Ask Mona (Almost) Anything

Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

Read AMAA 3

Do you define 'Deliberate Beauty' as being different to the beauty labour women do to appease the male gaze? And what of fillers, botox, etc?

Belinda (she/her)

I want to snatch back beauty from the clutches of the male gaze. I want beauty to be as easily abundant and as unrequiring of labour as the gorgeous scent I inhale when I put my face into the box of strawberries I reach for every morning to slice and pile berries onto my bowl of oatmeal, that bland white board that needs all the beauty it can get. We gravitate towards beauty like a sunflower turns toward the sun.

As I say in The Wonder Chronicles: 34: Beauty in the time of fascism is solace and power. It is what I call Deliberate Beauty and as I adorn my eyes with liner every morning, it is also homage and healing.

Our task is to snatch beauty back from the clutches of “the male gaze,” the phrase popularized by British film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she described how the “male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.” Use of the phrase has expanded far beyond film theory and criticism to refer to the ways patriarchy demands that beauty labour you mention.

I want to be as generous with the adornment of my face and body as my ancestors in Egypt were. When I learned that women and men of all social classes in ancient Egypt were wearing eyeliner as early as 6000 BC, it loosened considerably that patriarchal stranglehold over beauty that I’d spent so many years of my life pushing back against.