Reclaiming UGLY!

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 trans‐ phobia. 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.

FOR READERS who have experienced lookism, fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny, or other oppression and who have been under‐ served by mainstream self‐help

BIG-NAME ENDORSEMENT: Sonya Renee Taylor, author of The Body Is Not an Apology, has contributed a blurb.

WELL-LOVED WRITER AND PERFORMER: Vanessa Rochelle Lewis was Senior Editor for Everyday Feminism and Black Girl Dangerous, two widely read online magazines devoted to intersectional feminism and amplifying the voices of QTPOC. She has been profiled by Vice and has bylines in RaceBaitr, TheBodyIsNotAnApology.com, The Rumpus, and more. Additionally, Lewis is an engaging teacher, playwright, and performer, with a thriving and sup‐ portive social media network. Her workshops, talks, and creative endeavors with the PleasureNess Literary Academy and Oakland SOL frequently draw audiences from around the Bay Area.

TIMELY TOPIC FROM A NEW PERSPECTIVE: Critiques of body positivity, body negativity, and commodification of the body are not new to the publishing scene, yet early books on the topic were often written from a distance by industry experts. More recent books like The Body Is Not an Apology are written by authors who experience oppression at the hands of the systems they seek to criticize. Reclaiming UGLY!, written by a queer, fat, chronically ill, Black woman who was the subject of a viral internet meme based on her appearance, takes this premise further, seeking to demolish the ideas of beauty and ugly altogether.

LIBERATORY IDEAS: Lewis doesn’t simply ask us to reevaluate what we’re talking about when we talk about ugly; she asks us to perform ugliness as an act of rebellion and liberation. She creates a new pedagogy of intentional uglification as subversion, asking the reader to treat “ugly” as a verb and engaging readers through a series of reflections, exercises, and lesson plans.