know, we're all in our own lane. [Kristin laughs] But, um, the experiences I have had often involve being called upon or hailed to be woman in ways that I'm not, and also, sometimes, in ways I can't get on board with. So, I have this ambivalence.
Kristin 12:20
Yeah, totally.
Anna 12:20
And I think especially in the particular sense of what is important and what's respectable, um, it often feels fairly intensely expectation-filled and icky. And so, right, I have these experiences of, like, I want to leave, and I also really want to belong, and I have a hard time getting out of the cultural significance of these sorts of practices.
Kristin 12:44
Yeah.
Anna 12:44
On the other hand, like, when Cahill describes it, I think, “oh! well, that sounds really grounding and fertile and, like, nice.”
Kristin 12:52
Yeah. I mean, there's definitely something in the footnotes, you know, Cahill's aware of this, like, there's something in the footnotes saying, like, how these experiences can go horribly wrong.
Anna 13:03
Yes.
Kristin 13:03
You know, because of, you know, judgmental comments or shaming and so on, you know, it's also kind of a testament, the article, a testament to the Cahill ability to collaborate.
Anna 13:14
Yeah!
Kristin 13:15
That they have all this great relationship with each other, like, I'm impressed.
Anna 13:20
It’s so many siblings collaborating! And they're all, like, thinking about their dresses and, like, dyeing leg hair. – Again: feminist philosophy. You can't beat it. – And Cahill's, like, this sort of Socrates in the dressing room, which is actually very relatable, at least to some of us. I often, like, manage discomfort by kind of, like, being anthropologist, right? Like… yeah.
Kristin 13:42
So say we all!
[Kristin, Anna, and the audience chuckle]
Anna 13:42
But I'm guessing that our listener at this point might be really curious about what sort of conversations they were having. So maybe a little bit of dialogue with Cahill's sisters would be helpful to set the tone.
Kristin 13:56
Yes. Allow me to direct!
Anna 13:58
Okay.
Kristin 13:59
Anna, you be Ann.
Anna
Okay.
Kristin 14:04
Raman, can you be Mary?
Raman 14:06
Yes.
Kristin 14:07
And I’ll be Maggie, because she's my favorite.
[a moment to get situated]
Anna 14:11
Okay! [setting the scene] So here we go: Black tie wedding. Behind the scenes. We're getting ready with mirrors and bustling activity.
Anna as Ann
“So what happens, though? If we make ourselves into objects of beauty, right?”
Raman as Mary
“Works of art.”
Anna as Ann
“Yeah. But works of art demand, like, in order to be works of art, works of art have to be perceived. You can't be a work of art and just be somewhere in a corner. You need a perceiver to render you into a work of art.”
Raman as Mary
“But we're all that for each other as well.”
Kristin as Maggie 14:42
“You're looking at it: artist, art, and art critic.”
Raman as Mary
“And giving constructive criticism all the way. It's a process.”
Anna as Ann
“But who is the perceiver that we're making ourselves into works of art for?”
Raman as Mary
“Everyone who comes into contact with us.”
Kristin [directing]
Later in the piece…
Anna as Ann 15:03
“We also have to make clear that we're not really creating ourselves here, that Mary is the primary…”
Kristin as Maggie 15:09
“artist,”
Anna as Ann 15:1
“... she's the artist.”
Raman as Mary
“Facilitator.”
Anna as Ann
“and especially me. In the process, I'm almost completely passive. I am almost completely a blank canvas.”
Raman as Mary
“I have your input, though.”
Anna as Ann
“No, in certain things, I have very little input. My hair, it's all you. My makeup, it's all you. I don't know what I'm doing.”
Kristin 15:31
“Your dress.”
Anna 15:32
“My dress, I did choose. But Maggie helped me pick the dress out, too.”
Anna:
And, scene! Thank you, Raman!
Kristin 15:39
Thank you, Raman!
Anna
Yayyyyyy!
Kristin
“Transition music”
[audience applause; Kristin laughs, some audience members laugh]
[thoughtful piano loops fade in]
Megan Dean
I'm Megan Dean, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University and North American Coordinator for Culinary Mind,The Center for the Philosophy of Food.
One thing I really appreciate about this paper is the way Cahill sets up her intervention or contribution at the beginning. So she says [paraphrasing], “look, some feminists have been criticizing women's beautification practices for centuries.” You know, way back to Wollstonecraft saying, “look, they're oppressive, they're patriarchal,” “bad.” [paraphrasing] “But then there are also some feminists saying, well, actually, some women take pleasure in beautification practices. They can be a form of artistic expression, maybe a celebration of femininity in a way. So “not so bad.”” And Cahill's basically like, “look, it's more complicated than that. And I'm going to draw out some of that complexity for you in this paper.”
And ultimately, I take her argument to be that, you know, basically, from a feminist perspective, engaging in beautification practices can often be oppressive, but they can sometimes be good, or at least not so bad, when it's done in a particular way, like it's voluntary, it's done with a particular understanding of the self in mind, it's not an everyday thing, not too painful, and so on. But, we really need to attend to the context of these practices, use our discernment. We can't make blanket judgments about all women's beautification practices as either oppressive or not oppressive, right? Good or bad.
So, one thing I tell my undergrad students is that if somebody or some literature is trying to tell you, “hey, we can look at this phenomenon as either A or B,” you know, this very binary set of possible interpretations or evaluations of something, then, you know, [chuckling] your “BS-detector” should start going off, right? Like, “ding, ding, ding!” Like, the world, life, humans, relationships, society, like, these things are very complex. And if anyone is trying to restrict your understanding of some aspects of these very complex things to either A or B, you know, or A or not A, frankly, they're wrong. [chuckles] And playing along with that game is not really going to help you understand what's going on. So, that's one thing I really like about this paper is how it very clearly sets up this, you know, very binary way of thinking about women's beautification practices and then invites us to think with more complexity and ambiguity and nuance about the topic.
Another thing that really interests me about the paper is the specific topic of discussion, right? It's not beauty itself. It's not being beautiful. It's not wanting to be beautiful, or desiring beauty, but it's about women's practices of beautification. So even more specifically, it's about the pleasure that some women get out of engaging in those practices. So, what does the fact that some women, and specifically some very consciously feminist women, enjoy these activities? Like, what does it say about the oppressive implications or political meaning of these practices?
And I think that's really interesting, like, against a background of how pleasure commonly shows up in mainstream ethical philosophy. You know, so, um, and utilitarian or consequentialist moral theory in its most simplistic form says, okay, “what's good?”, uh, “what's good is what brings out the, the most pleasure, um, and what's bad is what brings out the most pain,”… that's very oversimplified, so apologies to anybody who, um, teaches those theories or loves those theories, I know that it's more complicated than that, but there's something very intuitive about that, like, basic form, you know, it's like, “yeah, pleasure's great… uh… pain is bad,” very basic, and, you know, so good actions, good habits, good policies, good laws are the ones that bring out more pleasure on the balance and, and reduce pain. There's something really intuitive and attractive about that, I think at least at first.
But of course it gets complicated really quickly, and Cahill cites Sandra Bartky's work a few times, who, I – I love Sandra Bartky's work – and one thing that Bartky points out is that, you know, we're socialized or disciplined to take pleasure in certain things, and then we are motivated to pursue those things in part because they feel so good, right, but, some of the things that were, were sort of, um, socialized or guided to take pleasure in can be quite contrary to our interests. So Cahill mentions the pleasure of obedience, you know, you're obedient at school, you get a gold star, a good grade, those things can feel very pleasurable for some of us, or I guess I'll speak for myself. [laughs] And that pleasure can motivate us to be good students, even if we don't always get that external affirmation, right, we just obey, we start to obey even when no one is there to notice that we're obeying or to keep us in line. But we also need to ask, like, who or what are we being obedient to?, and what is being obedient doing to us, or those around us?, like, does it actually align with our values?, or help us build the world we want?, or not?, um, and just saying, like, well, I enjoy it, it's pleasurable to me, that doesn't begin to answer any of those questions.
To end on a, on a more joyful note, I guess, um, one other thing I love about the paper is that it's really an occasion to reflect on the times I've spent getting ready with friends and loved ones for nights out or big events. Recently I was visiting home and I got to have such a fun little, like, spa night party with my cousin and her daughters. And I just, you know, I appreciate this thinking about pleasure and joy and community and caring for one another's bodies as part of these beautification practices, I think that's so important. It's just that as the article does a good job pointing out, it can also be complicated.
[piano loops play]
Kristin 22:28
Huh, so Megan says, “what does it mean that some very consciously feminist women enjoy these activities?” And, and, and they, they're probably not dupes, uh, maybe especially, you know, doing them with others. So, Anna, I'm, I'm so curious about your take on
[piano loops fades out]
Anna 23:02
Yeah, it, well, it makes me think of how sometimes my niece likes to do makeovers with me. Um, and, like, [smiling] I'm a fairly blank canvas at this point.
Kristin 23:13
Yeah, there's a theme here.
Anna 23:14
Yeah, we, we may often…
Kristin 23:16
We don't know what we’re… we need some help!
[both laugh]
Anna 23:21
Um, but I'm thinking about the fact that, like, I'm actually not very good at being cared for in that way. And so I'm awkward about it. And I really want her to enjoy all of those things. And I'm, like, so deeply honored that she wants to do it with me. But… I also don't ever want her to think that she has to, like, “woman” in that way.
Kristin 23:40
Hmm. Right. Well, she definitely doesn't.
Anna 23:43
No.
Kristin 23:45
There are such limited ways, I think, for us to pay attention to and, and care for one another. You know? Uh, this is making me think of all the 10-year-old boys in my life. [Anna giggles] There, there's so many, who, you know, three or four years ago would, would let me paint their fingernails, no problem.
Anna 24:03
Yeah.
Kristin 24:03
You know? And now, “cringe,” you know? I, I, and when I would do it, I just loved it. I had their undivided attention, and we had really lovely conversations, and they, they don't want to do it anymore. [wistfully]
Anna 24:14
Yeah, and I mean, this is something that I keep doing with my niece, but then I also want those skills she's developing to be recognizable as skills. And not just as some, like, “feminine essence” coming to the fore, right? And I, I often think, too, though, that if I were to raise that with her, it might kind of, like, “weird the vibes” of the situation.
Kristin 24:35
[unsure] Well… I never know. I mean, Ann's sisters seem to tolerate her pretty well, [laughs]
Anna 24:41
That's true.
Kristin 24:41
…asking a bunch of Socratic questions about beautification. Though, there's one point later on where Maggie teases Ann and says something like, uh, you know, “we're having fun. Can you say the same?” [audience laughs] And everybody in the room there laughs, but, I think it's, I think it's a good thing, you know, that we don't feel the same.
Anna 24:59
Yeah, yeah, and Megan's right, that this is, this is difficult terrain. And, um, you know, my niece is just being the loveliest, and maybe I'm not being, like, super cozy.
Kristin 25:10
She probably loves that together.
Anna 25:12
I hope so. I love it together.
Kristin 25:14
Yeah.
[Kristin thinks] I'm thinking, Anna, you know, I'm just putting together what you said about your niece having to “woman” in that way. And what Megan said about, you know, it's not a, A or not- A, right? But what I like about this paper is it kind of focuses on retrieving positive possibilities, you know? And, and because of that, could our discussion be heard, you know, as flying over a pretty important aspect of beautification that is no relic of the past?
Anna 25:49
Right.
Kristin 25:49
You know, which is how beautification is a way to compete for male attention.
And, you know, your concern here for your niece is that possibility of it as artistic expression and positive experience. you want that to be what wins the day rather than these hierarchies of status and competition and...
Anna 26:09
Yeah. Yeah, and, like, playfulness and joy and the sort of practicing attending to women and to femme-y stuff in life. But the outcome of that, of course, can also so easily be co-opted in ways over which we have no say, like, out in the world. Right.
Kristin 26:29
Right. Which is the opposite of taking pleasure from being, you know, more, like, taking pleasure from being more beautiful than others. Right?
Anna 26:58
And this is why Cahill and Megan, and I think both of us, we think that feminine beautification practices can't be endorsed uncritically, we can put it that way. Yeah.
Kristin 27:07
Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of my response to beautification is just trying to get away from these norms, you know, not that I really can. Because I find, I find them too fraught and restrictive. I mean, even professional dress norms.
Anna 27:19
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Kristin 27:20
Are completely imbued with racist, classist, you know, fatphobic norms about what a good body is supposed to look like, what a professional body is supposed to look like.
Anna 27:29
Yeah, and Cahill actually notes in the example she's using that the people are demographically cohesive and similar.
Kristin 27:36
Mm-hmm.
Anna 27:36
So they're deeply privileged by being white and upper class and educated and from large, usually nuclear families. And in this case, this group of people are self-identified feminists.
Kristin 27:48
Yes. And that's helpful, because there's no generic group of women, and, you know, each woman and each group of women are specific. They're not interchangeable, you know, and each group has its own political and cultural logics and undertones.[Anna confirms] Here, for example, the socioeconomic features of the women probably make things like buying formal dress clothing more likely to be something fun rather than a cause of stress.
Anna 28:12
Oh! Yeah. Yep.
Kristin 28:13
You know, that they’re sisters. Sisters that get along, which is phenomenal, you know, means that there's a dynamic of long duration, many years of building and getting to know each other
[thoughtful piano loops fade in]
Raman reading Cahill
“In the non-hierarchal communal beautification experience, women gather to care for each other, to delight in each other's bodies and artistic abilities, to gain self-confidence in their appearance, in ways that emphasize the relevance of their own relationships. The time that women devote to beautification may, then, serve to forward rather than thwart feminist aims.”
Kristin 28:51
“These features of a particular experience can further feminist aims…Non-hierarchical, communal care for one another where you gain self-confidence.” And my favorite part of that quotation is, you're doing all of this. “in ways that emphasize the relevance of their own relationships.”
You know, I wouldn't have asked just anyone to help me with makeup. [Anna laughs]That would have been a disaster. I wanted help from Megan. She would understand I'm working from very little knowledge and that I'm looking for something where I still feel like me and we share a context.
Anna 29:26
Yeaaah…And I think we can also recognize that these relationships are needed even when they are not reciprocal. Like the doing of beautification involves specifically embodied capacities that aren’t available to everyone. So it's important that people who might not have the dexterity or strength or balance needed to engage in some of these tasks, or to get good at them, also deserve beautification and attention and care. Like, part of the knowing-how of beautification is knowing how to do the make up and the styling But another part is knowing how to make those spaces really caring and attentive, and also socially critical. Right? But… [thinking] I feel like, um, [laughing at the thought] the hairstylists among us are probably like, “yeah, no shit kids! Like, exactly what we're doing.”
Kristin 30:13
[laughs] I know… I feel like the emphasis on skill is coming from your thinking in the philosophy of craft.
Anna 30:24
[surprised] Yeah! [thinking] Yeah, that's… yeah, that's right. One of the reasons why I think attending to craft knowing and craft work is important is exactly because it involves skill that's often ignored or misunderstood or taken to be “natural” for some bodies like mothering or cooking or manual labor for people in the classes that do manual labor. And, another important feature of beautification, and I think what Cahill's describing here is beautification as craft, um, is that it, its processes are generally bodily and material and temporary. They have to be done repeatedly or maintained in certain ways. So, um, craft work is often maintenance work too. And…
Kristin 31:07
[knowingly] …maintenance work… Maintenance work, which resembles other domains of feminized and devalued work or skills such as cooking, cleaning, child rearing. You know, this, this kind of “woman's work” is maintenance work, “never done,” you know. I love advertising for cleaning products. “Wipe this one time and never again! It stays clean forever,” you know. Beauty, same thing, right? Last-forever lipstick! No. Beautification is repetitive. It’s ongoing. There's no permanence to achieve.
Anna 31:38
Right. There's no permanence. Yeah, that's so true. And as you were saying there… these practices are often very, uh, social or communal as well because it's often just better – that is to say, in this case, more aesthetically pleasing and successful – to have someone, um, else like thread your eyebrows or braid your hair. Like trusted experts, but also just people at a different angle than you can get for yourself, right? Like, like when you do your bikini wax, right? You need someone at a different angle. [audience laughs]
Kristin 32:10
Oh, yeah. Yeah! Uh, sure! I was thinking of how hard it is to paint the nails on my non-dominant hat, but that is... also sounds hard! [Anna laughs at herself] Um, yeah. So, uh, the trusting relationship really matters. You know, I can think of things people have pointed out I was doing wrong that I didn't even know about and I felt so bad.
Anna 32:32
Oh. [Anna feels sad that Kristin felt bad]
Kristin 32:33
Uh, like, I'm a bit afraid of people who know too much. Uh, they will see my lack of effort or something. Uh, but, you know, I think, uh, I, I think we're trained for that. We're trained to feel like it's not enough.
Anna 32:45
Oh, yeah. And some of us aren't that into these practices. So, um, we don't have that enormous skill set, um, that people do when they're good at doing hair and makeup and waxing and styling and putting outfits together. But it's so much material knowledge.
Kristin 33:14
Yes. That gets, like, totally ignored, marginalized, minimized, laughed at.
Anna 33:18
Yeah. Yeah. And people often do laugh at women and femme-y folks who are serious about these things. It… maybe cis men too, but I can think of cis men who are taken seriously, um, for these sorts of skills. And I think it's always important to pay attention to who we laugh at and, and how. Um, a lot of these features of beautification practices: dependence on others, uh, bodilyness, parts of shared activities, read as not-rational or -intellectual and not autonomous, not individual, certainly not masculine, which is to say, um, none of the important parts of Western ideals about persons.
Kristin 33:56
Yeah.
Anna 33:57
And so they're not, or they're not thought to be parts of what is essential to being human because how you look is thought to be not essential to who you are. Um, a nd maybe, there are good things about that view, um, but it also seems to miss something.
Kristin 34:13
Like, it's kind of, who you are is, like, your disembodied rationality.
Anna 34:19
Yep. Yeah! and so taking beauty seriously and beautification seriously, um, sort of, uh, seems to miss that point, right, that, um, we're not essentially how we look. And so, paying a lot of attention to it also makes us look foolish, because we're paying a great deal of attention to something that is “not at all necessary.” But, it can then, for that reason, kind of reveal your failure as a full person, because you're already a woman or feminized, and you're not even taking the quote-unquote “real stuff” seriously.
[book flip sound]
Kristin 34:57
Cahill asks, "Can a focus on the body, and impermanence, be read as a challenge to patriarchal definitions of subjectivity, that privilege rationality and exclude the body or the bodily?" end quote.
[thoughtful piano loops fade in]
Helga Varden
My name is Helga Varden. Ann Cahill is one of my favorite philosophers to walk the planet. I'm saying that not just because Cahill is, as many of you know who listened to this, such a wonderful human being. But she is, to me, among those truly exciting philosophers that I've had the privilege to walk this planet with. This particular article where Cahill takes an opportunity, namely her and her three sisters and her mother are getting ready for a wedding. And she attends to this occasion with the philosopher's ears and uses it to understand beauty better, including, of course, in relation to existing feminist literature on beauty.
I think Cahill… in, in some regards, Cahill is doing exactly what I think a lot of feminist philosophers and minority philosophers who fought their way into professional academic philosophy in, you know, 1970s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, you know, the entrance of women and minorities into academic philosophy… they do a very bottom-up type of philosophy. That is, they practice learning and listening to and engaging with people – here women – about how they negotiate some of the very complicated inheritance that they have in terms of ideals, so-called ideals, handed to them from the culture in which they find themselves. Here it's the context of getting ready for a wedding.
This particular article is very much written from the point of view of being a straight woman, a woman who lives in a world where the male straight gaze has a particular function and is interrogating that, including how straight women are negotiating it, which is quite different from my life in many ways, as I'm an LGBTQIA+ woman. But it is so… that’s part of what is so brilliant about it, because it's, it's offered as a contribution to that discussion, a discussion that invites transcending these boundaries of what we know and what we don't know. And I love that inviting way in which Cahill writes here and I think is, ehm, characteristic exactly of how Cahill does philosophy. She always invites genuine deliberation, genuine engagement with lived experience in a way that is so fantastically philosophically productive.
[thinking] Hence, I find that this article, you know… of course I hear Cahill's voice and way of doing philosophy and it also makes me so incredibly grateful that I happened to be born in a time and in a place on the planet and that my road led me to Cahill and so that I could do philosophy and live my philosophical life in conversation with her. And I am so glad that this article is one of the many incredibly important articles Cahill makes available for generations to come, pieces they can engage with and think with, and help becoming themselves and help contributing to a better world.
[thoughtful piano loops fade in]
Anna 40:29
I mean… in addition to the content of Cahill's piece, I think the sort of feminist philosophy, the style of feminist philosophy that Helga's describing is the sort that I value and always find so compelling, so I really appreciate Helga's sort of meditation on that.
Kristin 40:48
Same. It takes me back to our very first episode on Sue Campbell's work on being dismissed.
Anna 40:54
Oh, Yeah. Yep.
Kristin 40:54
You know, the idea that expressing feelings, having them interpreted well is critical to being able to have those experiences at all and here, paying attention to each other's bodies, being really responsive and caring to each other, you know… and, and, and attention to how you relate, let's say, to your embodiment, paying attention to that. And, and doing that well is critical in, in, in you… in the possibility of you even having experiences of pleasure and beautification.
Anna 41:28
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think that's still what brings me to feminist philosophy, and listening to Helga talk about this and about Cahill's piece as a, an instance of that, I'm realizing that it's something that I've been missing in a lot more recent feminist philosophy, somehow. So I'm thinking about where that style of philosophy has gone or how it's changed and where we still find it.
Kristin 41:51
I think that's part of what drew us to podcasting, you know, specifically the kind we're doing, right?
Anna 41:56
Yeah.
Kristin 41:57
You're talking about your niece.
Anna 41:58
Yep. [laughing]
Kristin 41:58
I'm talking about getting ready for my own wedding. [laughing] You know? see what I mean?
Anna 42:08
Yeah! Yep.
Kristin 42:09
Like, like this [gestures to Anna and to the room] is vulnerable! [laughing vulnerably]
Anna 42:11
[laughing] This is… Yeah! This is… We are, we are in the mix here. [audience laughs]
[laughing] We are, yeah, we're down in the mud of all good things! Um, and maybe that's one of the things that Cahill's work does, too… because it's, it is this lived specific approach and maybe specific and lived enough that questions about who the thinker is and what their commitments and lived conditions are like are much closer to the surface. And like, that's certainly something that I've argued is necessary for responsible thinking and being and doing.
Kristin
Hmm.
[swoosh sound]
Kristin 42:39
Okay. Shifting gears: Ann starts asking whether everyone is revealing beauty that's already there, or creating. And at first, I, I wasn't really sure what hangs on this question, but you know, if our bodies are deficient or defective, then we're learning to hide… beautification is learning to hide that defect. Right?... Sandra Bartkey calls beautification “the art of disguise.”
Anna 43:09
Yeah, which is like, maybe not, maybe not wrong. I don't think Bartky’s wrong about that. Um, but there are also those things that we learn to do because we're trained to do them. And then those practices become more than just responses to their initial grounds. We might learn them because we're required to, or because we're being controlled. But then it turns out that… because those things are practices that, that exclude people with more social power…
Kristin
Mm-hmm.
Anna
… they can also take on values and have purposes that excludes those people from consideration and from focus. Right?
Kristin 43:42
hmm.
Anna 43:42
So we're focusing here on people and practices that might otherwise be marginalized.
Kristin 43:48
And we, we, we might forget the reason we started doing practices at all.
Anna 43:52
Right. Yep. And it's variable, right? For Maggie and Mary, um, they're revealing beauty that's already there. Um, they just don't always bother to fully reveal it.
Kristin 44:03
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But for Sarah, the beautification creates.
Anna 44:07
Yeah.
Kristin 44:08
That's what she says. It expands possibility. Not really a revealing of what already exists.
Anna 44:13
Yeah. And I love how these positions are, like, voiced here by actual people. So like they're not described as theoretical possibilities or positions. Um, and I guess I like it because, like, I know these people, right? I know those positions, but I know these people. Yeah.
Kristin 44:28
Yeah, me too.
Anna 44:29
Uhm, something I appreciate about both of those positions, right, my uhm… having beauty revealed or having… something made possible that wasn't there before, and both of these versions, uhm, neither one sort of operates as though there is some sort of ontological truth about who one really is kind of coming out or being exposed or something like that.
Kristin 44:58
Right, it's not like, you know, that's not the real me, but it's the real me in
my wedding photo or something, that's my true self, you know, frozen in time.
Anna 45:06
Yeah, yeah, and so even for Maggie and Mary, they're revealing what modes are sometimes concealed and neglected or unknown or ignored, uhm, but those aren't taken to be, like, necessary or essential features of themselves. And actually, this relates to the example too, uhm, in that getting ready for a wedding is not a daily occurrence. Yeah. So it’s often, like, not the essential stuff.
Kristin 45:29
Right. Yes, and that is specifically important. Right? The Cahill sisters don't see themselves as deficient, and they're having fun together for a special occasion, right? For Cahill, the pleasure of feminine beautification, in this specific case, right, “must constitute more than an attempt to overcome or answer the lack [Kristin adds emphasis] associated with the feminine body in a patriarchal society.”
Anna 45:55
That's so interesting, because beautification is unquestionably part of a social context in which women are at every moment at risk of being, right, quote-unquote "bad women."
Kristin
Bad!
Anna
Like, we're supposed to be beautiful, yes, but, uhm, sometimes the most important thing is that we're trying to be beautiful, right, like the “Mar-a-Lago makeover” is a particular instance of that, [Kristin and audience laugh] but like, this is fairly pervasive. It's fairly...
Kristin 46:20
[surprised] Wait! I thought we weren’t gonna talk about the Mar-a-Lago makeover.”
Anna 46:23
I couldn't help it! [laughing]
Kristin 46:25
I’m worried. [a little concerned] Okay, yeah, you're right. Like, you have to be seen to be putting in visible effort. You know, “do the best with what you have,” right, whether that's time, money, you know, effort. This is where, you know, beauty secrets come in, right? “You have a beauty secret. I want to know what it is.”
Anna
[sarcastic, thinking of her non-existent beauty secrets] Mmm… Indeed!… Yeeesss….
[thoughtful piano loop fades in]
Allison Wolf:
I’m Allison Wolf. One of the things that I think is so good and so useful about Cahill's piece is the way that it's still so relevant and can help women – feminist and not – engage with this topic in a way that feels more real to them. I think that feminists, frankly, have done a great job of explaining to society how beauty practices, beautification practices, beauty standards are raced and Westernized and oppressive in all sorts of ways. And I have a lot of students who agree with that. And yet, they don't want to eschew them in every single context. I think the example of of Cahill's sisters is a good one, in that I think a lot of students of mine and other women in my life, but tied to them, understand and don't engage in these kinds of practices on a daily basis. And yet, they do enjoy, sometimes, engaging in them. And I think that for at least some of my students, they haven't really found a way to navigate that within feminist philosophy. So for me, a really important contribution of this piece is helping us all, not just students, see that we can engage and identify as feminists, and at the same time, not have to fall into these either/or, “it's all oppression” or “it's not oppression,” “it's all fine, I choose my choice,” debates, which I don't think we have enough examples of.
But what I think is even more valuable about Cahill's piece is that because it's trying to weave a different approach, it invites us to continue to explore the issue of beautification and beauty standards in different ways. And one point that I saw is that, in passing, Cahill suggests that one of the ways that beautification practices, feminine beautification practices in particular, can be potentially promoting feminist agency is if the women doing them don't engage in those practices on a daily basis. But, I want to think a bit more about that, because I have to tell you, I'm, I'm reflecting on my own life. And I have to say, that I am surrounded by a lot of women who don't consider themselves feminists and they don't engage in these beauty practices, but I also know a lot of women who are deeply feminist and lead very, very committed feminist lives, and they do engage in these practices on a daily basis. And they don't see this as contradictory to their feminism. In fact, they don't see engaging in these beautification practices as part of the oppressive patriarchy. They… quite the opposite. They love engaging, they love doing, making themselves fit a certain aesthetic that they want. They don't feel good when they leave the house not looking their best. They take a lot of time in getting ready. And when I question them about why they do it or suggest that oppression might be internalized or at play, they fiercely resist that characterization. Uh, and frankly, I believe them because, again, these are women with deeply committed feminist lives.
So, I think that maybe we can reconsider this idea that, uh, not just can engaging in feminine beautification practices be promoting feminist community and feminist agency on special occasions, but also in general. Maybe, we need to, um, start reflecting on this idea that this is kind of a fundamentally bad, uh, set of practices, “except when…”. And instead think, well, wait, how does Cahill's analysis show us how feminine beautification practices might, might do all the things she says in terms of community building and other things, even when they're done on a daily basis? And I'm thinking, for example, of my daughter who gets great joy in conducting these beauty rituals and the gaze she is after is that of her female friends. And that, uh, that goes for other women in my life as well. They're doing it for themselves or, or for other women. And so I feel like we're potentially missing something if we only limit our investigation to those kinds of occasions.
And one more point I think Cahill invites us to consider, even though she directly doesn't discuss it, is the ways in which our relationship to these practices change over time and in different circumstances. And part of this, I was thinking about her example with her mom, who took so much less time getting ready. And her mom said, well, “practice makes perfect.” But I feel like, I don't know, I almost wonder if sometimes there might be something there in terms of how, as we get more, come into our own more, how we engage differently with these kinds of practices. But I'm also thinking, I'll confess, of my own life. And I was thinking about this the whole time I was reading Cahill's piece, which is that I used to be much more vocal in my opposition to these practices when I was in a long-term relationship with a man. It was as if I needed to reject them in order to maintain my feminist credentials. But when I started engaging and being in relationships with women, that attitude kind of changed. And I've let myself explore more, actually, in these practices, what I like. For example, I learned I love pedicures and perfumes. And also explore more what I don't like and continue not to like, like putting on dresses and makeup. It's still not really my thing. And I'm wondering how much that kind of freedom to explore, first of all, in and of itself, could be seen as promoting feminist agency. But also it could be me realizing that I'm no longer judging myself or feeling like I will be judged, not just by the male gaze, but by others who will wonder if I'm feminist enough. So, I think that those are interesting questions that Cahill's piece made me think of. And I hope that, that we continue to engage more with this piece because it offers such a rich philosophical discussion, not only on the topic, but also how to get out of what appear to be intractable dichotomous debates.
[thoughtful piano loop fades out]
Anna 53:45
I… do relate to the idea that doing…[pauses, thinks] doing things with and loving men under patriarchy is tied up in really complex things and I think Allison's right to suggest that for those of us who live with and love men under patriarchy, how we live feminist lives is often under pressures of various kinds. So even in lives with, like, feminist, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, um, men, the external patriarchal pressures on those relationships and the external expectations of those relationships can make a person really sensitive to, um, to reading as feminist in particular ways.
Kristin 54:28
Mm-hmm. Yeah, in these contexts, Allison is pointing out, matter, you know. As affectionate as I am for Maggie, I don't think we are art, artist, art critic, you know. Like Cahill points out, while, while we often have control over the process, the presentation is a different matter, you know. That's, Cahill writes that “we can easily lose this control once we go into the site of presentation… the beautiful woman cannot act in such a way as to preclude the occurrence of the objectifying gaze.”
Anna 55:00
Yep. Yeah. Like, however I understand my own beautification, I don't control how that's being read or understood by others out in the world. Um, and she's right that being the product of beautification practices is, and I'll quote her, a far less reliably pleasurable space, end quote, than the site of the process itself.
Kristin 55:19
Right. So, focusing on the process.
Anna 55:21
Focusing on the process, yeah.
Kristin 55:23
Yeah. Very different. Very different what goes on in the room, surrounded by attentive, caring people, lavishing you and your body with time and skill…. And then you leave the room.
Anna 55:33
Then you leave the room. Yeah, that's right.
Kristin 55:35
I just went to a wedding last week, you know, it was a very rural wedding, you know, people were wearing jeans. Nice jeans, but, you know…
Anna 55:45
Dress jeans!
Kristin 55:47
Belt buckles and all that good stuff. There was just a lot of rules… there's, there's a lot of rules about weddings, you know, what you're supposed to look like. You can't show up not put together according to the rules of the space, right? It's a signal of the day's importance, I think. [Anna agrees] And so that, that relates to this whole discussion of what the Cahill sisters, you know, there's all these choices about what it does or does not include, right? There's this discussion about, does it include shaving legs? Do you need to shave your legs for a wedding?
Anna 56:13
There's quite a discussion about whether or not to shave leg hair!
Kristin 56:16
And if your feminist philosophy doesn't involve leg hair discussions… we don't want it!
Anna 56:21
No! That is the new law. [audience laughs] Yeah, no-no. That's right. At one point, Mary says very perfectly, “It wouldn't be fun if we had to.”
Kristin 56:32
Yeah, that's interesting.
Anna 56:34
Yeah.
Kristin 56:35
Like, this is one of my takeaways from this piece is like, the pleasure of beautification, at least as described here, requires embodied knowledge of disobeying the patriarchal standards. So you have to know what it's like not to do it, for the possibility of pleasure in doing it.
Anna 56:52
Yeah, right… so that's how we get the difference between, she says, “a desire fulfilled and obedience to a patriarchal system.” And it's really hard to pull those apart sometimes.
Kristin 57:01
Very tough…
Anna 57:01
Yeah… “what I want” and “what I'm required to do.” Yeah.
Kristin 57:05
But I think, you know, I think the ability not to do something does matter.
Anna 57:09
Yeah. And so earlier, we talked about also presenting our beautification work kind of out in public. And that's where the risk of the objectifying gaze comes in. And we haven't talked too much yet about objectification. So maybe we can do that now.
Kristin 57:24
Yeah, this recalls, you know, our Iris Marion Young episode, if you want to read, go back to that, where we talk about woman as object or mere body, right? The potential object of another subject's intentions.
Anna 57:38
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And here, similarly, the person kind of disappears in the moment of objectification so that, I'll quote Cahill, quote “the beauty exists for him, for his own particular use” end quote. So in that moment, the person who is objectified is neither artist nor art, nor art, nor art critic, because she isn't anything at all. She's replaced by this thing that's beautiful, but is not a person.
Kristin 58:04
Right, right. And Cahill draws on Heidegger here. [Kristin knows we can’t do that justice]
We won't get into those weeds…
Anna 58:09
Yep. That’s quite,[impressed, but knowing this is fraught] yeah, no, that’s quite a move on her part!
Kristin 58:09
but... you know, she describes how the beautified woman is not perceived as a work of art under that gaze, but perceived as a social tool or an object of utility for a specific use, as equipment to satisfy men's needs, you know? This is a partial notion of objectification, right?
Anna 58:35
Yes.
Kristin 58:35
There's, there's, there's literature critical of this. [Anna agreeing throughout] I think there's times and places for consensual, maybe even sort of reciprocal objectification, maybe joyful reciprocal objectification, but you know, that's getting into a different zone. For Cahill, I think the presence of the male gaze doesn't preclude the possible, oh, this is a quote, [doesn’t] “preclude the possibility of the beautified woman actually enjoying and pleasure in being gazed upon, but still risks being perceived as equipment.”
Anna 59:03
Yeah, so there… yeah… there are limits, and there are risks, I mean, this is… [Anna thinks] if the gazer sort of puts himself, she says, “in the position of being the sole perceiver, then the beautifying woman's own perspective is implicitly denied.”
Kristin 59:18
Right. “I am the perceiver, the only perceiver.”
Anna 59:22
Right.
Kristin 59:22
Yeah. Yeah. As though, you know, denying her perspective, the gaze of all men.
Anna 59:27
Yep.
Kristin 59:28
And all men's interests.
Anna 59:29
And she rightly notices that the non-objectifying gaze, she says, “draws no conclusions about what behavior or use the person's appearance justifies or does not justify, and so it admires her as a full and vibrant subject.”
[thoughtful piano loop plays]
Anna 1:00:40
Kristen, is now a good time to talk about Mary doing Abby's hair?
Kristin
We need to!
Anna
We do need to. Yes!
Kristin
Mary seems to be the most skilled sister at hair and makeup, so there's focus on Mary's ambiguous role. She's working on other bodies, both as her own subjectivity and on behalf of her sisters’ subjectivities.
Anna 1:01:00
Right, yeah, because in working with and beautifying bodies, the line distinguishing one person and another blurs, and Cahill describes this in really beautiful, rich ways, Mary becomes “consumed” in the interaction between her hands and the hair or brush or skin in her hands.
Kristin 1:01:21
Hmm.
Anna 1:01:21
So she's sort of a medium… or a translator… there’s this translation Cahill describes, of a particular vision into a physical bodily shape of another's appearance. So the other person that Mary is working on is part of the material itself. Like the material has desires. The material has visions.
Kristin 1:01:46
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah! Like… this is not, you know, what we planned on talking about, but like...
Anna 1:01:54
Okay! [Anna’s game!]
Kristin 1:01:55
You know, doing my hair is different than, you know, if doing your hair.
Anna 1:02:00
Yes! Yeah… we have different hairs. [laughing]
Kristin 1:02:01
[chuckling] We've got different things going on!, you know. And it's like, I would take me multiple… I'd have to be skilled to just do multiple different kinds of hair well.
Anna 1:02:11
That's right… yeah! I mean, even as material things, we're not passive matter, right? Like, Abby is not entirely passive in having her hair done because she has these desires and visions for her hair, but also because Abby's hair is… a whole bunch of stuff that only Abby's hair is! [Kristin laughs] So, Mary's having to work both with what Abby wants, but also with the material realities of that…
Kristin 1:02:47
Yes. Yes. And bringing forward Abby's agency…
Anna 1:02:51
Right.
Kristin 1:02:52
… into the hair, right? How would you like this to look? I'm, you know, what would you like me to use, you know? I'm remembering shopping with… shopping with Megan for, for makeup,
you know, and she didn't just sort of say “this, this, this, and this, and, and put it on.” You know, she helped me form a particular vision, right? Drawing out my intention through her care and skill.
Anna 1:03:14
Yeah. And I think the desires that Mary has to meet, uh, Abby's desires are sort of, right, there's, there's this, yeah, it's this beautiful, um, uh, situational complexity where a lot of lines between agents, uh, blur.
[thoughtful piano loop plays softly]
Anna
Cahill writes, “The subjectivity at the heart of this process, then, which renders it pleasurable and perhaps even socially critical, is a distinctively shared one. It is a process by which a person allows another to work on her body. And yet by means of that action, the agency of the person being worked on persists and is even enhanced. Abby is working as an artist through Mary. Abby's body becomes Mary's material. But Mary's body simultaneously becomes Abby's tool. In this moment of feminine beautification, we have a perhaps paradigmatically feminist model of intersubjectivity, wherein the bodies, actions, and possibilities of these two persons are deeply entwined with each other." End quote.
Kristin 1:04:39
[Anna agrees throughout] So just, just revisiting this model of intersubjectivity, it's just such a deeply powerful critique of masculine individualist subjectivity and social structures that, that, that encourage that, right? The ways in which our world could change. If we model social institutions, organizations, on reciprocal care.
Anna 1:04:59
Yes. Yes.
Kristin 1:04:59
So many of our day-to-day interactions are based on property, money, power, borders, this, this critique of the subject is, is expansive.
[thoughtful piano loops fades in]
Christine Hamel
My name is Christine Hamel. I have seen all those Cahill women getting beautiful. So it was delightful to see that sort of rendered. But I wanted to talk about my child who is a trans 17 year- old and they now identify as genderqueer, gender fluid, trans femme, non-binary, kind of all of the above. And recently, they decided to shift their very long hair, which they had been wearing for a long time, to help identify them as more feminine. They were concerned that if they got a really radically short, partially shaved haircut, that they would appear overly masculine, so that they would need to counter the masculinity of this new short hairstyle with makeup, which they deemed – as make sense – coded necessarily as feminine.
So I got them a, a makeup tutorial at Sephora. And so we went to Sephora in Boston and really had to sort of confront what beautification meant to them. For them, it is clear that it's really wrapped up in an intention to become legibly queer. They hadn't learned much about makeup and hair, not because they had really missed out on it because they came out as trans when they were 10, but because they hadn't really, you know, forged relationships with groups of girls for whom maybe like – like the Cahill sisters – exchanging wisdom on this topic might've been more a part of their friend culture. They were totally interested in the artifice of makeup that signified their femininity, but also they were interested in how to bend and shape and explore makeup in a way that was not fixed to any norms that were, that were established.
So, we had this young makeup artist at Sephora, and she had this really demanding task in front of her, which was – because she started really within the sort of normative parameters of beauty – and then I have this, this child asking her to do things really differently. And I felt that they looked beautiful. They felt that they looked beautiful. It, the makeup was beautifully executed with tremendous skill, but it definitely tested out what was sort of beyond beauty norms. It really was asking like, “was this too far?”, “if you bring colour to all the way to the temple, is it ugly?” And my point is really just that, my child was much more in an expressive register and expressive space, where it really felt like they were co-creating something, as the client making demands, and with the makeup artist asking for something and creating it together so that the thought was like, “this is what I can create!” and “isn't that impressive or exciting?” And it was a whole lot less about creating like an illusion of naturalness or even somewhat slightly enhanced beauty.
So, I guess, in a sense, this makeup became a revelation, like, to reveal who they were in terms of an identity that they hold, but I don't think that my child would describe this as, like, “outer expressivity through makeup that just aligns with something of their true inner self” in that essentialist way. I actually think that makeup became a surface upon which they could reliably signal their queerness, and as a creative person, their artistry. And so, they weren't just an art object, but they became the artist. And in that same way that, you know, Ann Cahill's sister Maggie was described as “the art, the artist, and the art critic.” Someone who absolutely self-conceptualizes as a walking work of art in many ways. I mean, that is my child to a “T.” But my child also likes to use the term “patchwork,” so that they're putting bits together, masculine, feminine, that wouldn't normally “fit,” and in ways that you wouldn't normally expect. So, it wasn't cohesive, but they really constructed themselves through this expression of hair and makeup together, in a way that they really were intentionally hoping to, you know, disrupt and confuse the viewer.
Yeah, I'm just deeply interested in what it means to talk about beauty from the perspective of the trans subject.
[thoughtful piano loop plays softly]
Anna 1:09:48
So, Christine is thinking about both the labour that goes into translating someone else's vision of what they want to look like into what they look like. But when we do that, we're using our skills in a way that we're using our skills in a way that has to respect and extend the wearer's agency and needs. Which is really…
Kristin 1:10:14
[with feeling] And touching them.
Anna 1:10:15
Yeah, and touching them.
Kristin 1:10:17
touching them and being receptive to touch. You know, there's philosophers who talk about ontological or phenomenological aspects of touch, but nothing like this about how gendered practices are touching the body through reciprocal care.
Anna 1:10:32
Yeah, this actually reminds me of something an education professor once told me. She'd been back in the classroom for a bit, and she was telling me that teenage boys [Kristin laughs softly] express affection sort of spontaneously because, like, they're always touching... That's what she said. She said they're just, they're always touching each other, but, like, they're poking and they're tickling and they're hip-checking, and they're like, they've got one another in headlocks! Like, it's just... But they're touching all the time!
Kristin 1:11:02
I can attest to this! There's a park behind my house, and there's this group of teenage boys who play catch after school. And I sort of see them and tolerate. But I look out once in a while, and they're just in a dog pile for no reason.
Anna 1:11:18
Sure!
Kristin 1:11:18
You know, and then they'll get back up and play catch for a while, and then they're in a dog pile again! There's four or five of them, and I'm just thinking... “Hug!”
[audience laughs]
Anna 1:11:30
Yeah! Well, yeah! And this professor said she wanted to say something to them, because it's disruptive, right? They're being disruptive, and there's that. But also, she really wanted to say, like, “just put your arm around him or, like, hold hands!” Like, “it's okay to touch one another!” And when she said that, I knew exactly what she meant. And honestly, it broke me a little bit. Like...
Kristin 1:11:54
Yeah.
Anna 1:11:55
Yeah. That's hard.
Kristin 1:11:56
100%.
Anna 1:11:57
Yeah. In Anglo-American context, I think, boys are still mostly trained not to touch one another, except in, like, aggressive ways. Like, like, um...
Kristin 1:12:08
Dog piles.
[Anna and the audience laugh]
Anna 1:12:09
Like in dog piles. Like in dog piles!
Kristin 1:12:11
Don't get me wrong. I actually love a dog pile.
Anna 1:12:21
So rarely, I guess, is touch allowed or encouraged… just for the comfort or affection of touching someone you care about, if that's your thing,
Kristin 1:12:30
Mm-hmm. And to go back to the earlier quotation, in ways that “emphasize the relevance of the relationship.”
Anna 1:12:54
Yeah. And just this need for contact in which there's physical contact and attention. I think there's, um, a need for that, but I think there's also an openness for that, um, among at least some men for these experiences that, um, involve them being cared-for in that way.
Kristin 1:13:12
Yeah, and maybe, you know, the more men have those experiences…
Anna 1:13:16
.. yeah, in public...
Kristin 1:13:17
[agrees]... in public, in public, the more that, like, reframes feminine beautification practices as human practices, as functional, as pleasant, you know? The piece ends thinking, thinking about how the self as pure intellect just needs to be undermined. And beautification as a practice gives us this.
Anna 1:13:36
Yeah. Maybe… [thinking]... that's where we can resist those standardized and suffocating notions of selves as having the “right” kinds of pleasure and being the “right” kinds of things.
[bouncy theme music plays]
[Audience note from] Cressida Heyes
This is Cressida Heyes talking about “Feminist Pleasure and Feminine Beautification” as discussed at the thinking bodies podcast recording.
I was really struck by how beautifully the initial comments from Kristin and Anna captured the tension between feminine beauty practices being considered patriarchal and being enabling, being something that we might do together, that might build skills, that might develop a community. And that's a tension that I have also explored in, especially perhaps in my article, “Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers.” And I have to say, I went back and checked, and that article was published in 2006. And I know that I had read Ann's article and been influenced by it and I didn't cite it. So, sorry about that, Ann.
But one of the things I learned from writing the article, and then was reminded of by the discussion, is how important it is, in thinking about what practices mean, to look at the lived experience of those practices. And not even just the lived experience in some big sense, but really to delve into the micro practices, the absolutely tiny details of what it's like, in this case, to be together as a group of women engaging in feminine beautification and enjoying it. And the way that the podcast recording played out, Anna and Kristin really, really emphasized the voices of the Cahill women in a way that I didn't hear when I read the article. I think my eyes moved too quickly over those passages of spoken text to get to the theory. So I learned something perhaps about my own reading practice, but I also saw from watching Kristin and Anna talk about the article that the voices of the women are really distinctive, but that they also come together communally – that they're a group of women engaging in banter and argument. They have different perspectives and they're trying to make sense of an experience that they're sharing. And so I liked the way that the recording made me experience the written text in a different way. And to see that, in fact, the idea that process rather than outcome is what's important here, is both a feature of Ann Cahill's article, but also a feature of the way that Kristin and Anna practice podcasting. So I'm really appreciative of that.
[Audience note from ]Katy Fulfer
This is Katy Fulfer. One of the things I keep thinking about is Anna’s point about beautification as care, and it prompts me to think about the relationality of beauty practices. How much of beautification as a feminist act of care requires this relationality? Does the relationality change if I’m beautifying myself for an intended other, but going through the process myself? These are some of the things I’m thinking about. I’m also thinking about – again, going back to self care, “skincare as self care” – I had a colleague who had this nightly ritual of going through a 12-step Korean beauty regimen. But for her, the 12 steps, the taking time, for her was an act of protest against the neoliberal productivity, efficiency, “go go go” ethos of our contemporary life. One of the things that stuck with me the most that I kept thinking about is Christine Hamel’s point or the way in which she described make up as “wisdom,” and even though I appreciated before these embodied knowings, calling it “wisdom” really stood out to me. It really made me appreciate beautification knowledges in a different and deeper kind of way.
[theme music plays]
Kristin 1:19:02
Thank you to Raman for helping us go! live!
Anna
[echoes in a high voice] Live!
Kristin
Thank you to Megan Dean, Helga Varden, Allison Wolf, and Christine Hamel for their fantastic and generous contributions to this episode.
Anna 1:19:16
And I feel like we also should thank the Cahill women: Mrs. Cahill – Ann Senior, Ann, Mary, Abby, Maggie, and Sarah for being part of our podcast… [Anna realizes something] without their consent, actually.
Kristin
[laughing] We got Ann's consent.
Anna 1:19:33
We got Ann's consent. Consent by proxy. And of course, thanks to Ann Cahill for this and all of her work, which means so much to so many of us.
Kristin 1:19:43
Yes, and thank you to Chris Lowry and Katy Fulfer, local organizers and hosts of the conference, and to Dan Lowe and Barrett Emmerick for including us in the program! And thank you to our lovely audience!
[audience applause and woos!]
Anna 1:19:56
Yes!
[theme music plays quietly]
Anna 1:20:01
Want to listen, read our descriptive transcripts, or find Kristin's concept maps? Find us at thinkingbodiespod.com.
[theme music ends]