Venus was the God of Beauty and Love yet she was married to Hephaestus, the mangled, grumpy and for all intents and purposes, ugly god. Why juxtapose such distinct figures? Are they doing the same job? The course discusses the interplay between ugliness and politics with focus on a number of central concepts such as race, social conflict, nationalism, ideology, dictatorship, propaganda and autonomy. Emphasis is put on the double role of the deployment of ugliness, as reinforcement of ideological and political ideas and as a force of social criticism. How does the state justify its own existence by the use of aesthetic narratives? How does the State identify undesirables? This class highlights how groups who feel somatically alike behave, and how their boundaries form and change over time. The focus will be interdisciplinary and multi-national, with case studies from past and present. The class will have a digital media focus as we will delve into issues of representation particularly with respect to race. For example, we will delve into the aesthetic discussion of northern and southern Sudanese as well and Hitler's Germany.