Cooper Jones is a journalist, sports and travel writer, and philosophy professor with two PhDs.

In her memoir, Easy Beauty, Chloe Cooper Jones deepens the narratives surrounding her body a body with a congenital disability, who also happens to be a mother/scholar living in Brooklyn. This misrepresents or erases the voices of real, living individuals that do not classify neatly as “normal.” Rather than examining assumptions that distinguish normal and abnormal, the dominant American cultural narrative stigmatizes some individuals as abnormal in an otherwise normal world.

It is also so widely accepted as to be commonplace. Americans think, talk and write about disability, they usually consider it as a tragedy, illness or defect … that is as personal and accidental, before or without sociopolitical significance (2). Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson write in Disability, Rhetoric and the Body, The tendency to flatten the lived experiences of people with disabilities is well known. (Apr.Popular culture flattens the lives of disabled people beyond caricature, reducing the complexity of lived existence to a simplistic narrative that either wallows in pain and exploitation or relies on sports cliches of odds-defiance and triumph in the face of adversity. This makes a brilliant case for the beauty of complexity. Framing her physical appearance within the context of British philosopher Bernard Bosanquet’s theory of “easy beauty”-which describes the “plain straightforward pleasure” brought by the “apparent and unchallenging”-she makes a thrilling defense of “difficult beauty,” where “one often encounters intricacy, tension, and width.” As Jones explores this paradigm, she experiences the “blunt, triumphant beauty” of Beyoncé at a concert in Milan and the “energy of the aggrieved” of Bernini’s Proserpine, while a Cambodian massage moves her to consider her own complicity in the “fixed distance” she seeks to dismantle. disorder threatened beauty.” But just as she defied doctors’ claims that she’d never walk or stand on her own (even getting the “classic college experience” and, later, having a child), she challenges society’s rules of attraction with razor-sharp wit and intellect. “My body did not fit into any narrative of order, proportion, plan.

“Measure and proportion are everywhere identified with beauty and virtue,” Jones writes.

Born with a rare congenital condition that left her with a curved spine and “mismatched hips,” Jones became accustomed early on to “triggering pity” and stares from others around her. Jones, a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist for feature writing, takes aim at beauty standards in her dazzling debut.

Easy beauty chloe cooper