You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
The Wellcome Collection has teamed up with Profile Books to publish Disobedient Bodies: Reclaim Your Unruly Beauty by Emma Dabiri, praised as “an incisive, radical essay offering empowering alternatives to the pressures of pervasive beauty standards”.
World rights (including audio, to be read by the author) were acquired by Wellcome Collection publisher Fran Barrie from Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander. It will publish on 5th October 2023 and is one of Profile’s lead non-fiction titles for autumn 2023.
The synopsis says: “What part of your beautiful self were you taught to hate? We spend a lot of time trying to improve our ‘defects’, according to society’s ideals of beauty. But these ideals that are often reductive, tyrannical and commercially entangled, imposed upon us by oppressive systems and further strengthened by our conditioned self-loathing.
“This book encourages unruliness, exploring the ways in which we can rebel against and subvert the current system. Offering alternative ways of seeing beauty, drawing on other cultures, worldviews, times, and places, as well as looking beyond the capitalist model – to reconnect with our birth right and find the inherent joy in our disobedient bodies.”
It accompanies The Cult of Beauty, a major exhibition at Wellcome Collection in autumn 2023.
Barrie said: “We cannot wait to publish Emma’s book on how to embrace and radically reframe beauty. She has a genius for combining intellectual rigour with powerful personal perspectives.”
Dabiri added: “Jaded and fed up by insecurities about my appearance, I set out to uncover why so many of us can relate to this feeling. Examining philosophy, art history, advertising and consumer culture, Disobedient Bodies explores the origins of western beauty ideals to reveal the real reasons they remain inherently oppressive, and proposes a long overdue beauty revolution, offering new and alternative ways to think and do beauty.”
Dabiri spent over a decade as a teaching fellow in the African department at SOAS. She is a final year Visual Sociology PhD researcher at Goldsmiths and author of the Sunday Times bestseller What White People Can Do Next and Don’t Touch My Hair (both Penguin). She is a contributing editor at Elle and runs the Instagram account, Disobedient Bodies.