Moving Toward the Ugly

“Moving Toward the Ugly” began as Mia Mingus’s 2011 keynote to the Femmes of Color Symposium, and its argument is broader than a defense of bodies excluded from conventional beauty. Speaking as a queer, disabled Korean transracial and transnational adoptee, Mingus asks why even radical communities so often make desirability the price of recognition. A politics that says marginalized people are “beautiful too” may widen the circle, but it leaves beauty, able-bodiedness, consumption, and sexual legibility in charge of deciding whose body counts.

Mingus connects ableism to white supremacy, gender discipline, capitalism, medicalization, and colonial violence. Her “ugly” is not a fixed kind of person, nor a call to celebrate humiliation. It names what dominant culture casts out: bodies that shake, drool, need help, take time, occupy space, or cannot be made productive and polished. Moving toward the ugly means attending to the knowledge produced by that exile and choosing magnificence—collective survival, usefulness, dignity, and resistance—over a femininity measured primarily by attractiveness. The essay also distinguishes a lived, descriptive identity from a political identity grounded in analysis and solidarity.

This is a bracing corrective to body-positive language that simply reverses the verdict while preserving the tribunal. Mingus acknowledges that proximity to beauty can be a survival strategy and that refusing it may carry real danger; she does not turn ugliness into another moral obligation. For FemRes readers, the keynote is most productive beside disability justice, queer of color critique, fat politics, and anti-capitalist feminism. It asks movements to examine not only their representation, but their events, pace, leadership, aesthetics, and habits of desire: who must become attractive, coherent, or easy to accommodate before they are allowed to belong?