In 2011, queer Korean disability justice writer and organizer Mia Mingus published her speech, “Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability” on her blog Leaving Evidence. This speech was originally delivered as a keynote at the Femmes of Color Symposium in Oakland. Mingus implores us to move beyond our romanticization of beauty and instead dig deep into our ugly; the shameful parts of ourselves that are foundational to our freedom. To say that her essay changed my life would be an understatement. As a gender-nonconforming person, I am often told that I am ugly because I don’t fit into binary definitions of beauty. Mingus’s work not only provided me the conviction to persist from this, but it taught me that the parts of myself that I was most ashamed of had so much to teach me about vulnerability, interdependency, and liberation.
It was an honor to meet up with Mingus in her home in Oakland to revisit her ideas and have a profoundly ugly conversation about selfies, disability, and transformative justice. Almost a decade later with the proliferation of body positivity on social media, hashtags like #TransIsBeautiful, and the selfie offered as a digital middle finger to media erasure, Mingus’s work feels vital to revisit. She encourages us to reconsider our investment in beauty, and aspire to something more magnificent.
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You delivered your speech “Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability” in 2011, which was a groundbreaking point for you, me, and the world. What have the past seven years been like with reception to those ideas?
People still to this day send me emails about it and come and talk to me about it. Most of the time though, a lot of the conversations are in whispers. I think it’s harder to talk about these topics publicly than it is privately. It’s hard to talk about how undesirable you feel.
I find that when I write about personal things it temporarily feels liberating, but after, it feels like everyone knows my deepest secrets and nothing concretely changes. What’s it been like for you to write from such a raw place and to not see those ideas be seriously engaged with?
I think it’s a both/and: It’s really hard and it frustrates me every day that the queer community is obsessed with being desirable. But I also understand why people choose those things. There are so many reasons that we choose them: our survival, our pain, our trauma. The capacity it takes to actually be with undesirability and ugliness is really hard. I think part of what I was trying to say in that talk is that there are so many people who can’t choose, and that choice is an illusion for so many people.
Why are we so fixated on calling marginalized people beautiful when that’s not changing our material circumstances?
It’s a carry over from the ritual of the freak show. One of the ways that freak shows were used was as a way to create and reinforce normative identities. People think beauty is something that will make you feel better; that everybody wants/needs to feel like they’re beautiful. Because people can’t sit with the reality of what their life is like. It’s a band-aid, a life raft where they don’t have to join you in the water themselves. Because of the legacy of the freak show there is something that’s been ingrained about disgust and difference. It threatens the social order of things.
Social justice organizations often don’t hold space for frank conversations about loneliness, desire, and beauty, so we have go to elsewhere. What is your take on the burgeoning online body positivity movement?
I don’t in general like body positivity. When I think about my disability, it’s not something I need to feel positive or negative about. If we didn’t live in an ableist society, we would recognize that our bodies are all different and have different capacities. Most of us are trying to squeeze our bodies into capitalism. I don’t want to be wearing my “I heart disability” sandwich board and ringing my bell all the time. There are hard things about disability and that’s okay. Bodies are amazing and gross and weird and strange — why do we have to be so positive about it? Why is it so important for us to feel that way?
On the other hand, there are many folks embracing being a killjoy (a la Sara Ahmed) as a way to resist the status quo. Do you see more potential in being a killjoy?
I feel like it’s neither. A lot of this goes back to our conceptions of love and that we can’t handle difference well without erasing difference. That’s connected to love. We want love to be easy and all good, when actually love is not supposed to be where we are happy all of the time. For me all of this is more instances where we can’t actually hold the ugly well. We don’t know how to do that. It literally scares us because we have very few models to support that — we have been taught to fear it so deeply.
Beauty has been valued over everything: the easy, the convenient, all of the “good things.” We actually don’t know how to sit with difficult things — the reality of violence.
I’ve noticed increasingly how political demands are moving away from resources and toward representation — how the goal is simply about following a diverse array of different bodies to learn from online. We aren’t critical of the idea of looking as knowing. I feel like people find it difficult to really encounter the complexity of other people beyond the look, because that requires us to encounter our own reflection and therefore our own complexity. Freakishness is a mirror: it’s other people’s projections.
It’s okay to have multiple strategies. As a transformative justice organizer, I’m mostly off the grid, but we need people working in the system. If more brown kids can see brown people be reflected in media, that’s great. If disabled kids can see disabled folks be actors and land movie roles, that’s a part of harm reduction. That’s not our ultimate goal obviously, but whether we like it or not, the media has tremendous impact on us.
How do you feel about selfie taking? I tend to feel like selfies offer an alternative medium of self-representation outside of the dominant gaze.
Again it’s another both/and. I understand the complexities of documenting your existence because no one else will. And we don’t exist in a vacuum. All of the conditions that we live in and are shaped by, they don’t just go away when we live our lives. Even within selfies, I still see people choosing to post the selfies where they look thinner, more desirable, more in line with traditional beauty standards. What I see happening with beauty in oppressed communities is that we create an alternative reinforcement, claiming that it’s revolutionary — but it’s a new cage we are all supposed to live in.
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Both disability and gender-nonconformity require creativity to survive in a world that wasn’t built for us. Like, I’m never going to go outside and have people affirm me, so often the decisions that I’m making are: How do I dress to be palatable so that I won’t get harassed today? So much of what I have to do is celebrate my own appearance, because I know I’m inevitably going to be invalidated by other people. How do your disability and gender-nonconformity relate to you?
Gender and ability are so bound up with each other. The ways that we have learned to express gender is through our abilities: the way we stand, the shoes and clothes we wear. What about people who don’t get to choose if/when they go to the bathroom? People are shrinking and squeezing themselves into what counts as able-bodied under capitalism, and I think most people are doing the same thing with gender. Most people are gender non-conforming and we are squeezing ourselves into these categories to keep ourselves safe.
When I think about what I’m going to wear or how I’m going to be in the world, it’s mostly out of safety and access. I fall down all the time, in my house even. What are the kinds of clothing, shoes, things I can put on my body that can help me fall better? If I need to sit on the curb, how am I adorning myself to be able to do that?
I think it would be a reductive reading to say that disabled and/or gender-nonconforming artists are just creating another regime of beauty when we celebrate our difference. I think something else is going on — we are interrupting a cycle that requires us to be beautiful.
I think we literally get taught that you are only worthy if you’re beautiful; that there are no other pathways to worth besides desirability. This is where magnificence comes in to me. That feels like — I needed a word other than "beautiful." Magnificence comes out of our struggle. Give yourself permission and cultivate it and embrace it, rather than always literally wearing the mask.
So much of the fear of “ugliness” is rooted in racism, gender binarism, and ableism. They’re afraid that if they look like us no one will desire them. But what I’ve learned is that oppressed peoples are able to build other forms of intimacy that are perhaps more robust. What does intimacy mean to you and how is it related to beauty?
Ugliness is a pathway to intimacy. You can’t have intimacy without trust, and you can’t have trust without vulnerability. In order to be vulnerable, you have to reveal parts of yourself that are dismissed as capital-U Ugly. There’s also this piece around disability — the interdependence of disability is inescapable. I feel like access is not a burden, it’s an amazing opportunity to be generative, to deepen community, relationships, everything.
When I think about intimacy and its connections to beauty, I feel like it’s more connected to ugliness than beauty. I think the only way that we can build intimacy is through ugliness. For example, there is something very magnificent about how disabled people build access to intimacy — that kind of intimacy that comes with not being afraid to state your access needs. Not beauty, but the magnificence or the learned experiences that ugliness teaches you on how to survive. People see this as an extremist thing, but what I’m saying is that it’s been a way in my life to not let go of people, and to live in that interdependence that doesn’t always feel revolutionary and good. Sometimes it fucking sucks — sometimes you just want to be able to take a walk by yourself. Sometimes it sucks to have to depend on someone to help you take a walk by yourself.
There are times when it’s incredibly hard. I’ve learned and we have all learned so many different pieces of how to survive, how to be and thrive within our lived experiences. The alternative is to pretend it away, but I also think there is something with disability that doesn’t allow you to turn away. You could try to pretend it away even though your reality is not such. But there’s a concreteness to me about disability that doesn’t allow you to pretend it away.
Shitty things happen. Ugliness is all around us all the time. Sometimes shit is not beautiful and that’s okay, that’s actually more generative, there is a depth to that. If I was able-bodied and I didn’t fall all the time, I would never know that experience and that depth. There have been so many amazing strangers who have helped me pick up all of my things from the sidewalk, from the floor, helped me get some ice. All of these pieces of everyday life are so connected to those moments of intimacy. There’s something in that.
I wonder, is it possible to desire without inflicting harm? Is desire inherently exclusionary?
I’m not saying that people can’t use the word “beauty” — it’s about questioning the ways that we are defining beauty, what the criteria are. When we feel validated, what are we actually feeling validated by? I don’t know what the answer to that question is. I feel like it only exists in the realness of relationships and trust and intimacy and love. Meaning, somebody who knows that you’re ugly, somebody who has seen you in your most interdependent times — whether that’s having a breakdown or having a panic attack where you can’t move from the floor. Those are the moments that have the potential for a kind of magnificence outside of what we have been taught.
How do these ideas of beauty and ugliness operate on a larger scale?
We fear the ugly. So, we can’t actually face things like the migrant kids in detention. We can’t actually be with it in a way that allows us to address it. I think about the ways that we normalize violence and genocide. We see violence and beauty as this interpersonal thing. In reality, a lot of our policies come from whether people think folks are valuable — and that comes from whether or not we think people are beautiful.
What does disability justice teach us today?
Don’t engage with disability justice and knowledge it as just an intellectual exercise without also engaging in the lived reality of it. That could be engaging with yourself around your own compulsory ableism — the way you don’t allow yourself to rest when you’re tired. That’s part of how ableism continues. Everybody is getting it reinforced inside themselves, so there’s this resentment: I did it, so you should do it too.
Ask yourself: How can I be an accomplice, how can I be in solidarity, how can I build interdependence with disabled communities? Think about how you can put disability justice into practice. Accessibility is not necessarily disability justice. Accessibility is bare bones — making what we already have accessible, rather than transforming what we have.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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