Beauty as gendered

Gender is textually exhausted. Any attempt to define its characteristics are old and boring, a sign of backwardness. The excess of gender bending texts, texts designed to disrupt any sense of gender roles as a natural state, reveal that gender is merely a conditioning, an artifice.

To try and characterize a sex smacks of conservatism, the hope to preserve a past when roles where assumed to be stagnant.

To define a gender evokes a stereotype, not a person. It evokes the archetype. A list of characteristics: nuturing, tender, sensuous, etc.

Gender archetypes, like all archetypes, describe a platonic mirror world, a fiction available to describe both males and females. Gendered characteristics have always described both/neither of the person world (which is full of individuals).

As we construct a notion of gender, or a notion of non-differentiated gender, the new ideal, we use the characteristics of a historically predetermined gender to write this new one, to make ourselves. We make gender out of the historically available fragments.

When we deal with historical conditions that created gender we understand they never described anyone only culture with its aesthetic of control, usually masculine control.

The construction of the feminine explains the male’s self construction. Where the feminine was imposed, the masculine conceived.

Beauty was femaled and othered.

Beauty defined as decadence/ pleasure /decay, is no ideal against the central value of efficiency. Modernity, at least the branch of modernity with a strict sense of logic and rationality, reduces, seeks essence.

Beauty is propositional. Has no essence. Refuses definition. Offers pleasure without shame. Celebrates.

The feminine contains a slew of metaphors we can use as a frame of reference. The feminine is a convenient repository of meanings, but the gender of the maker does not matter. Because the feminine was defined by and against the masculine, it becomes a useful tool in defining the masculine metaphors that perpetuate violence. It also becomes the masculine metaphor’s alternative. However, we’re no longer talking about people but about gendered texts.