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What cultural objects and phenomena are designated to be ugly, bad, unacceptable, and monstrous, especially in relation to gender, sexuality, disability, race, class, and caste? Whose histories are marginalized or overlooked because of their perceived bad taste, abject existence, and the taint they leave on supposedly beautiful, grand narratives of nationhood, well-being, or progress? How do kitsch, camp, and excess function in the realms of activism in contemporary politics? How do nasty, revulsive art, literature, and performances act as sites that engender questions that push boundaries of societal mores and cultural hierarchies? How does a discourse of nastiness provide a comprehensive understanding of contemporary global political disruptions? In short, this graduate student conference puts forward “frigging ugly” or fugly as the axis to reimagine aesthetics for political change in art, literature, and media. 

Pointing out the ubiquitous presence of ugliness, Umberto Eco highlights the Greek identification of physical ugliness with moral ugliness through repulsive sirens and harpies, hideous Medusa, and monstrous Minotaur.1 Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach to abjection notes how a child learns to repress, reject, and regulate abhorrent bodily products such as blood, genital fluids, and excrement as it determines its path to being a sovereign subject.2 It is in the abject and grotesque that feminist scholars of comedy, such as Linda Mizejewski and Kathreen Rowe Karolyn, situate the corporal power of women comics. At another extreme, representations of genocide, rape, suicide, prison torture, and state-sponsored violence provoke us to look away or shun the unendurable. In these discussions of the bad, ugly, and nasty, questions of taste, affect, and identity break the neo-liberal boundaries of individuality and explore communal ethical and political responses such as compassion fatigue, revolution, or censorship. 

We welcome submissions from any discipline and encourage interdisciplinary approaches to the question of what is considered “ugly” in history, politics, aesthetics, and society. In addition to traditional research papers, we actively invite creative multimedia projects and performance-based pieces. Both conference papers as well as creative projects can use 15-18 minutes for their presentation. 

Presenters at the RAW 2024 conference will be eligible to submit their papers or creative work for the following awards.  

• 13th Annual Sherry Clarkson Prize for best scholarly paper 

• Arts, Humanities, and Technology Council Award for best creative project  
   

We will send out notices of acceptance by mid-December. Following confirmation of participation, attendees are required to register for the conference by paying a conference registration fee between $25-$35. 

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