Today I visited the Cult of Beauty exhibition at London’s Wellcome Collection (on till late April).
I knew it would be about questioning historic Western ideals of beauty. Fair enough. What I didn’t expect was quite how unsubtly ideological it would be.
The narrative: Western ideals of beauty are based on restrictive binaries > we need inclusive narratives > trans is liberation. The exhibition effectively tells a myth of sin and redemption: our culture’s sin lies in having ideals of beauty, especially ones based around a male-female binary. Salvation lies in queering the binaries.
Trans, non-binary and intersex people are presented as being on ‘a path towards self-actualisation’ and experiencing ‘joy’. Identity is ‘curated’ with intentionality’. Sacred relics include a photo of E-J Scott, founder of the Museum of Transology, holding up a jar of her/his own surgically removed breast tissue. The accompanying wording is defiant about the evils of looking at the photo with a ‘cis-gaze’. Scott notes, ‘We’re not only halting the erasure of our trancestry, we’re literally saving ourselves’. The final space features an in-depth look at queer/trans British people of colour: again, a narrative of redemption.
The Wellcome Collection is a museum of science. At no point does the exhibition question the narratives underlying gender ideology, or mention that humans are a sexually dimorphic species. Nor does it really probe why the West and other cultures came up with the historic visions of beauty they did.
It felt like myth-making and propaganda.