“To love some is a heavy cross...”: On the phenomenon of lookism

Abstract

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of lookism, its contents, its previous situation and its causes. The lookism is viewed as discrimination on grounds of the ideas of people's appearance, or as a new inequality when people's appearance differentiates their access to some or other socially important resources. The survey of the results in the problem exploration is presented as well as some conceptions within social knowledge providing explanations of both the practice of the Human being appraisal according to his/her appearance and the causes of discrimination as such. The author's point is that discrimination on grounds of the appearance may result from the processes of social identity construction. Some perspectives of the analysis the phenomenon in question are outlined.