“Beauty is not a ‘thing’ that can be experienced now,
But it is something that is felt in a different temporality. ”
— Dr. Monica Moreno Figueroa and Dr. Rebecca Coleman
Why should flowers be beautiful only when they are in bloom? Wrinkled petals and speckles, the remnants of flowers counter hegemonic and repressive ideas about beauty and gendered ideas about aging. Why should being beautiful be put in the past or put off into the future?
I have often thought about the transience of beauty myths that impose a culture of looks on women. It upholds patriarchal institutional powers that impose impossible standards on women.
Aging is evolutionary and everything that sheds and changes has within itself a state of transformation, a sense of empowerment.
Artists and writers have often used flowers as symbols of female sexuality. struggled against the hegemony of There is a fragile, surreal fragility in the decomposition of the flower, a true claim of impending collapse and death. The temporality of the stage has an empowered sense of self, a beauty in itself, a version free from the notion of beauty imposed by profit-seeking capitalism, which sees women as beauty. make young people vulnerable to oppressive thoughts. Because, after all, death is staring at us all.
The celebration of flower aging is liberating. It’s a feeling of “forever” liberation from everything.
(This appeared in print as “The Dumb Age”)
