Ugly Differences explores queer female sexuality’s symbiotic relationship with ugliness and offers a way to see worth in ugliness as a generative category for reimagining the inhabitation of gender, sexual, and ethnic differences. Ugliness, in this book, is a multipronged concept: it equates with the disagreeable and pejorative traits that are attributed to queerness; it aligns itself with nonwhite, nonmale, and nonheterosexual physicality and experience; and it refers to anti-aesthetic textual practices, which are located in/as underground culture. This study shows how late-twentieth- and twe ... More

Ugly Differences explores queer female sexuality’s symbiotic relationship with ugliness and offers a way to see worth in ugliness as a generative category for reimagining the inhabitation of gender, sexual, and ethnic differences. Ugliness, in this book, is a multipronged concept: it equates with the disagreeable and pejorative traits that are attributed to queerness; it aligns itself with nonwhite, nonmale, and nonheterosexual physicality and experience; and it refers to anti-aesthetic textual practices, which are located in/as underground culture. This study shows how late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts of ugliness register discontent with culturally normative models of queerness and why the underground is necessary for articulating difference. Locating ugliness at the intersections of the physical, experiential, and textual, the book’s central claim is that queer female sexuality needs to be understood as ugliness and the repertoire of underground cultural practices becomes its obligatory archive. In Ugly Differences, accounting for a minoritarian queerness associated with gender, sexual, and ethnic differences requires turning to marginal forms and, as reflecting ugliness, these forms provide options outside heteronormative modes of being that open up possibilities for envisioning deeply counterintuitive domains of queer world-making.