Reclaiming Ugly!: A Radically Joyful Guide to Unlearn Oppression and Uplift, Glorify, and Love Yourself

By Vanessa Rochelle Lewis

Book Overview

Flip the script on how you think about UGLY--what it means, what it is, and how to reclaim it to Uplift, Glorify, and Love Yourself in an uglified world.

Blending joyful self-help magic with incisive social analysis and personal narrative, Vanessa Rochelle Lewis empowers readers to heal, connect, and revolt against uglification.

Uglification is "ugly" weaponized: a tool, ideology, and type of oppression that designates some bodies as more or less worthy of love, respect, access, and dignity. It defines who's accepted in what spaces, which identities are marginalized, and how we all move through the world--and is part and parcel of systems like white supremacy, ableism, sizeism, sexism, and queer- and transphobia. Here, Lewis takes on uglification, showing us how reclaiming UGLY is a subversive act that roars an unapologetic "yes " to joy, healing, and community-building in a world that's engineered to hold us back.

Lewis asks us to go beyond analysis, inviting us to boldly perform UGLY as an act of rebellion, liberation, and radical self-love. Through self-help exercises, reflective meditations, and lesson plans, Lewis moves us closer to a collective liberation that takes back what society tells us is ugly and taboo...and teaches us to deconstruct what we've told ourselves is ugly and taboo. In sharing her analysis, personal journey, and activity toolkit, Lewis offers a warm embrace and compassionately guides us toward lives of radical self-acceptance, joyful community-centered healing, and unfiltered self-love.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1623175860
• ISBN13: 9781623175863
• Release Date: January 2024
• Publisher: North Atlantic Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Essential Reading for All

This book is incredibly moving, compassionately written, wise, real, and necessary for our survival as people who have been told we are ugly. Whether you were told you weren’t thin enough, people would only love you if you worked out or shaved your legs, you had to be straight or cis to get along in society, your skin was too dark, or simply that you would never fit the ideal, this book is for you. Importantly, the author calls us to be aware of how we have uglified others and why, even if that has been done to us too. Paths to true accountability and true justice are set out in these pages. Highly recommended!