Moving Toward the Ugly

In “Moving Toward the Ugly,” Mia Mingus critiques a value system often preserved even inside progressive politics: only bodies that can be made beautiful, desirable, normal, visible, or consumable are welcomed. Moving toward the ugly is not self-degradation. It is a refusal to make mainstream beauty and able-bodied standards the doorway to liberation.

For FemRes, the essay sharpens conversations about body positivity and bodily autonomy. Disabled, queer, racialized, and gender-nonconforming bodyminds should not have to be repackaged as “beautiful too” in order to matter. Mingus instead asks for a politics that can hold intimacy, interdependence, shame, desire, and collective belonging without demanding desirability first.