Largely inspired by Eric Plemons’ discussion of affective, economic, and normalizing race- and sex-making practices in his The Look of a Woman: Facial Feminization Surgery and the Aims of Trans- Medicine, this summer I am embarking on a project which will attempt to historicize looksmaxxing. Looksmaxxing, a term coined in 4chan groups and popularized on TikTok, describes a set of practices which desire to read, quantify, and optimize facial beauty. The characteristics that mark facial beauty–often described as “facial harmony”–are often distinguished as one’s jaw structure, canthal tilt, cheekbone height, and cheek gauntness.
Jordan Barrett, a popular aesthetic referent in looksmaxxing discourses
This first month of research has required me to ask what I don’t know. And how I can enact a research project which is both encompassing in academic genre and specific in scope. To assist me in this work, and to ground my meditations, I have begun to read Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia by Sabrina Strings and Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery by Sander Gilman. I also bought a copy of “An Ossuary for the Hunted” by Boz Deseo Garden (published by Cassandra Press) at the Mini Black Zine Fair in Harlem last weekend. All of these texts are endowing me with potent tools for negotiating the assemblage of religious, economic, and racial discourses which construct contemporary fascinations with the face and its legibility.
Some of the books I am currently rotating through.
In the past few weeks, I have visited Oskar Diethelm Library at Weill Cornell Psychiatry and the library at the New York Academy of Medicine to invigorate my study. These visits have helped me chart potential avenues for my research, ultimately encouraging me to settle on the subdiscipline of physiognomy as the primary candidate of my historical volley.
Phrenological profile of Louis Agassiz, a prolific biologist and geologist who produced literature in favor polygeny. Sourced from a copy of the 1867 American Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated at Oskar Diethelm Library. This type of cultural production feels akin to looksmaxxing spaces dedicated to rating faces, such as the subreddit page r/TrueRateMe.