Post-beautiful bodies: New ways of representing female in contemporary visual culture

This project puts forward new theoretical formations of beauty and the visual representation of the female body---formations generated by works of modern and contemporary art. It explores representations of the body that challenge conventions of gender identity and beauty, and seeks to distinguish an aesthetic phenomenon that I refer to as "post-beautiful." The primary focus of the research is on Kantian-influenced aesthetics in Western culture, and specifically, standards of Western beauty as they are underscored by mass cultural influences and negotiations. While the desire to be attractive is shared across genders, the attribute of the beautiful and its opposite, the ugly, is in particular tied to definitions of female and femininity.;Concentrating on select works of Western art---including a case-study of the artist Claude Cahun---I explore the ways in which unconventional representations of the female body may unsettle dichotomized terms of beauty and gendered embodiment and destabilize traditional notions of aesthetics while offering ways to rethink dominant discourses. To that end, I propose a phenomenon of post-beautiful bodies: bodies that discursively and visually elude a beautiful/ugly dichotomy. With works of art as sites of critical challenge, I locate the phenomenon of the post-beautiful in representations of the monster, post-human and queer subject. Through these images, my research attempts to dismantle discourses of gendered beauty, to demonstrate the intermingling contradictions of beauty and gender in Western art and visual culture, and ultimately, to recognize new ways of articulating aesthetic experiences of the female body. Ever-changing, differentiated viewing cultures in the West, coupled with the social and politically challenging representation of bodies in contemporary visual culture set up a necessity for a new aesthetic category---one that I identify as the post-beautiful.;New perspectives found in Western art may re-inform and re-articulate the experience of the lived female "self." The objective is to shed light on how visual art may reveal the complex perceptions of lived beauty and gender. With this in mind, I use theory to rethink how a body image may exceed conventional beauty standards, and to explore what social, political agendas such an image may invoke.