The Politics of Beauty

How taste is coded, conditioned, and contested

We are taught that beauty is personal. A matter of taste. A subjective response to form, texture, color, symmetry, or style.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” we’re told.

But this is only half true.

Because behind every taste lies a history. Behind every aesthetic judgment, a framework. What we call “beautiful” is never just about what pleases the senses—it’s about what has been conditioned to feel right. Beauty is not neutral. It is not apolitical. It is shaped by systems of class, culture, race, empire, and ideology.

In other words: beauty has politics.

And if we want to understand how culture controls perception, we need to understand how beauty has been used to justify, stratify, and mystify.

Taste Is Not Innocent

When you say you like something, that preference is rarely isolated from social cues.

We learn early on what kinds of beauty are rewarded and which are ignored or penalized. Whether in fashion, body image, design, art, or even voice and gesture, there is a hierarchy of aesthetics. And that hierarchy mirrors power.

Historically, Western beauty standards were constructed around whiteness, thinness, youth, symmetry, and wealth. These weren't accidental. They were tied to colonial ideals, class mobility, and gender roles. What looked “refined” or “clean” or “tasteful” often meant “not working-class,” “not ethnic,” “not messy,” “not poor.”

The dominant taste becomes a tool for cultural sorting—defining who belongs, who ascends, and who is marked as vulgar, uncultured, or excessive.

Beauty becomes a border control.

The Aesthetic Is Political

The architecture of a courtroom, the design of a school, the font on a resume—all carry aesthetic signals. These signals don’t just reflect taste. They signal legitimacy, discipline, and trustworthiness.

In media, beautiful people are more likely to be portrayed as competent or morally good. In hiring, “professionalism” is often a stand-in for aesthetic conformity. In design, “minimalism” is praised as modern while ornate or maximalist styles are often dismissed as emotional or excessive.

These judgments aren’t apolitical. They are deeply coded.
They reflect who gets to define good taste—and who gets punished for deviating from it.

The Canon and the Gatekeepers

In art history, the Western canon enshrines a particular aesthetic lineage: Renaissance idealism, Enlightenment clarity, modernist restraint. Non-Western or indigenous forms are often categorized as “craft,” “folk,” or “outsider art”—not because they lack sophistication, but because they don’t align with the dominant cultural grammar.

This isn’t just an institutional issue. It’s perceptual.

When you're trained to see only one kind of beauty, you begin to mistake it for natural law. You mistake preference for truth.

And that is how power hides—in the normalization of taste.

When Beauty Becomes Resistance

Yet beauty has also been a site of resistance. From the Harlem Renaissance to Afrofuturism, from feminist performance art to queer fashion, marginalized communities have reclaimed aesthetic space—not just to be seen, but to redefine what beauty means.

These movements challenge the idea that beauty must conform. They use beauty as a form of sovereignty—a way of saying: I will not shrink, flatten, or sanitize myself for your comfort.

Beauty here is not soft or decorative. It is symbolic power.
It says: I belong. I am whole. I see myself.
Even when the dominant gaze does not.

Is There a Universal Beauty?

Some argue that beauty is evolutionary—symmetry, proportion, balance. These may play a role in aesthetic preference. But even then, they are filtered through cultural interpretation.

A perfectly symmetrical face is not beautiful if the skin tone, hair texture, or body shape violates dominant norms.
A well-balanced painting doesn’t resonate if the style is considered primitive or kitsch.
An ancient artifact isn’t admired unless it's reframed by a museum or a Western academic lens.

Beauty is never just in the eye. It’s in the ideology behind the eye.

Reclaiming the Right to Beauty

So what do we do with this?

We reclaim beauty—not as a passive judgment, but as an active inquiry.

• What have you been taught to see as beautiful?
• What kinds of beauty make you uncomfortable, and why?
• Who taught you what “taste” looks like?
• What aesthetics have you dismissed as "too much"? Or not enough?
• What might it mean to see beauty as an ethical relationship, not just a sensory reaction?

To reclaim beauty is to expand the field of perception.
To decouple aesthetics from dominance.
To ask not only what is beautiful?—but also for whom? and at what cost?

Conclusion: Beauty as Perception Politics

Beauty is not superficial. It’s strategic. It shapes everything from urban planning to intimacy. From magazine covers to museum collections. From algorithms to algorithms.

When we ignore its politics, we surrender our perception to default settings.
When we examine it, we begin to see more honestly—and more fully.

Because to see beauty clearly is not to find a perfect form.
It is to become aware of the frameworks shaping what you call beautiful in the first place.

And that is where freedom begins.