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The beautiful, the ugly and the abject in female bodies

Abstract

The hegemonic social project for the gendered bodies is based on the assumption that there is a continuity relationship between the genitalia (vagina / penis), the whole body (woman / man) and the gendered practices (femininities / masculinities). This continuity line would mark what Judith Butler will call "intelligible genres". The article hypothesis is that a notion that threatens the recognition of a body as belonging to a certain gender is not ugliness. Beauty and ugliness would be hierarchical gradations of reading about intelligible bodies. It is the bodies of transvestites, transgender people, transgender people who would express the side of denial, abjection and who would even be outside the hierarchies of beauty. The analysis categories will be abjection and gender. And the objective will be to discuss how beautiful, ugly and abject categories in women relate them to the notions of gender performance, parody, prosthetic identities, and power relations.

Keywords:
Beautiful; Ugly; Abject; Feminine; Transvestite

Departamento de Sociologia da Universidade de Brasília Instituto de Ciências Sociais - Campus Universitário Darcy Ribeiro, CEP 70910-900 - Brasília - DF - Brasil, Tel. (55 61) 3107 1537 - Brasília - DF - Brazil
E-mail: revistasol@unb.br