After the internet tried to make her the face of ‘ugly’ women, Vanessa Rochelle Lewis is on a mission to reclaim the concept
The pursuit of beauty is a timeless tale, and society’s proclivity to reward attractiveness has only increased as a result of late-stage capitalism. The industry makes a huge profit off of the idea that customers don’t just purchase beauty products, but the chance to change their lives by becoming “prettier”. Add onto this society’s long-running tendency to equate beauty with morality, and the result is a landscape where being called ’ugly’ can feel like the worst thing in the world.
In 2019, if you Googled the term ‘ugly black woman’, Vanessa Rochelle Lewis’s selfie was the second to pop up. Simultaneously, she became a punchline after a party promoter used her picture in a meme discouraging women he deemed “unattractive” from attending his event. Rather than allowing it to bring her down, however, these events became the catalyst for Lewis to go on a mission of reclaiming and redefining what we see as “ugly”. She founded the organisation Reclaim UGLY, has hosted “Ugly Conferences”, and this year wrote a book, Reclaiming Ugly, which explores how the “uglification” of people dehumanises them, and disproportionately affects marginalised communities, more specifically Black women.
For Lewis, the concept of ‘ugly’ is not personal or individual, but a deeply entrenched, structural issue that oppresses the most vulnerable people. “[After being used in the meme] I thought ‘I’m not hurt. I’ve been called ugly before, but I’ve also been called beautiful and gorgeous before,’” she says. “I like the way that I look but I was upset because I recognised that this was beyond him insinuating that somebody was or wasn’t ugly, he was talking about who is welcomed into a space and who gets access to belonging.” With her book and organisation, she wants to remind people that we are all human and valuable, and “we can create a world where we all get to exist.”
Dazed caught up with Lewis to find out more about her journey of reclaiming ugly, and how we can detach from the tyranny of beauty.
How did you process ‘uglification’ personally?
Vanessa Rochelle Lewis: I realised it really truly wasn’t about me and I thought about it as an equation of factors that might have named whatever the algorithm determined ugly. When I saw all the other people listed as ‘ugly black women’ we were all dark-skinned, most of us were fat, but no one was thin. Some of the people were clearly in crisis, struggling with the hard impacts of homelessness and addiction. I [thought] what we define as ugly is not actually somebody looking at another person and saying, ‘I don’t like the way you look’. It’s actually all of these little things that we were taught to perceive as ugly, or taught to dislike because of some system of oppression. And when we see those things, we cross it off on a checklist.
How do you think we can discover our own desirability, outside of external factors like romantic desirability?
Vanessa Rochelle Lewis: I think disability justice is an amazing way of reclaiming ugly outside of romantic desirability. Being able to say I am in pain, my body don’t feel good, and because I don’t feel good, I cannot perform for you. What we perceive as ugliness is not just attached to how we look, it’s also attached to how comfortable we make people feel or how well we fit into whatever the cultural norm is. The cultural norm for a lot of us is that we acquiesce, especially if we are somebody who has a marginalised gender, somebody who is gay or a woman. It’s that we show that we’re tough and can keep going. I think being able to say I need help is one of the most courageous things in the world.
You’ve written about deconstructing and decolonising ugly, but you’ve also talked about choosing to embrace it. What did you mean by that?
Vanessa Rochelle Lewis: You can say that you are not ugly and those words don’t apply to you but you might also say, ‘actually, I am ugly. And I do resonate with this concept and idea and I will embrace ugly’. It’s something that I actually didn’t originally intend, but the more other people engaged with my content they started talking to me about how they embraced ugly and how they were proud to be ugly. I started thinking about it a lot to myself and [thought about] who gets to define what ugly is, first off and who would even aim to define somebody as ugly. If this is someone who walks around choosing to look at other people and deciding they are ugly and being okay with that, that’s a person whose opinions don’t matter that much to me, because we’re not in alignment. This person perceives me as ugly (because our values are just our perceptions) and that’s their business.
Wouldn’t that be hard to detach from?
Vanessa Rochelle Lewis: Let me ask you something, if Chad Carmichael from Ohio came and told you they didn’t like your hair, do you give a fuck about that? We can start applying that to other people as well because people who truly truly truly care about you and who are committing to loving you the way you deserve to be loved are not going to try to uglify you. Those people are going to support your freedom, your joy, your happiness, your feelings, and they’re going to want you to feel good and empowered. Anybody that uglifies you is not invested in you feeling good or empowered. Why does their opinion matter and why do they get to have a voice or a say? They’re not healthy for you.
You work as the Director of Programming at The Positive Results Center which works to mitigate violence, bullying, sexual assault and poverty – how do you think this relates to your work around uglification?
Vanessa Rochelle Lewis: There’s a section in my book titled ‘uglification kills’ that explores uglification and other forms of oppression. It really unpacks the way uglification systemically and personally impacts lots of people, but really keeps coming back to the specific ways that uglification impacts Black women and other marginalised genders in our families, romantic relationships and community.
I think of uglification as a public health issue. Black women are dying from intimate partner violence at rates that so many other people are not, especially Black pregnant people. The number one reason why pregnant Black people die is because of intimate partner violence and a lot of the reasons why I believe that Black women especially experienced so much sexual violence dating violence is because we are so deeply undervalued under respected. I believe that the people who perpetuate against us knows that we are under-protected and under-resourced.
In regards to desirability politics, beauty is discussed as a tool of oppression, but you told Elle that beauty could also be joyful. Can you elaborate on this?
Vanessa Rochelle Lewis: When we begin thinking about what beauty means to us, and what it means to cherish our own idea of beauty, I think it can be colourful and vibrant when we allow it to be. For example, I identify as a fairy princess mermaid gangster for the revolution and that was a wonderful title for myself as I came up with that in my mid to late 20s when I was trying to understand gender and my own Blackness and why I sometimes struggled to fit in.
I’m not someone who likes to put on nails or eyelashes or a lot of make-up really but I love fairy wings, glitter and tutus. For a while when I was younger, I was afraid to wear vibrant colours and put glitter in my hair because I was raised around respectability and to perform appropriateness in a sort of way. The way I was expected to perform was fatphobic, and it was cis-heteronormative, and I didn’t fit into it. Now I allow myself to wear vibrant colours and textures that create the tone of the environment that I want to experience with myself and with other people.