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ABSTRACT
Beauty is often formulated as a singular image, system, or narrative. Missing in these formulations are conceptualizations of personal desire, agency, and affiliation with community aesthetics. The following essay seeks to “complicate” current understandings of beauty -understandings that implicitly assume heterosexuality -by focusing on how lesbians do beauty to negotiate within and across four discourses. These discourses, we argue, function like cultural conversations that include verbal and visual messages, individual acts and media images, and dominant and community looks. Lesbians negotiate mixed responses to these discourses, in part, through lesbian styling. In the process, lesbianrs' assertions of agency allow for a reclaiming of beauty. To illustrate the ways lesbians re-frame and reclaim beauty in everyday life, we rely upon the voices and experiences of lesbians from Northern California.