“My life so far is motivated by pleasure”, says Katouche Goll with a mischievous smile. “I don’t like suffering, which is ironic, since I’m a Black disabled woman.” Goll is a makeup enthusiast, PR babe and disability activist from London. As an artist, singer and cultural commentator who infuses her jokes with invaluable wisdom, she creates online content to promote diversity in beauty and highlight issues of inclusion. Born in South London, Goll studied History with a special focus on the African continent at the School of Oriental and African Studies. “I fell into it by chance,” she admits with a laugh. Goll enjoys sharing her expertise on the African continent and its diaspora through her advocacy for young Black disabled people. “If you don’t know about Africa, then you don’t know anything”, she asserts. “You can’t get the full picture of what liberation looks like if you don’t know what was taken away from you.”
Goll could probably buy a second-hand car with the amount of money she has spent on makeup in her life. She is the friend you call on for a glow-up or when in need of advice on how to expand your product palette. Growing up in the early 2000s had a great impact on her sense of aesthetics; baby Goll was fascinated with pink entertainment and excess in the form of music vixens and hyper-femininity. “I never believed that this is the only gender performance because I’m Black and I knew that this didn’t represent me – but I loved it anyway,” she says.
By virtue of her identity, she continually dissects who we perceive to be beautiful and which power these non-inclusive aesthetic discourses hold over our lives. “Beauty and makeup serve multiple purposes in my life. I appreciate beauty in all of its forms and it helps me understand my positionality of how I live at the intersection of so many different identities.”
On makeup and misogynoir
“I find that many assume that Black women wear makeup due to low self-esteem and supposed ugliness”, says Goll. “However, this is based on how they in fact view Black women as ugly and they project this onto us as if it is our problem.” In her activism, she champions makeup as an art form to indulge in for pure pleasure as well as a mode of navigating misogynistic, ableist and racist societal pressures. One of Goll’s definitions of the Black existence is the ongoing struggle to prove our humanity to the rest of the world. According to her, Black people are only granted humanity in mainstream society when they are considered to be exceptional, “Respect for Black people is contingent on very unrealistic standards, like notoriety, being rich, or being a celebrity.”
Paired with misogynoir, Black women must be exceptionally beautiful to be considered worthy of respect. Colourist hierarchies intersect with how we perceive beauty, what we consider to be natural, and how much humanity we allow an individual – consequently, a woman’s life can be made more difficult or easier depending on how she is seen by society. Goll does not believe that most women use makeup to hide their flaws, but rather to cope with oppressive power structures. “Armour, as much as it covers, it enables. So makeup as armour isn’t just about covering imperfections, it is about accentuating your strengths in a world where all everyone wants to do is draw out your weaknesses.”
The social model of disability
Exceptionalism becomes even more unattainable at the intersection of disability. As a disabled person, Goll has been watching people watch her all her life. She discovered at a young age that a lot of our experiences are shaped by how others perceive us, “I am always a bit of a spectacle and growing up, I saw the difference of how they treated me versus other children.” Disabled people are left out of most liberation discourses because they do not deserve to exist in mainstream public imagination. Goll challenges the exclusivity of most Black spaces and shares her knowledge to remind us that disability is in fact an essential tool of our liberation.
She favours the social model of disability, a concept which “reveals that disability is in fact a social construct. An ‘impairment’, the diagnosis you’d get from a doctor/specialist, MS, Downs Syndrome, etcetera, should not actually impact how you relate with wider society”. In an equitable society with the right infrastructure, everybody should and can be able to access public spaces irrespective of their perceived ability. “A common example I have previously stated is: someone who wears glasses is visually impaired to some degree, but with glasses they are not disabled because they can access their environment without hindrance,” Goll adds.
Goll encourages society to scrutinise non-disabled privileges in general and ableist beauty ideals in particular. She tells disabled people to reclaim their bodies as their own by actively subverting parameters of beauty which overemphasise symmetry and proportions. Makeup thus becomes a powerful tool in this endeavour, and the Black disabled body a canvas for art and creativity. In one of her articles, Goll writes that “despite how it has been framed as fickle and shallow, makeup artistry serves as an important healing aspect of my personal development.”
Healing can occur as an empowered self-image after spending hours looking at one’s own face, or simply in the form of recreational escapism. Ultimately, makeup art allows a person the power to create their own image and challenge the determinism of colonial beauty standards. “There’s something special about curating your personal presentation”, says Goll, “thinking it through, figuring out what you like.” Goll is an inspiration, because she infuses her activism with joy, love, laughter, courage, passion and music. Her identity challenges the notion of what it means to be an activist. Living by example, she encourages us to question our perception of ourselves and of others all the while centering our lives around what feels good. “White supremacy is out to get your joy, your time, sense of self, your resolve, but when you choose to enjoy your life despite it all, you’re a victor.”
To read more about Katouche Goll’s activism, check out her work: The Beautiful Disabled Body, The Missing Piece of the Movement: Black Disabled Activism, and Womxn Doing It For Themselves: Conversations with Kat