“But change is glacial,” writes Jill Sigman in Chapter Nine of Sherri Irvin’s edited collection of essays entitled Body Aesthetics, referring to the art of performance as real life achieving only small changes (169). This phrase represents the collection’s powerful response to the discussion of the important intersection of body aesthetics and ethics. Body Aesthetics contains 18 contributors and 16 essays categorized into four sections: Representation, Look, Performance, and Practice. Irvin’s introduction not only discusses the lack of interdisciplinary research in the field of body aesthetics, but also outlines the governing purpose of the collection: “[To emphasize] the potential of systematic inquiry into the aesthetics of the body to challenge oppression and injustice, to enrich everyday life, to enhance social cohesion, and to deepen our understanding and experiences of art, as well as to refine our thinking about classic questions about aesthetic experience and value” (10). The slow-moving nature of change demonstrates the need for collections such as Body Aesthetics, which explore body aesthetics as a site of both pleasure and pain, providing both a historical overview of the field and an examination of contemporary questions. While the content of each essay is different, the collection as a whole demonstrates the possibility of collective responses to the topics and questions that comprise it.

The essays by Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, C. Winter Han, Shirley Anne Tate, Peg Brand Weiser and Edward B. Weiser, and George Yancy expose, as Irvin mentions of Davidson in the introduction, “the copious residue of historical stereotyping,” such as racialized and sexist injustices done to people (3). Stemming from critical race and gender studies, these essays address the function of aesthetic responses to produce a counter-hegemonic reality, one that exposes the systemic violence and power relations against certain bodies. As Yancy writes, the white gaze is not a fixed phenomenon, making it “contingent and thereby open to be disrupted, undone” (245). Yancy echoes the other contributors in explaining the poignant truth of this collection: that this type of injustice derives from a layered historical tradition of oppression that can yet be dismantled.

Moreover, Tobin Siebers, Jill Sigman, and Yuriko Saito share an aim to educate people about the imbrication of violence, resistance, aesthetics, ethics, and social justice. For Siebers, it is the equation of disability and aesthetics “on the stage” that would make “possible a form of identification that neither accepts nor rejects identity but transforms it” (149). Sigman explores the work of Wafaa Bilal, specifically a performance piece involving an interface video in a gallery wherein people had the ability to shoot at him with a paint ball gun and demonstrate how quickly a desire for violence can arise. Sigman argues that Bilal’s work reveals “the ways we dehumanize others” and what subsequent bodily-aesthetic performances can teach us (157). Saito similarly advocates for a cultivation of morality through aesthetics as a means of attaining a “good society” (239). These essays focus on the ways in which people have the potential to become stronger collectively and as a community through the sharing of lived-experiences and aesthetic performances, which produce compassionate connections and induce transformative processes of identification.

Body Aesthetics also explores the notion of taste as multivalent and socially constructed and raises a variety of questions such as: taste or preference for certain bodies; the privileging of colour, characteristics, or size in certain bodies; sexuality; and eating. There is a traceable development of what has historically been considered attractive, a history that Stephen Davies examines. However, A.W. Eaton questions this genealogy and explores the social, cultural, and historical contingency of taste against fat bodies, which extends to other forms of taste and “oppression based in race, disability, age, gender identity,” and more (3). Richard Shusterman discusses the connection between ethics and taste in his essay on the communal function of eating that can shape “the self and its powers of choice, introspection, taste, discrimination, order, discipline, and will … eating is intrinsically a social practice, steeped in cultural meanings” (266). The potential for taste to be, or to become, oppressive is equally explored by Ann J. Cahill, Sheila Lintott, and Sherri Irvin in their respective essays.

Cahill continues Yancy’s main claim that—due to the very contingent nature of entrenched prejudices, whether concerning race or sexual desires and preferences—they “can be weakened” and undermined (297). Lintott’s and Irvin’s co-authored essay closes the edited collection with a final description of how to destabilize these “systems of objectification” (9). According to Lintott and Irvin, to deviate from societal norms of sexiness and aesthetics, a collective practice and engagement is required to cultivate respect for a person’s subjectivity, agency, and embodiment as sexualized (305). Lintott and Irvin, along with the other contributors, cogently argue that an aesthetic appreciation results in ethical implications because it forms our behaviours and informs our attitudes (314).

The strength of Irvin’s edited collection is located in the open dialogue among the essayists; it is a book that is both self-referential and one that engages with research in the larger fields of aesthetics, critical race, and gender studies. The contributors work with an inspired interdisciplinary approach to body aesthetics that sets up a series of inquiries intended to “enhance a social cohesion” and show that the perpetuation of oppression is ubiquitous and yet can often be subtle and glanced over (10). With growing political movements such as LGBTQQIAAP, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and #TimesUp, Irvin’s collection proves that learning new and better ways to talk to one another can improve our levels of compassion, respect, and aesthetic appreciation for resistance movements. Body Aesthetics is a useful resource for those who are beginning their inquiries into the fields of body aesthetics, philosophy, race and gender theory, but also for those already working in these fields and looking to develop new connections.