Niki Seth-Smith interviewed me about Intact for the New Humanist magazine.

We are using more digital and cosmetic “tweaks” than ever. What would happen if we treated our bodies as good enough?

You can read the interview here.

Should you be using eyelash serum? Or would that be an example of shametenance? Eva Wiseman reflected on this dilemma in her beauty column on 23 April 2023. You can read the full article here.

I hadn’t realised eyelashes thinned as we aged. If I had, perhaps I’d have been focusing on them earlier as part of the relentless search for signs that time has passed or been lost, and with it, maybe power. In her book Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body, philosopher Clare Chambers talks about “shametenance”, all the things we do (like applying “natural makeup”) that maintain the idea that our unmodified bodies are shameful, and I wonder if this project counts. Remove the hair there, bleach the hair there, a dull domestic struggle. The seconds dragging serum across my lashes joins the minutes spent dying my roots, then the hours logged by all the women in my life, fighting quietly in the gym or bathroom or salon to get back to an I we recognise.

I really enjoyed speaking with Sarah Ditum about the history and present of using botox for cosmetic use. You can read her long-form article, including citations from our interview, here. It was originally published in The Times magazine on Saturday 4th March 2023.

INTACT is featured in an article in the NZ Herald, the leading weekly magazine in New Zealand. It’s called “Face Value: Why it’s time we made peace with the way we look.” It was a real pleasure to talk to Angela Barnett for the piece, which you can read here.

INTACT is featured in an article in the Dutch philosophy magazine Filosofie Nummer 11 2002. The article is by Femke van Hout, who interviewed me, and is called “Zichtbaar maar niet gezien”. You can read it here.

“Il corpo è un campo di battaglia politico? Riflessioni di una filosofa”

You can read – in Italian – Mara Accettura’s interview with me in La Repubblica. Find the piece here.

“A beautifully written and thoughtful push back against all the people and powers that have made us, as a society, feel that our bodies need to be altered.”
Martha Alexander in Metro, 21 April 2022

Intact Bodies: The Ambivalence of The Natural and The Normal – John C. Brady in Conversation with Clare Chambers was published in the February 2022 issue of Epoché, the monthly magazine for the Philosophy diaspora. You can read the interview here.

Clare Chambers is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Her work deals with contemporary liberalism, social construction, feminism, and social justice. Her latest book, Intact (Allen Lane, 2022), is an analysis of the ways in which the body is a political site where the inequalities of sex, gender, race, disability, age, and class are reinforced. The book argues for the value of the ‘unmodified body’. The unmodified body is not an empirical concept, such a thing would be impossible in actuality (our bodies are undergoing constant revision and intervention). Rather, it is a political tool for resisting forms of coercion and oppression that would have us viewing our bodies as never good enough as they are, and thus requiring their modification, concealment, and conformance in myriad ways. However, the unmodified body cannot be viewed as a simple ‘body positivity’ any more than it can be asserted as an empirical concept. Rather, it is a new notion that cuts orthogonally across various ideals that we have previously held the body to: the natural, the normal, and the sovereign. Because of this orthogonality, these various ideals show themselves, under Chambers’ analysis, to have an ambivalent character. The book functions as both a political and cultural call to arms, and an astute analysis of how our bodies becomes ensnared in oppressive structures that inhibit the road to equality.

“The rise of ‘shametenance’, the exhausting things we do to hide our natural bodies because we feel inadequate. Why are we so ashamed of the way we look?”

A wonderful article on INTACT by Kasia Delgado of i news, which includes a charming photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger. You can read the article here.

We all feel pressure for our bodies to look a certain way: 70% of women say they feel pressure to have a perfect body, and two thirds of men feel ashamed of how they look. However, those pressures don’t affect everyone equally. The standards by which our bodies are judged reflect and reinforce other unjust societal hierarchies. Furthermore, the failure to adhere to society’s beauty standards is often interpreted as a deeper failure of character, encompassing our entire identity. By being aware of the sources of these pressures we can remind ourselves that the unmodified body is valuable just as it is, writes Clare Chambers.

Read the whole article here.

My essay on Rethinking The Body featured as a discussion article based on the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour discussion. You can read the article here.

“My thought is this: a significant aspect of beauty practices is comfort and visibility. Comfort relates to discipline: discipline makes some actions and inactions seem comfortable and others effortful. Visibility relates to surveillance: some beauty practices make us seem visible or hyper-visible, others make us feel invisible. Sometimes beauty practices aim at making the practitioner visible: she wants her appearance to be noticeable. But beauty practices can also aim at invisibility: at making a person blend in rather than stand out. Both make up and its absence can have this effect, depending on the person and context involved.”

This short piece is published on the Beauty Demands blog. You can read it here.