 A good deal of performance art has been highly controversial, partly because of the exposure of the bodies of the artists in ways that not only challenge norms of female beauty but are deliberately gross or even borderline pornographic. The art tradition was long accustomed to pictures of nude females arranged in alluring poses. A performance artist who manipulates her body in ways that reverse the values of that tradition confronts the audience with a direct and emotionally difficult challenge to those values. Karen Finley, to mention a well-known case, called attention to the sexual exploitation of women by smearing her body with foodstuffs resembling blood and excrement. This is an especially political use of disgust—an emotion that in earlier times was explicitly precluded from aesthetic arousal but that has become a major feature of the comprehension and appreciation of contemporary art (Korsmeyer 2011). What at first disgusts, however, may come to lose its stigma, and displays of the body are also deployed to induce acceptance. Regarding what at first appear as disfigurements with aesthetic openness can broaden both our sensibilities and our social horizons (Irvin 2017; Protasi 2017). Artists have contributed to changes in the social imagination about gender fluidity. While the concept of the sexed body has seemed in the past to be dictated by nature, transgender and non-binary artists are among those who challenge the idea that morphology at birth must determine the course of one’s life (Mostovoy in Brand Weiser 2018; Vaid-Menon 2020).