Here's what it feels like, okay. Let me explain the normate. The normate is that Perfect Body, Perfect Look, Perfect Presentation everyone wants to have. And I do mean everyone because the normate depends on abjection

So literally nobody is the normate. The normate can actually only be formed by dissatisfaction. Its borders are all the bodies abjected from its boundaries

But, working from Chapkis in Beauty Secrets, we can see that you can briefly occupy the normate position for a terrible, agonizing moment.

Well. Some people can anyway.

It feels like there's two types of the people who can: those that want it and those that want to reject its traditions and create a new (similar) normate. An "alternative" look if you will

Then there's the people who are visibly disabled, disfigured, fat, visibly trans, outside the beauty standards of the dominant culture (here in the west white beauty standards), not all but many, who can't assimilate even momentarily to the normate

And we're trapped between these abjecting circles, crushed between the people expelled and sucked back in and expelled again

Aesthetics as politics creates a no man's land we are permanently exiled to

Yes, every conversation with me is either like this or a shitpost