Original title: Bellezza e potere. Narrazioni e contro-narrazioni sui nostri corpi
Four invited seminars for RETE per la Filosofia e gli Studi Umanistici’s Winter School 2023 “La rivoluzione femminista. Modelli teorici e pratiche politiche”, organised by Società Italiana di Filosofia – Friuli Venezia-Giulia, online venues.
Every day we are accustomed to being immersed in narratives about our bodies. Narratives that we create ourselves, through our photos and profiles on social media, as well as through the way we dress, move, what places we go, how we use our voice. But also narratives created by others about us, constantly drawing the rules of how a woman, a man, a girl, a boy, a non-binary person, a queer person, a black person, a white person, an able-bodied person and a disabled person … (the list could go on and on) should be. How our bodies are, or are not, “beautiful”, where they can stand, how they can move. In these narratives, beauty takes on the role of defining what is acceptable, what can (and how) take the stage of public visibility. Beauty is thus inextricably linked to power.
Visual self-narration, or self-fashioning, has historically always been a way to exercise power, to define the way one participates in the political field and/or to change it.For some subjects more than others, however, the narrative is mainly imposed from outside.
Free self-expression becomes difficult when we cannot distinguish whether we are expressing ourselves and ourselves* or are just repeating what is suggested to us from outside. To what extent do these suggestions control our lives, how we feel, what we think we (cannot) do? How do we distinguish the narratives that through the device of “beauty” exert political control over our bodies? How do we re-appropriate our narratives?
The seminar aims to provide students with some basic critical tools on this question, in order to open the perspective to future in-depth studies, through feminist reflections from different sources: American feminism, black feminism, Italian sexual difference thinking. The theoretical study will be flanked by debates and practical exercises on poetic texts, videos and photos.
Caterina Diotto 