While twentieth-century brow categories—highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow—may no longer explicitly structure taste-making, the “judgmental sting” that Beth Driscoll (2014) associates with levels of distinction continues to shape artistic and literary taste in networked cultures. The words highbrow and lowbrow (first used in 1884 and 1901, respectively; OED) derive from highbrowed and lowbrowed, terms associated with the pseudoscientific practice of phrenology, which sought to map intellectual and artistic propensities, as well as moral character, onto cranial contours. While these terms shifted from being physical descriptors into being markers of cultural distinction, the emergence of middlebrow (1924, OED) complicated the high/low binary to become a site of ongoing debate about legitimacy and value—entangled with both aspiration for cultural sophistication and the maintenance of distinction from mass entertainment.

Drawing from Monique Rooney's book, Brow Network: Taste-making in Contemporary US Literature and Art (under contract with Iowa UP), this paper argues that brow distinctions have long signified sensitivity to (sometimes invisible) structures of evaluation—whether in the form of box office statistics or algorithmic mediation—in an otherwise chaotic and estranging modern world. With reference to Fernand Deligny’s “a network is a mode of being” and  Catherine Malabou’s “morphing intelligence”, she explores ‘brow’ not only as a cultural classification but also as a physical threshold—situated near the cranium, which houses the brain (a signifier of cognition), and above the mouth (a site not only of sensory taste but also of expression). Taste, as both a bodily sensation and a cultural marker of refinement, operates at the intersection of the sensory and the aesthetic. In an era where art and literature circulate through computer-mediated taste worlds, the brow serves as both metaphorical and anatomical register of meaning, positioned at the convergence of embodied experience and networked aesthetics.

Monique Rooney teaches in the English Program at the Australian National University. She has published widely on U.S. literature, film, television, and Australian literature. Her forthcoming book, Brow Network: Taste-making in Contemporary US Literature and Art (Iowa UP), examines the persistence of cultural distinction in networked environments. She is the editor of Australian Humanities Review and is currently preparing to write a literary biography of New Zealand-Australian writer Ruth Park.

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Presented as part of the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics's 2025 English Seminar Series