Rita Felski

‘Because it is beautiful’ new feminist perspectives on beauty

Bonnie Adrian, Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. 297 pp. ISBN 0–520–23834–6 (pbk) Paula Black, The Beauty Industry: Gender, Culture, Pleasure. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. 214 pp. ISBN 0–415–32157–3 (pbk) Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. 180 pp. ISBN 0–415–97402-X (pbk) Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. 206 pp. ISBN 0–415–35183–9 (pbk) Rebecca Popenoe, Feeding Desire: Fatness, Beauty, and Sexuality among a Saharan People. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. 230 pp. ISBN 0–415–28096–6 (pbk) Linda Scott, Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism. New York: Palgrave, 2005. 359 pp. ISBN 1–4039–6686–9 (hbk)

Being reasonable, telling stories

Sylvia Walby’s wide-ranging article directs our attention to some important dilemmas and dead ends in feminist theory. I am sympathetic to much of her argument. For example, I agree with her critique of incommensurability as a way of describing the relations between different social groups. As Walby points out, individuals always belong to a number of overlapping communities, making it impossible to isolate a holistic, self-contained group identity. Moreover, the boundaries between different ways of knowing, describing, and making sense of the world are more leaky and porous than identity politics will allow. No group is an island or an enclave.1 Walby is also right to stress that politics means not just recognizing and celebrating differences, but looking at the links between difference and inequality. Looking in this way means comparing, and hence invoking standards and frameworks of reference that span differences. Of course, knowledge claims are made in a specific context; in this sense, they are always ‘situated’. Yet they also seek to transcend that context by being accepted as valid by others. For example, feminist scholars repeatedly make claims about the world that they hold to be generally true (not true just for them). Even those who argue that women possess unique ways of knowing the world are always making a meta-argument about why such gender differences deserve respect from others. In this sense, the appeal to difference always involves an implicit universalism. One of the dilemmas of much contemporary feminist theory is that it cannot help but rely on universals, yet is often unwilling to articulate them. This skittishness has been intensified by the influence of poststructuralism, with its corrosive skepticism toward every positive claim. To counter such skepticism and its politically disabling consequences, Walby turns to Habermas’s model of communicative rationality. In this model, there are no absolute truths, but there is a faith in the value of argument, debate and critique as a way of getting at (fallible) truths. The grand project of reason gives way to the more humble project of demanding and giving reasons. Rationality is no longer substantive, that is, it is no longer grounded in any particular norm, ideal, or way of being in the world. Rather, it is procedural, enacted in the very process of questioning, challenging, and responding to others. 225