Spanish/Portuguese / Cultural Studies and Media Studies

Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Dolores Juan-Moreno (Clark University)

Susana Antunes (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

Beauty is often perceived and sold as a universal value, yet its meanings are shaped by history and by the social contexts in which they circulate. Across the Luso-Hispanic sphere, artistic expression has been a space where ideas of beauty are imagined, tested, and redefined. Literature, cinema, visual arts, and other cultural forms both sustain and unsettle dominant aesthetic ideals, revealing how beauty is never separate from questions of power, belonging, and cultural authority. This roundtable invites contributions that examine how beauty has been represented and reimagined across different times and places in Spanish- and Portuguese-language contexts. We are particularly interested in the relation between beauty, power, and the gaze: who is allowed to define what is beautiful, and from where is beauty seen? How do race, gender, class, age, and colonial histories shape what can be recognized as beauty? And how do artists and writers open other ways of seeing—sometimes in spaces marked by exclusion, displacement, violence, or precarity? Rather than a fixed category, beauty emerges here as a shifting field of attention, where ways of seeing are also ways of valuing. Abstracts are welcome in Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

This roundtable explores how beauty is constructed, represented, and questioned in Luso-Hispanic cultural contexts. It brings together approaches from literature, film, and visual arts to examine how aesthetic values are shaped by social and historical forces. Attention is given to how power relations define what counts as beauty and how these norms are challenged. The session aims to open a space for dialogue on alternative ways of seeing and valuing.