Beauty Matters

2004-04-01T02:09:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Beauty Matters, an exploration into the human creation of objects of beauty and the nature of beauty itself with original articles and teaching resources on aesthetics, visual arts, fashion, the culture of beauty and more.

Featured articles

Fashion Statements: Beauty and the Clothing Code: Clothes speak symbolically to wearers and their viewers, but what is the nature of the meanings they communicate?

Make-up in the Pursuit of Beauty: The technicolour world of cosmetics offers endless possibilities of enhancing (or disguising?) the canvas given by nature.

Beauty in the Ear of the Beholder: What makes a piece of music beautiful, and can there be objective standards of criticism?

Featured Teaching Resources

The Significance of the Media in Issues of Beauty Culture: What makes a news story in beauty culture? How does the media promote beauty standards? How does the media contribute to the creation of celebrities? Should celebrities in beauty culture have a right to privacy?

The Body as Image: What is image? How has the body been used as an image in different times and cultures? How is the body used as an image in contemporary art and photography?

2004-01-01T00:53:00.000-08:00

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Beauty Matters

Lucire - The global fashion magazine, with features on international style, beauty, lifestyle and travel.

Apparel News - A comprehensive online source for fashion and apparel information.

Fashion-Era - 100+ content rich, illustrated pages of Fashion History, Costume, Clothing, Textiles and Social History.

Fashion Worlds: All about fashion designers and influences past, present, famous and up-coming, with original articles and regular news updates.

Daily Fashion - An online fashion resource for girls with lots of tips, ideas and stories about fashion.

Beautylink - Gateway to the world of beauty on the web, with news and expert advice.

Fashion Network - Body, style and fashion news (in German).

Barrlu's Arts and Artists Resource Centre - A comprehensive list of artists' resources and arts relevant links.

Hint Fashion Magazine - Online magazine covering many aspects of fashion and style.

DiamondRing.com - For information about diamonds including articles, tutorials and forums about shape, carat weight, clarity grades and more.

Jolique - A website that explores dress and culture across space and time.

Disability and Sexuality - An informative website covering issues of disability and body image.

Isabel Gallery - Fine art reproduction oil paintings of Masterpieces: Van Gogh, Cezanne, Degas, Manet, Botticelli, Gauguin, & more.

The Costumer's Manifesto - One of the World Wide Web's largest, and most eclectic, costume sites.

FashionSenseClub - dedicated to the promotion, support and training of Beauty Consultants throughout the US and Canada.

Cultural Studies Central - An informative website for all aspects of contemporary culture.

Virtual Hair - Let us give you a virtual hairstyle makeover! Get results, without going to a salon.

Hair Boutique - Banishing bad hair days with news and information about hair care and products.

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Alumbo - A self-help website that includes a page of aesthetics resources for the study of beauty and the arts.

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Global Express - Aims to enable young people to gain a greater understanding of the context in which news stories from the developing world happen, and to build links between their experience of life and their understanding of development issues. Editions provide materials that help answer young people's questions and increase their critical awareness of how the media can influence their images of the developing world.

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2000-02-08T02:32:00.000-08:00

Home>>Cultures>>Nappy Hair: A Marker of Identity and Difference

Nappy Hair: A Marker of Identity and Difference

Hair affects not only our appearance but also our identity. It has a remarkable power to shape personal and group identities in the lives of African women in America. In the book, Hair Matters (1), interviews conducted with over 50 black girls and women between 1996 and 1998 reveal the political complexities of African American hair and beauty culture. Ingrid Banks, sociologist and author of Hair Matters , concludes that 'hair shapes black women's ideas about race, gender, class, sexuality, images of beauty and power.' Since mainstream Western images of beauty do not embrace tight black coils, the decision of many African American women to use relaxants, perms, hair extensions and pressing combs reflects a deeper devaluation of black hair in its natural state. As the feminist philosopher Susan Bordo writes, 'When Oprah admitted on her show that all her life she has desperately longed to have 'hair that swings from side to side' when she shakes her head, she revealed the power of racial as well as gender normalization to the Caucasian standards of beauty that still dominate on television, in movies, in popular magazines' (2).

The photographer Bill Gaskins portrays contemporary black hairstyles of African American women in the book, Good and Bad Hair (3). The title refers to the terms used by black women themselves to define different types of hair. 'Good' hair is sleek, smooth, fine, straight and long. 'Bad' hair is coarse, kinky, coiled short and 'nappy'. Such beliefs are obviously derived from a narrow definition of beauty that is marketed and promoted in America's fashion and beauty industry. Their power as a race-based measurement, however, goes beyond a personal statement of choice in approaches to hairstyle and exposes the social and political implications for African American culture.

The cultural historian Bruce Tyler describes how African Americans in the nineteenth-century were encouraged to adopt 'proper conduct and grooming standards' (4). It was believed that these would promote their assimilation into American culture and thereby improve their status in society. When female slaves attempted to change their nappy hair into good hair, they were hoping for inclusion through an imitation of Western beauty standards. Hair was slicked in waves with axle grease, wrapped with string to make it straight and relaxed using concoctions of potato, potash, lye and hot fat. By the twentieth century, many black women managed their own beauty shops and parlours. This coincided with an increase in commercial beauty products and treatments designed to aid African Americans conform to Western beauty ideals. For example, Madame C. J. Walker pioneered an innovatory hair-straightening technique called the 'Walker System'. This involved the use of hot combs and presses to straighten and smooth the naturally coiled hair of African American women. In effect, hair styling practices arose from a desire to transform blackness into whiteness within the larger socio-political arena of racial difference and power.

A return to African-based hairstyling practices by many black women in the 1960s, on the other hand, marked an assertion of national identity and heritage in the face of oppressive Western ideals of beauty and continuing disenfranchisement. Although the popular Afro was achieved by blowing hair out to straighten the curls, it was representative as an expression of beauty ideals centred on an African identity. In other words, hairstyling became a political statement of connection to the black community. A large Afro was worn with pride and denoted commitment to the black cause. Although the popularity of the Afro declined, black hairstyles retained a cultural and political significance. The author Alice Walker describes the feeling of liberation symbolized through the embracing of traditional African hairstyling techniques. She writes, "I remembered years of enduring hairdressers, from my mother onward, doing missionary work on my hair. They dominated, suppressed, controlled. Now, more or less free, [my hair] stood this way and that...It never thought of laying down. Flatness, the missionary position did not interest it. It sought more and more space, more light, more of itself. It loved to be washed; but that was it" (5).

An emphasis on traditional African hairstyling practices continued in the 1980s and 90s. A wide variety of popular styles were worn including braids in West African patterns, relaxed hair, dreadlocks, twists, corkscrews and fades. Such hairstyles are designed to exploit rather than repress the natural texture of black hair. The ongoing promotion and appreciation of traditional African hair and beauty culture however is not unproblematic. As the cultural historian Noliwe Rooks explains about the hair of African American women, "its style could lead to acceptance or rejection from certain groups and social classes and its styling could provide the possibility of a career" (6). The relationship of hairstyling among African American women to racial identity politics thereby serves to create a tension in hair and beauty culture that remains unresolved.

(1) Banks, I. (2000) Hair Matters: Beauty, Power and Black Women's Consciousness , New York, New York University Press.

(2) Bordo, S. (1993) Unbearable Weight: feminism, western culture and the body , Berkeley, CA, University of California Press.

(3) Gaskins, B. (1997) Good and Bad Hair , New Brunswick, N. J., Rutgers University Press.

(4) Tyler, B. M. (1990) 'Black Hairstyles: Cultural and Socio-political Implications' in The Western Journal of Black Studies , 14.4, pp. 235-250.

(5) Walker, A. (1988) 'Oppressed hair puts a ceiling on the brain' in Living By The Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987, New York, Harcourt.

(6) Rooks, N. M. (1996) Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women , New Brunswick, N. J., Rutgers University Press.

Home>>Cultures>>Nappy Hair: A Marker of Identity and Difference

2000-02-07T01:35:00.000-08:00

Home>>Creative Arts>>Female Beauty in Twentieth-Century Poetry

Female Beauty in Twentieth-Century Poetry: A Critical Analysis of Selected Works

Homage to My Hips
By Lucille Clifton

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

Lucille Clifton’s ‘Homage to My Hips’ is a poem celebrating the female body and its power. The narrator’s pride in her hips is conveyed through repetition of ‘these’, implying ownership and hence assertion in her expression of selfhood. Clifton also uses a repetitive style of sentence structure to suggest that ‘these hips’ are something special. Through the poem’s forward-moving rhythmic progression, Clifton conveys a sense of ‘these hips’ swaying proudly, hips that are ‘mighty’ and ‘magic’.

Clifton’s use of language also invites a comparison of ‘these hips’ with the hips of other women. The implication is that her pride in having ‘big hips’ is something unusual. Moreover, Clifton positions herself positively in relation to these other women, whose hips are ‘enslaved’ and ‘held back’. This theme can be related directly to Clifton’s experiences as an African-American, in which beauty is strictly defined by white and unattainable standards. It also foregrounds and questions the assumption commonly portrayed in the media that thinness, or having hips that ‘fit into little petty places’, is desirable. The speaker’s awareness and acceptance of her body as it is allows her to take charge of her sexuality in a way that is denied to women who are striving to attain what the poem views as oppressive standards of female beauty.

Horse
By Chase Twichell

I’ve never seen a soul detached from its gender,
but I’d like to. I’d like to see my own that way,
free of its female tethers. Maybe it would be like
riding a horse. The rider’s the human one,
but everyone looks at the horse.

Chase Twichell’s short poem, ‘Horse’ introduces a division between female ‘gender’ and ‘soul’. This idea is introduced in the first line and is sustained throughout the poem through the continuous splitting of sentences across the line, including the use of enjambement (lines 3-4). The concept of ‘gender’ is metaphorically compared to ‘female tethers’, implying the notion of something binding the ‘soul’, thereby restricting a true expression of the speaker’s sense of self. Furthermore, the symbolic imagery of a rider on a horse in the closing lines serves to identify the speaker with the (unseen) rider and her ‘gender’ with the horse at which ‘everyone looks’. In this way, the poem separates a self-awareness of ‘gender’ from the experience of being ‘human’.

The themes consistent throughout the poem revolve around female conflicts, concentrating on appearance, identity and social acceptance. Female beauty, or appearance is aligned with social norms and expectations. Following a feminist approach, gender is thereby revealed as a social construction, distinct from biological sex. The construction of female beauty in these terms is not unproblematic, and the maintenance of existing power relations between the genders in a patriarchal society is symbolically underlined through the notion of ‘female tethers’ and the limitations these impose.

The Snow Queen
By Peter Howard

Presumably, the frozen bird believes
The cobra to be beautiful. Her brain
Infers this from her fascinated eye:
It is an understandable mistake.

By catching them on frozen slides, we may
Beneath a microscope observe the shapes
Of snowflakes, all hexagonal, each one
Unique. So we were told. A lie, no doubt.

Though at the time the story cut no ice,
Its magic worked. One inch of snow. England
Freezes. Trains stop. Old women die of cold.
My bastard car won't start. The phones are jammed.

I know it. Snow is dangerous. Frost kills.
Yet, when clouds seem to threaten, my heart beats
Faster, and I can never turn my eyes
From soft, seductive, fatal, fields of white.

‘The Snow Queen’ by Peter Howard is a poem about the opposition of beauty and danger, and the way in which these two concepts may co-exist in reality. In the first stanza, a bird, paralysed with fear, admires the beauty of the very cobra that will presumably soon be its killer. In the following three stanzas, snow is metaphorically assigned an anthropomorphic intent to hide its dangerous aspects (‘frost kills’ and ‘old women die of cold’) behind the ‘seductive’ beauty of its appearance. The rich alliteration of ‘soft seductive’ and ‘fatal fields’ in the final line conveys a sense of beauty lulling the speaker into a false sense of security, or into making ‘an understandable mistake’ about the nature of beauty.

This poem can be interpreted as an allegorical statement about the psychological truth of female beauty. The interaction between the symbols of bird, cobra, snow and narrative voice in the poem create a coherent meaning beyond that of the literal level of interpretation. The implication is that female beauty is similarly dangerous to men: appearances are deceptive and possibly ‘fatal’. The closing lines effectively underscore the allegorical nature of the poem through increased reference to the human body. Parallels can be drawn between the way in which the speaker’s ‘heart beats faster’ (itself emphasized through enjambement) in the sight of ‘soft, seductive’ snowy fields, and his presumed physiological excitement when seeing a woman whose beauty he finds both alluring and dangerous.

Earthbound Mirrors
By Stephen Oliver

A woman polished as an earthenware jug
filled with northern light:

and you know there isn't a chance of that.
Is that what beauty's all about

what you'd like to give into most
to make a gift of it, to get what's going?

Right through your eyes allow me
to see these transparencies

which crush me like ice. Now, that's beauty.

And so I practise at departure
as this light moving the trees - airily.

What saves me (if you can call it that)
are the words here which stick,

something like a rubber/boot on damp ash.

This poem from ‘Earthbound Mirrors’ by Stephen Oliver is about female beauty as a reflection of the viewer’s own thoughts and desires: ‘what you’d like to give into most’. Both the form and use of language evoke a sense of absence and space, thereby conveying beauty’s lack of material reality. One and two line stanzas serve to create a visual impression of emptiness on the page. Words such as ‘airily’ and ‘light’ suggest impermanence, whilst ‘transparencies’ implies that the speaker is looking at something that is not really there. An emotional distance and coldness is conveyed through the evocation of ‘northern lights’ and beauty crushing the speaker ‘like ice’. These correspond to the theme of beauty as an evasive, translucent quality. The unreality of beauty is contrasted in the final line with the concrete image of ‘a rubber/boot on damp ash’.

Psychoanalytic criticism relates the poem’s theme to a Freudian perspective of the role of beauty in achieving happiness: while undoubtedly a source of pleasure, beauty has no discernible nature or origin. The speaker’s appreciation of beauty as ‘what you’d like to give into most’ is concerned with the compensatory value of beauty: the idea that aesthetically pleasing appearances can stave off suffering and provide temporary pleasure. Furthermore, the concept of beauty as a reflection of the viewer’s own desires can be related to Kant’s theory of the definition, value and function of beauty in his work, Critique of Judgement (1790). Like Freud, Kant believed that beauty does not inhere in the material qualities of the object but is a function of the viewer's receptivity to it.

Girl Powdering Her Neck
By Cathy Song
from a ukiyo-e print by Utamaro

The light is the inside
sheen of an oyster shell,
sponged with talc and vapor,
moisture from a bath.

A pair of slippers
are placed outside
the rice-paper doors.
She kneels at a low table
in the room,
her legs folded beneath her
as she sits on a buckwheat pillow.

Her hair is black
with hints of red,
the color of seaweed
spread over rocks.

Morning begins the ritual
wheel of the body,
the application of translucent skins.
She practices pleasure:
the pressure of three fingertips
applying powder.
Fingerprints of pollen
some other hand will trace.

The peach-dyed kimono
patterned with maple leaves
drifting across the silk,
falls from right to left
in a diagonal, revealing
the nape of her neck
and the curve of a shoulder
like the slope of a hill
set deep in snow in a country
of huge white solemn birds.
Her face appears in the mirror,
a reflection in a winter pond,
rising to meet itself.

She dips a corner of her sleeve
like a brush into water
to wipe the mirror;
she is about to paint herself.
The eyes narrow
in a moment of self-scrutiny.
The mouth parts
as if desiring to disturb
the placid plum face;
break the symmetry of silence.
But the berry-stained lips,
stenciled into the mask of beauty,
do not speak.

Two chrysanthemums
touch in the middle of the lake
and drift apart.

Cathy Song’s poem, ‘Girl Powdering Her Neck’ is a contemplation of a portrait of a geisha from one of the artist Kitagawa Utamaro’s studies of the floating world, ukiyo-e in Japan. Geishas were women largely responsible for the amusement of newly-rich lower-class merchants in the capital’s Yoshiwara district during the second half of the 18th century.

In this poem, the narrator is engaged in her daily routine of preparing her body for a man. She speaks of her beauty as a mask and her personal world as one of silence and solitude. As in the wood-block print by Utamara, Song provides an intimate and close-up portrait of this woman who parts her lips but maintains her silence: ‘The mouth parts (…)/ But the berry-stained lips,/ stenciled into the mask of beauty,/ do not speak.’

The changing rhythms in the poem underline the speaker’s increasing identification with the woman in the print. In lines 1-15, the woman is perceived as motionless and unmotivated. She is a beautiful object at which men like to look. These lines contain iambic (‘Her hair is black,/ with hints of red’) and a mixture of iambic and anapaestic feet (‘The light is the inside/ sheen of an oyster shell’). The use of trochaic feet in lines 16-36 (‘Fingerprints of pollen’) highlights a shifting concern to an appreciation of the woman as a figure in action, animated by routine and purpose. The rough juxtaposition of stressed syllables in lines 37-49 emphasises a sense of the woman as not only a figure in action, but also as an individual in conflict with herself (‘But the berry-stained lips,/ stenciled into the mask of beauty’). The abrupt closing lines of the poem, with their figure of two chrysanthemums touching then drifting apart, can be interpreted as a metaphorical depiction of the woman’s two selves: frivolous and entertaining in the role of geisha, yet melancholic and sad in her silent personal world.

Home>>Creative Arts>>Female Beauty in Twentieth-Century Poetry

2000-02-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

Home>>Cultures>>Chinese Beauty through the Changes of Time

Chinese Beauty through the Changes of Time

Women in China have traditionally been associated with the pursuit of beauty. For example, the Confucian scholar Liu Xiang ( c 77-6 BC) wrote "[she] takes delight in one's appearance" (1). The Chinese word 'beautiful' originally meant 'pleasant to sight' and is one of the earliest characters inscribed on oracle bones from 16-11 BC. However, standards of beauty have changed significantly throughout Chinese history. From slender to plump and frail to graceful, shifting ideals of feminine aestheticism in Imperial China can be traced through paintings, sculptures and contemporary accounts of women famous for their beauty. Although such women appeared as leading politicians and warriors, it was nevertheless from within a predominantly male-centred society that expectations of femininity were constructed. Conversely, the emancipation of women since the 1920s and increasing globalisation in the twenty-first century have effected further changes in ideals of beauty and fashion in modern China.

Western Han dynasty (206 BC - AD 8)

Founded by Liu Bang in 206 BC, this became one of the great dynasties of Chinese history. It was in this period that Confucianism was established as the main ideology of government in China. Chao Fei-yen is reported to have been one of the most beautiful women in this dynasty. The Emperor Ch'en-ti was attracted by her slim and graceful figure. She displayed her agile body as a vivacious and energetic dancer. With her sister, Chao Hede, she used her beauty as a weapon against the Emperor, of whom she was a concubine. The government was thrown into chaos in an internecine struggle for power. Although she was ultimately unsuccessful, her story shows that strength and confidence were highly regarded as virtues in a woman during this period. This is in stark contrast to the frailty and wilting beauty that was later to be admired in the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties.

Similar strength of character and resilience can be seen in Wang Zhaojun, also highly regarded for her beauty during the Han dynasty. Having caught the attention of many at the refined and sophisticated Chinese court, Wang Zhaojun continued to flourish despite having been bargained in marriage to strengthen an alliance with the Huns in the wilderness of the Asiatic steppes.

Terracotta sculptures that survive from the Han dynasty reflect the tall, slender ideal of feminine beauty so admired by the Emperor. Tomb figures from this period strive to capture the life and vitality of the subject and are noted for their graceful, slender style. Robes worn by noble women during the Han dynasty had a long train that trailed behind, gracefully emphasizing the women's height and stature.

The Lienuzhuan

The Lienuzhuan , compiled by the Han Confucian scholar Liu Xiang, contains 125 biographies of exemplary women. Aiming to promote dignity and moral virtue as necessary components of beauty, the Lienuzhuan can be seen as an attempt to caution women against using their beauty to gain power as the sisters Chao Fei-yen and Chao Hede had done. Many stories maintain that external physical beauty is merely a manifestation of internal beauty in the form of virtue. The book contains several biographies of physically ugly women who nevertheless married emperors and became empresses as a result of their attractive, special inner qualities. Women lacking such virtue, on the other hand, are described as scheming to entrap men in sensual pleasures in order to distract them and fulfil their own selfish plans. These women are attributed with causing disruption and breakdown in families and the state. It appears therefore that, whilst not regarded as necessarily dangerous, beauty at this time was strongly linked to female virtue. As such, beauty could be displayed primarily through strength of character and moral disposition.

T'ang dynasty (AD 618 - 907)

The T'ang dynasty is renowned for the artistic and personal freedom it afforded women. Artwork from the period shows energetic, full-bodied women engaged in outdoor athletic sporting pursuits such as polo on horseback (2). Delicate features and plump faces in sculptures of aristocratic ladies of the T'ang dynasty convey the ideal image of feminine beauty. Ceramic figures of elegant female courtiers that were used as tomb furnishings in the period are known today as 'Fat Ladies' for their fleshy faces.

The origin of this standard of beauty can be attributed to the T'ang emperors' preference for plump women as a sign of wealth and privilege. An example of such a woman is Yang Kuei-fei, a heavy and robust concubine with whom the Emperor Ming Huang became infatuated. Known as the 'Jade Beauty', she is celebrated as one of the most beautiful women in Chinese history. Chroniclers at the time described her white skin and delicate features, comparing them to fine carvings in the jade with which she surrounded herself.

Song dynasty (AD 960 - 1279)

The Song dynasty was marked by a return to Confucianism and a desire to live a simpler life than in the former T'ang dynasty. Peace and economic security encouraged a flourishing of such educational and intellectual activity. This is reflected in a plainer style of dress for both men and women during this period.

In contrast to the T'ang dynasty, women were now encouraged to remain indoors and to be seen by none but their husbands. It was socially expected that women should display their virtue physically. This expectation was instrumental in establishing the practice of footbinding during the Song dynasty. The physical limitations of bound feet were intended to emphasize female delicacy and vulnerability in comparison with superior male strength, thereby confirming men's sense of mastery over women. In effect, female subservience to men in Song society was encouraged as a display of the highest form of chastity and virtue. Attention to physical appearance was therefore crucial to women in attracting the interest of both powerful men for marriage, and husbands in competition with their other wives and concubines. Paintings commissioned by emperors during the Song dynasty portray women according to these presiding standards of graceful and plaintive beauty (3).

Ming dynasty (AD 1368 - 1644)

Between 1279 and 1368, China was under the foreign domination of the Monguls. During this period, the Monguls restricted the assimilation of Chinese culture and attempted to preserve their own national character. Following the success of an uprising against the Mongols in the 1350s, a new Chinese dynasty with the name Ming was declared in 1368. The founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, aimed to restore a traditional Han cultural identity. The growth of urban prosperity and cosmopolitan entertainment can be contrasted with the solitude and reclusion expected of women. They were classed as outsiders as a result of male anxiety and warnings about the dangers of their beauty.

Footbinding became more widespread and severe during the Ming dynasty as the "symbol for feminine beauty, hierarchy and morality" (4). The author Wang Ping comments on poetry from the period, writing that "The women presented in these poems and literary works all have the same qualities: they are floating and weightless like unreachable treasure. Men cannot help feeling pity for them and falling in love with them" (5). The ideal of beauty portrayed in such poetry emphasizes sickness, fragility and suffering as much as it does delicacy, elegance and grace.

However, the meaning of bound feet in the Ming dynasty was essentially grounded in eroticism. Bound feet were central to a woman's identity as an aspect of her beauty that she could control. An outpouring of novels, plays and poetry by female writers at this time highlights the erotic associations of bound feet. The 'Three Inch Golden Lotus' standard of perfection in foot length was therefore closely associated with an expression of sexuality. As such, footbinding formed part of a larger valorisation of passion, or qing, that is characteristic of the Ming dynasty. A high point of Chinese erotic culture, the cult of qing helped to bring explicit sensual and passionate significance to ideals of beauty in women.

Ch'ing dynasty (AD 1644 - 1911)

The conquest of the Ming dynasty by the Manchus in 1644 brought China under the authority of the Ch ing dynasty. The State attempted to regulate the sexual and gender roles of women through the prohibition of footbinding and the promotion of chastity in widowhood. Although footbinding continued among upper-class women, as the historian Susan Mann writes, "the meaning of bound feet shifted away from eroticism and toward social responsibility" (6). In other words, footbinding became a mark of social elitism and feminine morality rather than a symbol of eroticism as it had been in the Ming dynasty. Indeed, 'beauty' was no longer a formal requirement in ideal standards relating to the role of women during this period. Women were expected to possess virtue and talent, but beauty as a suggestion of passion and sexuality was inhibited.

The difference between ideals of beauty in the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties is revealed in the exclusion of all poems dealing with love, sex or romance from a collection of women's poetry by Wanyan Yun Zhu, published in 1831 (7). She wrote that, "in compiling this anthology, I have attached the greatest importance to purity of emotional expression and the harmony and elegance of rhymes poems about sexual love and romance by courtesans, whom earlier compilers anthologised profusely and rhapsodised over, are not included here."

Political, economic and social change (1911 - 1976)

Underlying currents of nationalist protest against Manchu authority in China fuelled the organization of a Republican movement in the 1890s. In 1911, Sun Yat-sen was elected provisional president of the Republic of China. Following the May 4 th Movement of 1919, nationalist movements involving large sections of the population aimed to push China towards modernization. Increased contact with the West through trade and commerce brought many women in China together with new Western ideas of gender equality and women's rights. Not surprisingly, ideals of feminine beauty were influenced by women's emancipation and pursuit of education, employment and independence. The practice of footbinding declined and many women wore the cheungsam or qipao . In response to the shorter skirts seen in Western fashion, the cheungsam was tight fitting with high side-slits. It revealed more of a woman's body than any previous style of Chinese clothing. 'The Changing Face of Chinese Beauty' (8) details the rise in popularity of lipsticks, eyebrow plucking and shorter fringe lengths during this period, and the way in which women continued these practices surreptitiously during the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 76). These changing aspects of beauty symbolized the transition from more restrictive traditions to women s newfound freedom in China.

Consumer culture and beauty industries (1976 - 2003)

The death of Mao Zedong on September 9 th 1976 heralded the end of an era and the beginning of an 'open-door' policy with further economic reforms in China. The first Chinese fashion magazine, Shizuang , or 'Fashion', was published in Peking in 1979. Receptive attitudes and experimentation with regard to Western fashion styles signalled a growing interest in personal appearance, beauty and consumer culture. Within this consumer culture, changing attitudes to women in China can be discerned. Female beauty became a commodity in a renewed importance of the expression of body and gender ideals. Consumerism provided an alternative arena for femininity outside the domination of the Party State.

However, a dichotomy between nature, tradition and China on the one hand, and culture, modernity and the West on the other hand, can be seen to underlie contemporary Chinese consumer culture. Whilst women in China are advised to make themselves 'modern', sexy and alluring, they are also expected to represent Chinese culture and values through the proper enactment of chastity and submission in their roles as housewives. The tension between these two ideals is expressed in magazine advertisements. For example, whilst advertisements for bust enhancers portray uninhibited women with natural curves symbolizing modernity and Western civilisation, those for skin care products tend to rely on pictures of chaste, shy women wearing traditional Chinese dresses in domestic settings. Similarly, the rising popularity of beauty pageants in China, with the Beauty Queen Guan Qi being crowned Miss China on September 21 st 2003, reveals a conflict between the desire to embrace a Western tolerance towards activities once suppressed as being bourgeois and decadent, and the need to justify the competitions in terms of providing suitable role models for women. An emphasis on the judgement of beauty in manners and education as well as in appearance is reminiscent of the traditional Chinese ideals of inner virtue and talent in women regarded as beautiful.

Furthermore, the export of American entertainment products such as films, music and MTV, together with the aim of opening markets for Western beauty products and technologies in China are reflected in the rapidly changing norms of attractiveness among Chinese women in recent years. As a result, the processes of globalization are implicated also in the establishment of beauty industries in China. Practices promoted by these industries typically include breast enlargements, skin whitening procedures, limb lengthening and the creation of 'double' eyelids. Cosmetic surgery is becoming increasingly popular as a means of altering the shape of noses and eyes to accord with Western appearances (9). Ideals of beauty in contemporary Chinese culture can therefore be seen to be attached to symbolic meanings based on China's transformation from a closed socialist society to a globalized consumer culture.
Sources

(1) In The Machinations of the Warring States , a 33 volume work by Liu Xiang ( c 77-6 BC) of the Former Han period.

(2) For example, the Tri-color Glaze Pottery Figure of a Lady playing Polo in the permanent collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei.

(3) For example, Looking in a Mirror by an Ornamental Box by an anonymous Song painter in the permanent collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei.

(4) Ping, W. (2000) Aching for beauty: Footbinding in China , Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

(5) Ping, W. Ibid.

(6) Mann, S. (1997) Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century , Stanford, Stanford University Press.

(7) Wanyan Yun Zhu (1831) Correct Beginnings: Women's Poetry of our August Dynasty (Guochao quixiu zhengshi ji).

(8) http://www.chinavista.com/experience/old/beauty.html

(9) BBC News, Chinese woman seeks perfect beauty , published 2003/07/24

Home>>Cultures>>Chinese Beauty through the Changes of Time

2000-02-05T12:59:00.000-08:00

Home>>Cultures>>Beauty Under Islam

Beauty Under Islam

Violence during the staging of the 2002 Miss World beauty pageant in Nigeria sharply exposed the incompatibility of the understanding of beauty in the West with that of Muslims under Islam. As the reporter, Gamal Nkrumah, wrote in The Al-Ahram Weekly, "Beauty is only skin deep, but in Nigeria, it has assumed such profoundness that in the preparations to stage an international beauty queen pageant an estimated 250 lives were lost because of sectarian violence" (1). Denounced by Muslim leaders as a "parade of nudity" (2), riots were fuelled by an article in the Nigerian newspaper This Day, venturing the opinion that Muhammad himself would have enjoyed choosing a wife from the beauty pageant. Clearly, Islamic attacks by protesters chanting "Down with Beauty" reveal a deeply seated commitment to religious beliefs concerning the appropriate display of female beauty, not only in society at large but also within an all-encompassing context of religious government itself. What form does this understanding of beauty take under Islam, and how can its manifestation in the lives of women be reconciled with Western ideals of beauty culture?

Islam is a religion that pervades all areas of life for a Muslim, whether this is national in politics, social in the community or private in the home. Revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, the Messenger of God, the teachings in the Qur'an express God's will for all humankind. Accordingly, the Qur'an gives guidance on the commitment or surrendering of the lives of Islamic Muslims to the will of Allah. Beauty is considered to be a divine quality and is articulated as such in Islamic art and architecture. An aesthetic joy of beauty is emphasized in calligraphy and pottery, and directs the serenity of contemplation when sitting on a traditional carpet. Beauty itself, therefore, is believed to emerge from spirituality and to guide the inner qualities of peace, harmony and equilibrium in artistic manifestations of the Islamic religion.

How does this divine, spiritual dimension of beauty impact on ideas of femininity in Islam? In the first instance, 'masculine' and 'feminine' are not considered to map precisely onto the biological sex of a person. Allah embraces principles of masculinity through being Absolute, and principles of femininity through being Infinite. In other words, elements of both masculinity and femininity are present in all men and women. However, the Qur'an reveals Allah as masculine under the name of Majesty ( jalal ) and feminine under the name of Beauty ( jamal ). This implies that femininity is understood foremost as an embodiment of beauty. Qualities associated with beauty are described in the names used in the Qur'an when Allah is revealed in a feminine context: the Generous, the Merciful, the Forgiving. It follows that, whilst masculinity is displayed outwardly, femininity is interiorized. Such qualities of feminine beauty are perhaps most eloquently portrayed in Sufi literature. The love story of Layla and Majnun shows how transcendent levels of meaning raise the heroine to the place of the Divine Reality waiting in stillness, spoken in terms of female beauty. Masculinity is depicted as an outward act as the hero goes in quest of the Divine beloved.

Criteria for female beauty can now be seen to derive directly from Islamic understandings of femininity, as revealed by Allah in the Qur'an. Women are expected to be silent, immobile and obedient. The Qur'an states explicitly that believing women should "lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands, their fathers, their husbands' fathers, their sons..." (3). The Qur'an instructs both men and women to observe the 'hijab rules':

1. The clothes worn by a man must cover the body at least from the navel to the knees. Those worn by a woman must cover the complete body except the face and hands. Head-to-toe garments worn by women include the Burqa,Chador and Hijab.

2. The clothes worn should be loose and should not reveal the figure.

3. The clothes worn should not be transparent such that one can see through them.

4. The clothes worn should not be so glamorous as to attract the opposite sex.

5. The clothes worn should not resemble that of the opposite sex.

6. The clothes worn should not resemble that of the unbelievers i.e. they should not wear clothes that are specifically identities or symbols of the unbelievers' religions.

Full observation of these rules for women includes hijab of the eyes, heart, thought and intention. In other words, women are expected to guard their modesty and veil their beauty not only through their style of clothing but also in the way they walk, talk and behave. This is justified in the Qur'an as being a preventative measure against molestation: "O Prophet! Tell thy wives and daughters, and the believing women that they should cast their outer garments over their persons (when abroad); that is most convenient, that they should be known (as such) and not molested" (4). Indeed, testimonies of Muslim women defending their decision to wear the hijab or burqa in Western societies emphasize "its original purpose to give back to women ultimate control of their own bodies" (5). When the body is concealed, character judgements cannot be made on the basis of physical attributes. In this way, the hijab is regarded as providing both protection and equality to women in Islamic society.

However, these teachings have profound implications for women that go beyond a mere aesthetic appreciation of beauty. The Moroccan scholar, Fatna Sabbah argues that Islamic religious concepts of beauty lead to the dehumanisation and demonization of Muslim women (6). Although a divine quality, beauty provokes a desire in men that is believed to be sinful and satanic (shahwa ). Women are therefore associated with the devil through their beauty. Their appearance must be hidden from sight to enable men to control their desire. These dangerous connotations of female beauty are deeply rooted in Islamic religious history. The imam and orator Ibn al-Jawzi (1126-1200) taught, "the beauty of women is one of the poisoned arrows of the devil" (7). It could be argued therefore that, rather than offering protection and equality to women, the hijab functions to establish their position as a sex object by making them wholly responsible for not arousing the passions of men. Whilst Muslim women in Western societies may claim to feel liberated by their choice to wear the hijab , those in Islamic states who refused were frequently slashed with razors, had acid thrown in their faces, were killed or imprisoned for showing their bare arms and legs before they were required to cover their bodies by law. Notions of liberation in such circumstances are therefore questionable.

When Vida Samadzai walked down the catwalk in the 2003 Miss Earth contest, she became the first Afghan entrant in an international beauty pageant for 30 years. She was also warned by Fazel Ahmad Manawi, deputy head of Afghanistan's Supreme Court, that she could face prosecution if she returned to her native country. Her crime? Wearing a red bikini. Judges at the contest, on the other hand, awarded Samadzai a newly created 'beauty for a cause' award for 'symbolizing the newfound confidence, courage and spirit of today's women' and "representing the victory of women's rights and various social, personal and religious struggles" (8). Whether in Islamic or Western cultures, beauty pageants raise critics on both sides of the argument concerning displays of female beauty. Burqa or bikini - are women truly liberated by either of these?

Sources

(1) Nkrumah, G. (2002) 'Beyond Salvation', Al-Ahram Weekly , 28 Nov. - 4 Dec. 2002, Issue no.614

(2) BBC News, Miss World Nigeria boycott spreads , Friday, 6 September 2002.

(3) Al-Qur'an 24:31

(4) Al-Qur'an 33:59

(5) Mustafa, N. (1993) 'My Body is my Own Business', The Globe and Mail, June 29, Facts and Arguments Page (A26).

(6) Sabbah, F. (1984) Woman in the Muslim Unconscious , New York, Pergamon Press.

(7) In the text Dhamm al-hawa

(8) Sunday 9 November, 2003, Manila, Philippines: Miss Earth Contest.

Home>>Cultures>>Beauty Under Islam

2000-02-04T05:35:00.000-08:00

Home>>Collection>>The Question of Beauty

The Question of Beauty

By Dr. Judith H. Langlois. First published by the Office of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

When I took my Ph.D. examination all candidates were grilled by five professors about their dissertation to make sure they "know their stuff." My dissertation was an innocuous study of preschool children's peer relationships, and I knew the data and the relevant literature like the back of my hand. I answered all the questions quickly and articulately. Except one. A professor asked me if I had considered whether the children's facial attractiveness influenced their peer relationships and popularity and, therefore, my results. My immediate reaction was to roll my eyes back and say emphatically, "No, of course not!" But then flashbacks of college blind dates crossed my mind. I remembered well the first question asked by both males and females: "What does he or she look like?" I was uncertain how to answer my professor's question. On the one hand, I was taught "never judge a book by its cover," implying that attractiveness should not be important. On the other hand, there were all those blind dates....... I stumbled and stammered. My professor gently let me off the hook by telling me that perhaps I should think about the question before I did my next study.

That simple dissertation question became the impetus of a research effort originally conceived to demonstrate that the professor was wrong and facial attractiveness was not important for children and their relationships. Some twenty years and many research studies later have revealed that the professor was right and I was naive about the importance of attractiveness in child development. Facial attractiveness, I emphasize, is not the most important influence on children's relationships and development; intelligence and personality are both more important than attractiveness. Through my research, however, I now recognize that attractiveness makes a significant and meaningful contribution, more than previously believed.

Myths About Beauty.

Many conventional truisms about attractiveness are really myths. Despite the old adage "never judge a book by its cover" and despite the prevailing belief that attractiveness does not matter once we know a person, even parents judge and treat their own children differently based on attractiveness, although they are not aware of it. In a study of more than 150 Caucasian, Mexican American, and African American newborn infants and mothers, we found that moms of attractive first-born infants were more attentive and affectionate than moms of less attractive first-borns. All the mothers denied that attractiveness should matter in parental treatment of children but their behavior belied their beliefs.

Many studies, in addition, demonstrate that facial attractiveness is a significant correlate of children's popularity in the classroom, where the children are among familiar peers. One study we conducted shows that attractiveness is significantly related to social acceptance and popularity for girls throughout the entire school year. For boys, low attractiveness is associated with rejection by peers. Moreover, the likelihood that unattractive boys would be rejected increased, not decreased, as the school year progressed and as the boys became better acquainted.

These studies on parent-infant interaction and children's popularity directly contradict the notion that attractiveness becomes less important as people become better acquainted. Many studies also contradict the conventional wisdom that "beauty is all in the eye of the beholder." A 1960 study by psychologist A. H. Iliffe establishes vast agreement in attractiveness judgments made by more than 4,000 men and women ranging in age from fifteen to fifty-five and from different regions of the United Kingdom. Michael Cunningham and his colleagues point out that attractiveness ratings of Asians, Hispanics, Blacks, and Whites made by Asians, Hispanics, Blacks, and Whites are highly related. Even the attractiveness of young babies can be reliably judged by college students, even though they initially complain that all babies look alike!

Even more surprising, we discovered that infants, as young as three- to six-months of age, agree with the attractiveness judgments of adults, suggesting that the standards and preferences for beauty are not learned gradually through exposure to the media but rather are in place early in life. How do we know that babies prefer attractive faces given that they cannot talk to us? To answer this question we've conducted two different types of studies to assess infants' preferences for attractive faces.

The first study is a visual preference experiment. In these experiments, we showed a group of babies several slides of faces reliably rated by adults to be more or less attractive. The babies saw the faces of either Caucasian male or female adults, African-American adult females, or the faces of other infants. In each experiment, eight attractive and eight unattractive faces, matched closely for hair length, style, color, and facial expression, were chosen from a large group of faces. Pairs of these faces were projected side-by-side so that each image was about the size of a real face. The amount of time each infant looked at each face was then recorded. The results of all these studies were straightforward and unambiguous. Babies look longer at adult-judged attractive faces than at unattractive faces, regardless of whether the face is male or female, white or black, adult or infant.

We wondered whether these visual preferences of infants extended to other infant behaviors. To answer this question, we asked a professional mask maker to design and construct attractive and unattractive masks for a woman who would later interact with infants as a "stranger." The masks were realistic and life-like. They were thin enough to move the stranger's face so she could smile and talk freely. (Each mask, similar to those seen on the television program "Mission Impossible," took about 2.5 hours to apply to the stranger's face for an experimental session.) The stranger played with sixty one-year-olds, one at a time, using a strict, rehearsed script so that her behavior would be consistent for all infants. The stranger did not know whether the attractive or unattractive mask had been applied each day because the masks' interiors were identical. Thus her behavior toward the infants could not have been affected by her knowledge of whether she was "attractive" or "unattractive." The interactions between the stranger and the babies were recorded on videotape and scored by observers who could not see the stranger's face and who, therefore, could not be biased by the mask she wore.

The results showed that infants' preferences for attractive females do indeed extend beyond visual preferences to include actual behavioral differences. The infants more frequently avoided the stranger when she was unattractive than when she was attractive, and they showed more negative emotion and distress in the unattractive than in the attractive condition. Furthermore, boys (but not girls) approached the female stranger more often in the attractive than in the unattractive condition, perhaps foreshadowing the types of interactions that may later occur at parties and other social situations when the boys are older!

It appears that what our mothers and grandmothers said was true-that standards of attractiveness were gradually learned through exposure to the media-is actually wrong. Standards of and preferences for attractive faces are either innate or acquired much earlier than previously supposed.

Defining Beauty.

What exactly IS facial beauty and why is it that infants, children, and adults all seem to prefer attractive faces? Defining beauty is a task scientists and philosophers have tackled for centuries, largely without success. Recent empirical work on the effects of facial attractiveness, nevertheless, has proceeded without any conceptual or scientific definition of attractiveness. Researchers simply have defined attractive faces as those that raters agree are attractive! Even Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (10th Edition) is not much help: "Beauty. The quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit."

For our understanding of "what is facial beauty," we wanted and needed a more precise and scientific definition to help explain why infants, young children, and adults from various parts of the world could so easily agree on which faces are attractive and which are not. After searching all the existing research literature, we located a series of historic studies that showed that faces close to the average facial configuration of the population of faces should be attractive.

In the 1800s English anthropologist Sir Francis Galton and American psychologist George D. Stoddard created composite portraits by superimposing photographic exposures of faces. Essentially they constructed imprecise mathematical averages of faces by using this photographic technique. Galton's goal was to design facial types; he was especially fond of fabricating composites of criminals and vegetarians. Stoddard assembled composites of members of the National Academy of Sciences and of the 1883 and 1884 graduating classes of Smith College. Both Galton and Stoddard noticed and remarked that the composites were "better looking" than their individual components.

Why might "average" faces be preferred over non-average faces (not "average" in attractiveness, but average in facial configuration and proportion)? A cognitive theory emphasizes the role of prototypes in understanding how a person processes information. A prototype is an abstract, cognitive representation that reflects the best example of a category of objects or events, and it often is defined as the central tendency or the averaged members of the class of examples. For example, an average sized dog, neither very large nor very small, is usually represented as the prototypic dog in the human mind. So a dog that represents the average of all dogs would be the prototypic dog and a face that represents the average of all faces in the population would be the prototypic face. Many studies show that after seeing several examples of a category-for instance, schematic animals or schematic faces-one responds to an averaged representation of those category members as if it were special or familiar to us even if we have never seen it before. Studies even show that young infants can average incoming stimuli to form a prototype. Perhaps this is why infants in our research preferred attractive faces; if attractive faces are prototypical of the category of faces, they would be preferred because they seem more facelike or more familiar to the young infants.

A second theory also emphasizes the importance of "averageness." The field of evolutionary biology suggests that perhaps innate, built-in mechanisms account for these preferences for attractive faces. In the most common form of natural selection, called normalizing or stabilizing selection, evolutionary pressures operate against the extremes of the population and in favor of characteristics representing the average or central tendency of the population. Thus average values of characteristics shaped by normalizing selection are preferred in the population. According to this view, individuals with average population characteristics should be less likely to carry harmful genetic mutations than individuals with extreme population characteristics. In fact, evolutionary biologist Donald Symons has proposed an innate mechanism of perception that detects the population mean of anatomical features. For faces, Symons refers to this mechanism as a "beauty detector." The "beauty detector" averages observed faces and, because of stabilizing selection pressures, prefers these "average" faces over faces more distant from the mean.

Both cognitive and evolutionary theory suggest that faces representing the average of the population will be perceived as attractive as did Galton's work in the 1800s. We examined the hypothesis that averaged faces would be attractive by performing a "high tech" version of Galton's technique. We photographed a substantial number of UT Austin male and female undergraduates using a standard background, lighting, and distance. We randomly selected ninety-six male faces and ninety-six female faces and randomly put them into three sets of thirty-two faces for each sex with no overlapping faces in the sets. We then created three "composite" or averaged faces for each sex on a computer in a two-step process.

In the first step, we "digitized" the individual faces by converting the light and dark shades that comprise each face to an array of numbers, or chromatic values, that represent each face and can be manipulated just like any other set of numbers. Each color value represents a different shade present in the picture of the face.

In the second step, we mathematically averaged the numbers representing the different individual faces in each of the six sets. We created composite faces of two, four, eight, sixteen, and thirty-two different faces averaged together for each set of randomly selected faces. These averaged faces were photographed and rated for attractiveness by 300 judges along with the photographically equivalent (in other words, slightly blurred) slides of the individuals who went into them.

We found that averaged faces made of sixteen-and thirty-two-faces were judged to be significantly more attractive than the average attractiveness level of all the individual faces. Additional analyses indicated that, of the ninety-six individual male faces, only three were judged to be significantly more attractive than their thirty-two-face composite-about what is expected by chance. Of the female faces, only four were rated as significantly more attractive than the composites, again only the number one would expect by chance.

By using advanced computer technology, we demonstrated that "averaged" faces are perceived as attractive; we replicated this finding in two populations, male and female, and in three samples from each population. Although we do not think that "averageness" is the only aspect of facial beauty (expression and age are important as well), we do believe that "averageness" is a necessary and critical element of attractiveness. Without "averageness" even the most youthful, smiling face will not be judged as attractive.

Although evolutionary and cognitive theory are generally considered quite different theoretical accounts of human behavior, they both posit similar mechanisms in the case of preferences for attractive faces by suggesting that prototypic or averaged faces underlies the tendency of infants and adults from diverse cultures to notice and prefer attractive faces. At this point, we can't choose between evolutionary theory, which suggests that preferences for attractive faces are innate, and cognitive theory, which suggests that preferences for attractive faces are acquired early in life through exposure to category members. Indeed one of the most exciting aspects of this work is that we will eventually be able to contribute some answers to the age-old nature vs. nurture debate: what capabilities are we born with and what capabilities are developed due to experience?

Caveat.

I end with a cautionary note. After hearing of this work and about the "myths" of attractiveness, one might wonder if this research on the nature of facial beauty is in some way an advocacy of the importance of beauty, an approval of the emphasis on beauty in the media, or a suggestion that because preferences for attractiveness are evident so early in life, they are an immutable aspect of human nature. The answer to all three questions is no! It is true that even the youngest of us fall victim to the "beauty-is-good" bias automatically, and that often we are not aware that we have such biases in favor of attractive individuals. As cognitive humans, however, we are capable of controlling many aspects of our thoughts and behaviors, an ability that distinguishes us from lower animal species and allows us to change undesirable aspects of our behavior. Studying and examining these unconscious influences, such as biases toward facial beauty, help us become aware of how and when they operate and thus allow us to learn to oppose them. The same research that identifies these unconscious processes can rob them of their mystique and influence and can lead us to behave more consciously and humanely.

Dr. Judith H. Langlois is the Charles and Sarah Seay Regents Professor of Developmental Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin.

Reproduced with permission. Copyright (c) 1997 Office of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Home>>Collection>>The Question of Beauty

2000-02-03T09:30:00.000-08:00

Home>>Body>>Modifying the Body: Tattoos and Piercings

Modifying the Body: Tattoos and Piercings

Body modification in the form of tattooing and piercing is traditionally viewed with reserve in contemporary Western societies. Those with tattoos or piercings are seen as rebellious and defiant of social conventions. However, body adornment in other non-Western cultures plays an expressive role in the articulation of cultural and religious values. Ritual ceremonies involving body modification and ornamentation mark rites of passage, the calling of spirits and the enhancement of beauty (1). Whilst Western societies promote slender, tall athletic bodies as an ideal of beauty, perceptions of beauty in other cultures often focus on what has been done to the body rather than on the body itself.

Body modification is not a new practice. It can be seen in many ancient cultures. Evidence of body marking has been found on Egyptian mummies dating from between 4000 and 2000 BC. The word tattoo is derived from the Tahitian word meaning 'to strike', tatau , and examples can be found in the history of ancient societies in Hawaii and Tahiti. A recently discovered 'Ice Man' whose tattoo markings were preserved in a glacier, is estimated to be around 5000 years old. In Britain, tattoos of animal motifs on members of ancient tribes were designed to scare their adversaries in warfare. As Julius Caesar remarked, the blue appearance that these tattoos gave to the warriors made them 'frightful to look upon in battle' (2). However, when Roman soldiers imitated these tattoos themselves, the Roman Emperor Constantine I banned the practice as being against 'God's handiwork'. In effect, body ornamentation in Western Europe was thereby largely repressed and extinguished through fear of religious persecution by the then dominanct Christian religion.

In other non-Western cultures, however, tattooing, piercing and scarification of the body were regarded as a necessary part of religious expression. Within these cultures, body adornment and alteration were believed to distinguish humans from other animals, so providing evidence of civilisation and socialisation. Ornamentation was performed following strict observation of ritual preparation, ceremony and taboos. For example, tattooing was widespread as a religious practice among the peoples of the South Pacific. In the Marquesan Islands, tattooing of men began at puberty in a ceremonial rite. Women's arms and legs were also inscribed with complex and elaborate motifs. These tattoos were believed to defend against spiritual and physical danger. Similarly, a sacred rite among the Maori involved using a mallet and chisel to gouge deep cuts in the skin, usually on the face. Those who received the tattoo were highly respected for their spirituality and bravery and were secluded from other non-sacred people while their wounds healed.

A form of tattooing called cicatrisation or scarification is widely practised in traditional African societies. Rubbing charcoal into small cuts made with razors or thorns forms decorative patterns of scar tissue in the skin. These designs are often indicative of social rank, traits of character, political status and religious authority. For African women, scarification is largely associated with fertility. Scars added at puberty, after the birth of the first child, or following the end of breastfeeding highlight the bravery of women in enduring the pain of childbirth. Scars on the hips and buttocks, on the other hand, both visually and tactually accentuate the erotic and sensual aspects of these parts of the female body.
In other cultures, piercing rather than tattooing forms the main focus of such religious and social symbolism. For example ear piercings in Alaska are used to represent social status and prestige. Similarly, lip piercings in Inuit (Eskimo) societies are performed at puberty to mark a boy's transition to manhood, whilst social distinction is emphasized by nose piercings among the Tlingit of Alaska. Tattooing, on the other hand, is traditionally thought to enhance female beauty in Inuit (Eskimo) societies. Close parallel lines running from the lower lip to the chin of a young girl are usually drawn by older women using a needle, thread and lamp soot.

Body ornamentation, especially tattooing, was spread among Western societies when soldiers and sailors returning from conquest and trade imitated the practices they had seen among the indigenous people of Asia, Africa and the South Pacific. Working class men in Europe and America wore tattoos primarily as a symbol of tough masculine pride throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, a revival of interest in body modification in Western industrialized societies in the late twentieth century is associated more with domestic youth culture movements than with the foreign origins of such practices. The Beatniks of the 1950s and Hippie movements of the 1960s turned to Asian tattooing techniques as a personal expression of spiritual and mystical body aestheticism. Conversely, working-class young people of the Punk movement in the late 1970s and 80s used tattoos and piercing as symbols of rebellion in an explicit political protest against their feelings of imprisonment in society's rigid class structure and values.

A recent rise in the popularity of tattooing and piercing in the West is evident in magazine features (3), themed photographic exhibitions (4) and newspaper articles (5). In America, it is estimated that between 10 and 25 per cent of teenagers have some kind of tattoo or piercing (6). The opening of a tattoo and piercing section in the London high-street store, Selfridges, indicates a new interest among middle class men and women in body modification techniques. This can be attributed to an increasing professionalism of such practices and access to high quality tattooing resources (7). Popular forms of tattooing range from a single image to a full bodysuit tattoo. Common sites of body piercing include the ear, eyebrow, nose, bridge, cheek, lip, navel, nipple and genital. Different methods of piercing add further variety to body modification styles and include the regular method, surface, pearling, sub-incision and pocket piercing.

However, whilst body modification may be finding new levels of acceptance in certain areas of society, motivations for tattooing and piercing among adolescents and middle class women are profoundly different in nature from those of the sailors, soldiers, bikers and gang members more commonly associated with such practices in the West. Originally a social symbol of group identification and affiliation, tattoos and piercings are now being invested with more personal, individual meanings. Clinton Sanders, a sociologist who spent seven years engaged in field research work among young people with tattoos, believes that tattoos provided his subjects with a means of self-identity. He writes that they marked themselves with 'indelible symbols of what they see themselves to be' (8). The sociologist Chris Shilling argues that as notions of the inner 'self' are conflated with the appearance of the surface of the body, adornment and ornamentation occupy an increasingly significant role in the construction of personal identity (9). In other words, piercings, tattoos and other body modifications allow a person to control and manipulate visual projections of their own sense of individuality. For example, the website 'Body Modification Ezine' (10) includes numerous readers' stories about the extent to which a tattoo or piercing has changed their image of themselves. One contributor wrote that being pierced 'helped me know who I am'.

It appears therefore that, whilst practices of body modification in traditional non-Western cultures serve to connect people to their social position and ancestry, tattooing and body piercing in the West functions to delineate individuals from the society in which they live. As such, body modification in contemporary Western societies is not only a code of identity but also an attainable aesthetic standard of beauty and physical appeal among those that ascribe to its values.

(1) Krakow, A. (1994) The Total Tattoo Book , New York, Warner Books.

(2) Sanders, C. (1988) 'Marks of mischief. Becoming and being tattooed' in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography , Vol. 16, No. 4, Jan, pp. 395-432.

(3) For example, Betts, K. (1994) 'Body language' in Vogue , April, vol. 184, issue 4, p. 344.

(4) For example, Manne, D. (1993) 'Hung up on SM' in The Melbourne Times , July 7, p. 13.

(5) For example, Masterton, A. (1994) 'Carved in Flesh' in The Age Extra , September 3, p. 13.

(6) (2002)'Body piercing, tattooing, self-esteem and body investment in adolescent girls', Adolescence , Autumn issue.

(7) Rubin, A. (1988) Marks of Civilisation , Los Angeles, Museum of Cultural History.

(8) Sanders, C. (1988) 'Marks of mischief: becoming tattooed', Journal of Contemporary Ethnography , Vol. 6, No. 4, Jan., pp. 393-432.

(9) Shilling, C. (1993) The Body and Social Theory , London, Sage.

(10) http://www.bmezine.com/

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2000-02-02T09:45:00.000-08:00

Home>>Teaching Resources>>Online cross-curricular units of work

Online cross-curricular units of work

The Science and Politics of Cosmetic Surgery: What is cosmetic surgery? What views do different people have about cosmetic surgery, and why? What are the key scientific aspects of issues concerning cosmetic surgery? How does the media cover issues and problems of cosmetic surgery, and what effect does this have on our understanding and opinion of them?

Beauty in Contemporary Global Cultures: In these activities, students develop their understanding of the economic, social and political forces which shape all of our lives through a study of beauty in contemporary global cultures. They develop knowledge of the world as a global community, and the political, economic and social implications of this.

The Body as Image: What is image? How has the body been used as an image in different times and cultures? How is the body used as an image in contemporary art and photography?

The Significance of the Media in Issues of Beauty Culture: What makes a news story in beauty culture? How does the media promote beauty standards? How does the media contribute to the creation of celebrities? Should celebrities in beauty culture have a right to privacy?

Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to read the downloadable worksheets associated with these Units of Work.

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2000-02-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

Home>>Presentation of content

Presentation of Content

This website is designed to be read by people seeking original, quality information about the nature and culture of beauty, and by teachers looking for ways to incorporate these ideas in their classroom teaching.

It does not:

include many graphics: "since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps, Web pages can be no more than 3 KB if they are to download in one second which is the required response time for hypertext navigation. Users do not keep their attention on the page if downloading exceeds 10 seconds, corresponding to 30 KB at modem speed. Keeping below these size limits rules out most graphics." (Jacob Nielsen, expert on web design and usability).

It does:

employ scannable text

use highlighted keywords

include meaningful sub-headings

use outbound hypertext links to refer readers to additional information, images, interactive and multi-media presentations of the main content.

Further details about the presentation and design of this website can be found in Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity by Jacob Nielsen.

Home>>Presentation of content

2000-01-31T09:57:00.000-08:00

Home>>About the Author

About the Author

Lindie Pavati is a qualified teacher, artist and musician. Born in Italy, she completed University honours and postgraduate degrees in Rome and London. Her PhD thesis studied the work of designers in Milan, analysing its social context and cultural significance. She was editor of the journal, La Sociologia dell’Arte and co-founder of the Centre for Youth: Art in Society. Between 1992 and 2001, she specialised in the cross-curricular development of PSHE and Citizenship, teaching in secondary schools across the UK. She now lectures in adult education and teacher training.

Home>>About the Author

2000-01-30T12:16:00.000-08:00

Home>>Collection>>In Praise of Intellectual Beauty

In Praise of Intellectual Beauty

By John Haber. First published in Haberarts.

Description is revelation.
— Wallace Stevens

Why Art Takes Words

What difference does it make whether Rembrandt or a follower painted The Polish Rider, as long as it still looks beautiful? When scholars burden us with arguments, is it only to dull our senses and certify some dealer's prices? I think not, and to explain why, I am going to deny the very premise that there is appearance or beauty on the one hand, history or interpretation on the other.

Sure, the intellect can often denigrate beauty, even ruin it entirely. The threat goes far beyond our respect for art, right to its existence. At least unfamiliar followers of Rembrandt are still painters, and their work is still art. But when critics claim that a row of oversized Campbell's soup labels can be art, they imply that something else—say, something in the supermarket—might not be.If that sounds a little too much like a cause for celebration, try turning our merry critics loose on a Native American tapestry or an African ritual object. Will it be art, decoration, both, or neither? How about its knock-off behind the furniture display at the mall?

The ability of the mind to establish value in old colored fabrics and aluminum cans is remarkable. At the very least, it reminds us that art is a human creation, and that alone gives it meaning. However, I want to leave tough philosophical questions about the nature of art aside right now. My goal is to plead for the beauty that the critical intellect can bring alive for us, even when its words sound difficult and obscure.

Seeing beauty for the first time

When we classify things, it is our way of arranging in our heads what we see, and it allows us to see more. A botanist can be so much more sensitive to the beauty and variety of plants than most backyard observers—and more aware of how that beauty and variety hinge on the smallest detail. Even a bored, hurried city dweller like me can be made to see more than just one green patch after another and to relish the difference.

Science does not have exclusive insight into nature, of course. Art, too, inspires us with the wonder of living things. All the same, both work by forcing us and, ultimately, training us to see. As Yogi Berra said once, you can observe a lot just by looking.

For the same reason, it always helps to decide who painted something: we can then see more in the painting. In ordinary language, the word "connoisseur" has both connotations—of aesthete and scholar making attributions. Artists most committed to beauty for its own sake will take added pleasure when someone sees their special style in something they did, and the viewer takes much the same pleasure in the draftsman's art.

Several generations, myself included, have been turned on to painting by reading Bernard Berenson on the Italian Renaissance and Erwin Panofsky on the Northern Renaissance. Both, writing decades ago, in a sense created artistic personas out of a mass of art and a scarcity of historical records. Sometimes it meant chucking out the losers, but often it meant appreciating a wider range of different styles—and appreciating them more deeply.

The best researchers have often been the finest teachers, because they could share with their students the pleasure that took them to the cutting edge. Thanks to teachers like these, I can appreciate both the delicacy of Jan van Eyck and broader streaks of shading in Petrus Christus, his close follower. I can thrill again to angular complexity of an influence on them both, Robert Campin. I can re-experience Giotto's innovations in debates over who painted what might be his earliest frescos. Now that I see Titian in light of his predecessors, I no longer write off his work as a lot of out-of-focus, overweight women. I can marvel that he somehow held in his hands both the grandeur of the High Renaissance and the subtle color and light of Venice.

Sometimes, deattributing an artwork does make it look a good deal worse—does entail serious value judgments as an essential critical role—and that can be good, too. Over and over, once a forgery is uncovered, we no longer understand how we were ever taken in. We suddenly see all those differences created by a lesser artist in our own time.

Letting beauty be strange

At other times, knowledge makes the things we enjoy look stranger—without our enjoying them any the less. A psychologist or historian of chivalry can say how childhood and culture determine who and how we love. A physicist or biologist can explain the emergence of life on a different level. Still, we are in love after all that, and explanations need not make us discount experience. We may see it as less innocent, but the change can be strengthening as well as chastening. Who said innocence is so great, especially in love?

When we let ourselves imagine a loss of beauty, we really are speaking about just that added strangeness, and art thrives on it. I have allowed myself to use beauty too complacently, as a catch-all for the pleasures we take in appearances, but it must be an unfamiliar kind of beauty indeed. Art does not pander to our preference for pretty pictures and tabloid shocks. That refusal is the explicit stance of much modern art; it is why we sometimes hear, misleadingly, that real art is ugly. Artists, however, have always looked without flinching at the banality of life and the terror of death. In his last years, Titian even imagined himself as the satyr Marsyas, being flayed alive by the gods.

Probably the need to work at understanding is most obvious in the older masters, which is why their galleries are visited so infrequently. Even a painting that seems to go down as easy as The Polish Rider poses an obvious problem. It might have been easier to decide who painted it if we could reach agreement on what exactly was painted. Whatever it was, it mattered enough to Rembrandt and his studio to inspire a great work, so I would not be too sure that it no longer matters for our admiration.

Because the ideas behind art of past centuries seem remote, they make us face how much we assume when we pretend today simply to look. The need to interpret contemporary works is just as pressing, precisely because their assumptions are so close to us as to be invisible. When we have achieved enough detachment to decide confidently when geometric abstraction or political art is more than a hoax, we can dispense with the arguments and books, but then we shall probably no longer need the art.

The need for interpretation is most severe of all for those decades in between the old masters and the art of today, when the art has become all too familiar. We enjoy Impressionism, but we can easily miss the powerful emotions that produced it, respected it, and denounced it—or the overwhelming effect it had on early Modernism. Those matters are mere history; they hinge on long-gone trends in genre, style, and technique, the society being depicted, and the politics of the French art world. But they led viewers to do more than hang reproductions over their sofas; they caused people to risk their careers. By rediscovering those issues, we can recover some of the emotional response that got Manet to be caricatured in newspapers or sent Cézanne back to contemplate his mountain year after year, and we also gain by learning about other artists, especially women artists, whom the easy stories long overlooked.

Seeing our stake in beauty

Naturally only the ideal scholar, free of economic motives, never lets attributions stand in the way of admiration for art. The Dutch Rembrandt committee is biased to keeping the artist a genius, and so it often tries to assign unsuccessful art to the workshop. But when the committee does better—as in deattributing a painting as popular as The Polish Rider—it can help us grow to enjoy lesser talents, where before we might have simply dismissed the works as bad Rembrandt.

But admirers of beauty for its own sake let their personal motives destroy art's emotional precision just as often. It is what we mean when we call something sentimental, and it is as reductive of art—as much an irritable reaching after certainty—as any scholarly thesis. Most of the time, when one side accuses the other of being anti-intellectual, while the other side complains about willful obscurity, both are correct.

We should value anyone who speaks about art simply and still says something. I myself would love to be clear and knowledgeable enough to reach both sides when I write, and I bet I lose both instead! For all that, however, we must learn to live with difficult ideas about art as well as direct expression. There is a time and a place for both.

I spent many years learning to read science and to look at painting because scientists and painters themselves had spent centuries refining their expression. Science and art needed that time, in order to make their point as richly and as economically as possible. We should not expect such marvelous languages to let themselves be spoken too harshly or too quickly.

In our time, the very distinction between supposed plainness and sublime difficulty has broken down. Modern art tries to be stripped down, but it still has many people puzzled. Scientists have an annoying habit of talking about simplicity, when they mean that matters boil down to two or three equations that plebeians cannot hope to understand. Words like plainness and simplicity may still have meaning, but life got complicated, and it necessarily became harder to say just who is conning whom. As so often in life, however, I believe that the con artist will generally be the one professing the greatest innocence.

Recovering beauty for ourselves

As philosophers have often stressed, there is no such thing as pure observation, free of exactly this kind of difficulty. Everything we are and everything we perceive is caught up in what we know—our cultures, our languages, our prejudices, our teachers, our hypotheses, and our love. I think that this is what makes art so important: when it most seems to copy nature, it in fact sees nature as something—and, when the artist is really moving to us, as something we had never fully known before.

In the end, scholarship cannot spoil our sense of beauty, because it is still up to our own sensibility to agree. Even critics have fragile moments. When a museum reframes an artist or the crossroads of Modernism, we can turn our backs. For what it may be worth, I do not like The Polish Rider quite as much as the Dutch committee—or, for that matter, the general public—but I think it is by Rembrandt.

Beauty and the intellect are inseparable, and art relies for its very mystery on a mixture of both. Along with Shelley, we owe a hymn to intellectual beauty.

John Haber is an editor and writer living in New York.

Reproduced with permission. Copyright (c) 2004 John Haber.

Home>>Collection>>In Praise of Intellectual Beauty