AustLit

'Daily, I watch my friends enact rituals of control and augmentation. They negotiate personae, attempting to embody the imagined desires of imagined people. I take part in similar rituals. I oscillate between veganism and vegetarianism. I obediently strip my face of its oil and drench it in a different oil, from a little bottle, like a rebirth. I online window shop for Miu Miu dregs, dresses that would make me look like a doll. I struggle to disentangle these habits and disciplinary choices; vanity, art and environmentalism become difficult to tell apart. To witness these acts of control and reorganisation is to reach for the same questions again and again. Can you worship beauty from a place of love, from some kind of divine and transcendent space? Or must it erupt from a place of punishment, disgust, self-flagellation? Is beauty a kind of surrender, or is surrender the opposite of a commitment to beauty?' (Introduction)