This article explores the potential of feminist new materialisms and theories of affect for reframing how we might think about beauty and the body. Through an exploration of girls, beauty and the school ball (prom), the article engages with Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action to conceptualise beauty as an affective-material process. This perspective involves an ontological shift in how girls, bodies and beauty are understood; from thinking about beauty and the human as discursively produced, towards a relational approach that conceptualises materiality and affect as co-constitutive forces. The article is interested in how such a framing might invite ways of understanding beauty that avoid binary frameworks, such as good/bad, subject/object and discourse/matter. I consider the potential this might offer feminist analyses of beauty, where the focus is less on what beauty is or what it means, and more on how it comes to be.

本文探讨了女权主义的新唯物主义和情感理论在重新定义我们对美感和身体的看法方面的潜力。通过对女孩，美女和学校舞会（舞会）的探索，本文与卡伦·巴拉德（Karen Barad）的“内部动作”概念相结合，将美女概念化为一种情感物质过程。这种观点涉及对女孩，身体和美丽的理解的本体论转变。从以话语方式产生的美和人类的思考，到将物质性和影响概念化为共同构成力量的关系方法。本文对这样的框架如何吸引人们理解避免二元框架（例如好/坏，主题/客体和话语/事项）的美的方式感兴趣。我认为这可能会为女性主义的美分析提供潜力，