## 1. Art and Artists: Historical Background



Feminist perspectives in aesthetics first arose in the 1970s from a
combination of political activism in the contemporary art world and
critiques of the historical traditions of philosophy and of the arts.
They have developed in conjunction with the postmodern debates about
culture and society that have taken place in many fields in the social
sciences and humanities. These debates often begin with an assessment
of the western philosophical legacy, a legacy that is nowhere more
challenged than in the art world itself. Therefore, the significance
of many contemporary art movements, including feminist and
postfeminist work, is dramatized and clarified by understanding the
traditional values and theories that they address and challenge.



The richest historical target for feminist critiques of philosophies
of art has been the concept of fine art, which refers to art that is
created chiefly for aesthetic enjoyment. It includes at its core
painting, music, literature, and sculpture, and it excludes crafts,
popular art, and entertainment. Closely related to the concept of fine
art are ideas about the creative genius of the artist, who is often
conceived as possessing a unique vision expressed in art works. It was
the fine art tradition of painting that art historian Linda Nochlin
had in mind in 1971 when she asked her famous question, "Why
have there been no great women artists?" (Nochlin 1971 [1988]).
Since the modifier "fine" already contains profound
implications for the gender of artists, some background regarding the
older history of ideas about art and artists is first needed in order
to understand the variety of answers that can be provided to that
question. This inquiry also positions us to understand the media,
subject matter, and styles that contemporary feminist artists and art
theorists have advanced. What is more, examination of the ancient
roots of philosophy of art reveals a gendered value structure that
persists to this day.



The term "art" has not always served as shorthand for the
fine arts. Like most of the terms that refer to major conceptual
anchors of the western intellectual tradition, its origins may be
traced to classical antiquity. The Greek term that we now usually
translate "art" is *techne*, a term that is equally
well translated as "skill," and that in its broadest sense
was used to distinguish products of human endeavor from objects of
nature. The types of *techne* that most resemble our modern
concept of art are those that are "mimetic" or imitative,
that is, that reproduce the look of an object or that express an idea
in narrative or drama. Sculpture imitates the human form, for
instance; music imitates sounds of nature and voices or--more
abstractly--human emotions. Drama and epic poetry imitate lived
events. That art's nature is to be mimetic was widely assumed
for centuries, and most commentators, including Aristotle, extolled
the ability of the mimetic artist to capture with beauty and skill
some truth about life and the world. The Roman historian Pliny the
Elder recorded the acclaim for painters who were able to render their
subjects in line and color so accurately that they were
indistinguishable from their appearance in nature.



Probably the earliest philosophical discussion of art in the Greek
tradition occurs in Plato's *Republic*. Unlike most of
his contemporaries, Plato regarded mimesis as dangerous. The
*Republic* is an extended investigation of the nature of
justice, in the course of which Socrates and his friends envision an
ideal society that strictly censors and controls art forms such as
drama, music, painting, and sculpture. According to Plato's
metaphysics, the abstract world of the Forms possesses a greater
degree of reality than the physical world with its changing, unstable
events and objects. Hence the more direct the apprehension of Forms,
the closer a human mind can approach Truth. Imitations such as
paintings mimic the mere appearance of physical objects, becoming (as
he puts it in *Republic* X) three times removed from reality
and the truth. Mimesis substitutes illusion for truth, and it does so
in seductively pleasurable ways. What is more, arts such as tragic
poetry rivet attention by engaging powerful emotions such as fear,
enervating the virtues of a courageous person but paradoxically
pleasing at the same time. According to Plato's analysis of the
human psyche, the nonrational elements of the soul are powerful forces
that might divert the intellect from the cooler apprehension of
wisdom; thus the pleasures that mimetic art delivers are sufficiently
risky that art should be carefully curbed in a well-governed
society.



Plato's denigration of mimesis does not seem immediately to have
anything to do with gender, although his influential system has
important indirect implications that are rife with gendered
significance. In his preference for the philosophical quest to attain
knowledge of the Forms over indulgence in the pleasures of mimesis,
for example, one can see a hierarchy of values that rank the eternal,
abstract, intellectual world of ideal forms over the transient,
particular, sensuous world of physical objects. This hierarchy
supports the dualism between mind and body that is deeply correlated
with gender asymmetry, and that was a fundamental target of critique
in the early development of feminist perspectives in philosophy.
Feminist philosophers take note of certain concepts that appear in
"binary" combinations: mind-body; universal-particular;
reason-emotion, sense, and appetite; and so forth--including
male-female. These are not merely correlative pairs, they are ranked
pairs in which the first item is taken to be naturally superior to the
second (Gatens 1991: 92). Universality is considered superior to
particularity because it provides more general knowledge, for example;
reason is superior to emotion because it is supposedly a more reliable
faculty. Both preferences represent a partiality for
"objectivity" over "subjectivity," concepts
that have an especially complicated significance in aesthetics. What
is more, the sorts of pleasures that mimesis arouses are emotional and
appetitive, appealing more to the body than to the intellect.
Therefore we can find in Plato's peculiar assessment of mimetic
arts an elevation of intellect and abstraction over emotion and
particularity. While not explicitly invoked, gender is present in
assumptions of this discussion, because "male" and
"female" (sometimes conflated with "masculine"
and "feminine," though the terms are not synonymous) are
root members of the pairs of opposites that have been present in
western philosophy since Pythagoras. While there are no direct
references to women creators in the *Republic*, this philosophy
of art partakes of gendered concepts at its very core. The
implications of such concepts for artists evolve into explicit form
with the genesis of the modern category of fine art and its
creators.



Scholars disagree about how to date the rise of the special category
of arts designated "fine arts" or "beaux
arts." Some claim that the concept begins to emerge in the
Renaissance, while others argue that it is not until the eighteenth
century that fine art really firms up as a distinct classification
(Kristeller 1951-52; Shiner 2001). At this time the idea that art is
essentially mimetic begins to recede, and it gradually gives way to a
romantic concept of art as self-expression. The eighteenth century is
also the period that produces many treatises comparing arts to one
another according to shared principles and, even more importantly,
develops influential theories about a particular kind of pleasure
taken in objects of nature and art that becomes known as
"aesthetic" enjoyment. This type of pleasure was central
to the theories of taste that characterize the formative theories of
aesthetics.



The focus on fine art singles out the purely aesthetic values of works
of art and positions them so centrally that the very concept of art is
narrowed. Art that is appreciated for its beauty or other aesthetic
virtues is distinct from the sorts of arts that produce items for
practical use, such as furniture, cushions, or utensils. The latter
came to be designated "crafts," and while their usefulness
and skill-requirements were recognized, the making of a craft object
was considered decidedly less of an original achievement than the
creation of a work of fine art. Artistic creativity increasingly came
to be regarded as a kind of personal expression that externalizes the
vision of the individual artist in a work of autonomous value; craft,
by contrast, aims at some practical function.



The significance of the fine art-craft distinction for the assessment
of women's creative production is substantial. While there are
many objects that are excluded from the category of fine art whose
makers are male, those objects of domestic use whose creation was
predominantly the occupation of women were all marginalized by this
category and its attendant values (Parker and Pollock 1981). Thereby
the traditional domestic arts were removed from the history of art
proper. This historical change suggests one reason that painting, for
example, has had so few "great" female practitioners:
historically women's creative efforts were likely to be directed
to the production of domestic wares; when these were shunted into the
category of "craft," women's presence in the genre
of visual arts shrank radically.



What is more, the rise of attention to the fine arts gave those arts a
particularly public presence. The modern institution of the museum put
paintings and sculptures on display; the concert hall made
performances available to a larger public (Shiner 2001). This is a
period of history when ideas of social propriety were especially
divergent for men and women of the middle and upper classes, the chief
consumers of the fine arts. While it was considered a domestic benefit
for well-bred young ladies to be able to perform music at home for
family and guests and to decorate the walls of the home with deft
paintings, public exposure of such talents was widely regarded as
improper and unfeminine. Therefore, what talents women exercised in
areas such as music tended to remain in the amateur realm rather than
be exerted in the more public professional world that monitored
important developments of art forms. (There are notable exceptions
such as the musicians Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, but
they are comparatively few.) Thus another reason women artists in many
genres take a back seat to their male colleagues is that they withdrew
from or were denied the kind of education and training that prepared
them for the exacting standards of the public audience. (Nochlin notes
how many women painters were trained by artist-fathers who were able
to provide them with the kind of training that would otherwise be
difficult to obtain; the same may be said of women musicians [Citron
1993; McClary 1991].) These historical explanations illuminate another
pair of opposites marked by gender: public-private. This binary has
been especially investigated by feminist political theorists but also
has considerable significance for philosophy of art (Pollock
1988).



From the above we can see how the concept of "art,"
considered in its aspect of "fine art," is a gendered
concept that selects as its paradigms mostly works that have been made
by male creators. Awareness of fine art's exclusionary criteria
is evident in contemporary feminist art practice. Mindful of the
effects that strict divisions between fine art and craft have exerted
over female creativity, feminist artists who were active in the
women's movement of the 1970s, such as Faith Ringgold and Miriam
Schapiro, incorporated craft materials such as fiber and cloth into
their displays (Lauter 1993). Their work employs materials with
domestic and feminine associations, calling attention to the
long-overlooked labor of women in art traditions that are different
from but no less worthy of attention than the fine arts of painting
and sculpture. Indeed, craft objects themselves such as quilts are now
occasionally the subject of exhibits in fine-art museums, another
recognition that the problematic distinction between fine art and
craft dissolves with changing cultural assessments. These sorts of
work suggest that, from one point of view, women have not been so much
absent from the history of art, as the history of art has screened out
many of the forms to which they have traditionally directed their
energies.



The area known as "Everyday Aesthetics," discussed below,
has taken up some of these insights and widened the attention of
philosophy so that it more readily recognizes the role of creativity
in domestic life. Perspectives on domesticity and the daily lives of
women have dramatically influenced not only the materials of art but
also subjects portrayed. There has been a notable increase of
depictions of pregnancy and motherhood in art that manifests feminist
thinking, for example (Liss 2009; Brand and Granger 2011). Feminist
and postfeminist art has been groundbreaking in the theoretical
exploration of the body in its varieties and meanings, including
sexuality and maternity. (For an example of the tandem work of art and
philosophy, see Dorothea Olkowski's discussion of the art of
Mary Kelly (Olkowski 1999).) The body in art is reviewed in Section 5
below.



In addition to principles of selection, another bias infuses gender
into the idea of fine art: the very concept of the artist. For much of
the modern period, the very best examples of fine art were understood
to be the creative products of artists with special talent amounting
to "genius," and genius is a trait that possesses
especially emphatic gender meaning.


## 2. Creativity and Genius



While genius is a rare gift, according to most theorists the pool of
human beings from which genius emerges includes only men. Rousseau,
Kant, and Schopenhauer all declared that women possess characters and
mentalities too weak to produce genius. This judgment represents a
particular instance of more general theories that attribute to males
the strongest and most important qualities of mind, in comparison to
which females are but paler counterparts. At least since Aristotle,
rationality and strong intellect have been regarded as
"masculine" traits that women possess in lesser degrees
than men. Women are standardly considered less intellectual but more
sensitive and emotional. According to some theories of creativity,
emotionality and sensitivity can be inspirational virtues, and so the
field of aesthetics has been more responsive to the positive uses to
which these traits might be put than are some other areas of
philosophy. When it comes to genius, however, male artists get the
best of both worlds: the great artistic genius is more than
intellectually brilliant; he is also emotionally sensitive and
fine-tuned, thus possessing characteristics that are traditionally
labeled both "masculine" and "feminine."



Christine Battersby has detailed the long and complicated history of
the concept of genius, which has roots in antiquity (Battersby 1989).
By the time it reaches its powerful Romantic form in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, it is especially exclusionary of women
artists. The artistic genius was praised not only for the strong
mentality that has always been attributed more heavily to men than to
women, but also for a sensitivity and creativity that partakes equally
of supposedly feminine attributes. Especially in the nineteenth
century, such "nonrational" sources of inspiration were
extolled for transcending the rules of reason and bringing something
new into being. Womanly metaphors of conception, gestation, labor, and
birth were liberally appropriated in descriptions of artistic
creativity, at the same time that actual women artists were passed
over as representatives of the highest aesthetic production.



> 
> As the nineteenth century drew on ... the metaphors of male
> motherhood became commonplace--as did those of male midwifery.
> The artist conceived, was pregnant, laboured (in sweat and pain), was
> delivered, and (in an uncontrolled ecstasy of
> agonized--male--control) brought forth. These were the
> images of 'natural' childbirth that the male creators
> elaborated. (Battersby 1989: 73).
> 



The description of genius with feminine images did not serve to bridge
the gulf between male and female artists, partly because of the
different ways that their creativity was conceived. Actual childbirth
was regarded as an outgrowth of women's "natural"
biological role; their own particular emotions and sensitivities were
similarly regarded as manifestations of what nature bestowed upon
them. Their artistic expression was thereby categorized less as
achievement than as natural display; consequently the expression of
feeling in women's art was often seen as a manifestation of
temperament, while strong feelings expressed in the work of men were
interpreted as emotions conveyed with mastery and control. By this way
of thinking, emotions in women's art are a byproduct of nature;
in contrast, the genius of the male artist produces a new creation
that transcends the dictates of nature (Korsmeyer 2004: ch.3).



While by and large disparate evaluations of the capabilities and
social roles of men and women have inhibited women's historical
accomplishments in the fine arts, they have not prevented them
entirely. Art and music historians have reevaluated the record of fine
art and brought a number of women practitioners to the attention of
both scholars and general audiences. While there have been relatively
few women artists recognized as "great," they have not
been altogether absent from the historical record. What is more, there
are certain art forms in which women were the pioneers, such as the
prose novel. The novel is a relatively new art form in the west, and
it began as popular story-writing whose market demand also afforded
opportunities for women writers to earn money. Their works were not
always highly praised, for there was a lot of critical disdain for the
wide appeal of their stories. Some of them, however, such as George
Eliot and Charlotte Bronte, created works of lasting acclaim and
even earned that contested accolade, "genius."



At the same time, a general skepticism about the soundness of the
canon of great arts of the past has informed a good deal of feminist
scholarship in the critical disciplines, which has reassessed the
historical record in painting, music, sculpture, and literature and
revised the canon to include neglected works by women. Rediscovery of
the work of women of the past was one of the major efforts of feminist
scholars during so-called second-wave feminism of the 1970s and 80s, a
period that also saw the founding of women's studies programs at
many colleges and universities in North America and Europe. Especially
in the early years of such studies, an important goal of scholarship
was to give women a fair shot at recognition in order to attain the
goal of sexual equality in the arts. As we shall see shortly, this
proved to be an initial stage in the development of work in feminist
aesthetics.



There has been considerable debate among feminist scholars concerning
how to assess the values associated with genius and artistic
accomplishment. Some have argued that the idea of genius itself is
suspect because of the great disparities in education available to
people, and the concept ought simply to be discarded. In addition,
valorizing the accomplishments of one individual perpetuates the
neglect of joint and communal creativity in favor of a kind of
masculine heroism. (In fact, earlier feminist art was often
collaborative, an explicit rejection of the idea of individual
creativity in favor of joint efforts among women.) Other feminists
disagree and have located alternative criteria at work in
women's achievements, arguing that one can discern traditions of
female genius at work in the body of art produced by women (Battersby
1989).



Critical attention to the values surrounding genius and the
valorization of individual creativity has occasioned some practical
recommendations regarding museum displays and the sorts of objects
considered worthy of public attention. In fact, recent years have seen
increased attention to works produced outside the academic fine art
systems, including the creative products of under-represented social
minorities. Hilde Hein pursues this point by suggesting that museums
might divert traditional interest in "masterworks" and aim
at understanding more commonplace objects and their meanings, thus
inverting the usual hierarchy of values manifest in museum and gallery
displays (Hein 2010). Hein maintains that the nonhierarchical values
promoted by feminist theory might motivate museums to reconsider their
visitors and the objects on display, reducing the distance between
viewer and object that the concept of the masterwork of genius induces
(Hein 2011, 2014). Sue Spaid goes even further, advancing a relational
collaboration among curators, artists, and viewing public (Spaid 2020;
also Reilly 2018).



The debate over creativity is a particular entry into broader
discussions over whether women's art might represent a kind of
"gynocentric" tradition different from the androcentric
traditions of male artists (Ecker 1986; Hein and Korsmeyer 1993, sect.
II). If this is to mean that the works of women artists always
manifest certain feminine aesthetic qualities due to their
makers' gender, then many feminists respond negatively, arguing
that other social positions (historical, national, ethnic, racial,
sexual orientation, and so forth) impose too many differences on women
to yield any feminine common denominator to their work (Felski 1989,
1998). On the other hand, some scholars argue that women artists and
writers often produce a counter-voice within their ambient traditions
which might be considered to claim its own "aesthetic."
Where one stands in this debate depends much on the scope of evidence
considered relevant to the question (Devereaux 1998). Claims for a
tradition of feminine aesthetics have been widely criticized for
essentializing women and ignoring their many social and historical
differences (Meagher 2011). At the same time, as Cornelia Klinger
observes, speculations about a women's art tradition seem, in
retrospect, to be more sophisticated than the label
"essentialism" implies, because they move beyond
egalitarian liberalism and recognize the enduring influences of gender
in aesthetic productions (Klinger 1998, 350; Eaton 2008). As with
virtually all philosophical questions, those concerning commonalities
among women artists are revisited from time to time. (In 2015 a
conference in Cork, Ireland, was devoted to the topic of
"Aesthetics and the Feminine" (Edwards 2016).)



The latter perspective characterizes those scholars who defend the
idea that experiences of female embodiment can be manifest in
distinctive expressive styles that yet accommodate difference. The
most elaborate theoretical framework supporting this approach is
provided by work loosely described as "French feminisms."
Helene Cixous famously proposed the notion of
*ecriture feminine*, positing that the expression
of women's lived experience might be impressed in women's
literary production in linguistic styles that offer alternatives to
standard objective description and linear temporal development (Cixous
1975/1981). Although they proceed from varying theoretical
foundations, including different interpretations of psychoanalytic
theory, Luce Irigaray's notion of writing the body and Julia
Kristeva's positing of modes of semiotic expression that escape
patriarchal symbolic discourse, propose parallel methods to
distinguish creativity distinct from androcentric styles (Irigaray
1974 [1985]). They need not characterize the writing only of women,
however; Kristeva's theory of the semiotic posits that poetic
language taps expressive pre-symbolic resources flowing from infantile
experiences in the mother-child dyad (Kristeva 1984). With or without
the psychoanalytic frameworks employed by their originators, such
ideas have proven fruitful resources for feminist scholars working in
a variety of philosophical traditions. For example, Jane Duran has
examined the fiction of writers as different as the British novelist
Margaret Drabble and the African-American writer Toni Cade Bambara to
disclose how expressing embodied experience shares certain traits that
are manifest quite differently when inflected by race, social
position, and cultural legacy (Duran 2007).



The critique of tradition that fosters "writing the
feminine" proceeds from the discovery of a lack at the heart of
artistic representation, an absence of voices positioned to express
the subjectivities of those who occupy the margins of social power. In
counterpoint, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek notes that worlds of art have also
provided a wealth of resources to uncover realities of gender,
sexuality, social position, and race. However, the project of
developing feminist aesthetics has often been eclipsed by the
political urgencies thereby disclosed, sidelining feminism within
aesthetics and aesthetics within feminism. Ziarek examines the works
of modernist women writers, arguing that the very artistic form of
their works unifies the efforts of feminism and political practice in
"complex relations between political and aesthetic
transformations, their relation to gender and race differences, and
the role of materiality in political contestation and aesthetic
invention" (Ziarek 2012a, 392; Ziarek 2012b).


## 3. Aesthetic Categories and Feminist Critiques



The foregoing has reviewed feminist reflections on theories of art,
noting how the histories of women in the arts inform contemporary
feminist debates and practices. Equally important are assessments of
the values that comprise the conceptual frameworks of aesthetics, from
which some of the most influential tools of feminist critical analysis
emerge.



A good deal of feminist criticism has been focused on
eighteenth-century philosophy because of the many influential works on
beauty, pleasure, and taste that were written at that time and that
became foundational texts for contemporary theories.
"Taste" refers to a capacity that permits good judgments
about art and the beauties of nature. While the metaphor for
perception is taken from the gustatory sense, these theories are
actually about visual, auditory, and imaginative pleasure, since it is
widely assumed that literal taste experience is too bodily and
subjective to yield interesting philosophical problems. Judgments of
taste take the form of a particular kind of pleasure--one that
eventually became known as "aesthetic" pleasure (a term
that entered English only in the early nineteenth century).



The major theoretical concepts of this period are riddled with
gendered significance, although tracing gender in the maze of writings
of this time is a task complicated by the unstable role of sexuality
in theories of aesthetic pleasure. According to its most austere
analysis--which came to dominate aesthetics and philosophy of art
for a time--aesthetic enjoyment has nothing to do with sexuality
at all: Aesthetic pleasure is not a sensuous, bodily gratification; it
is free from practical considerations and purged of desire. The two
kinds of desire that most interrupt aesthetic contemplation are hunger
and sexual appetite, which are the "interested" pleasures
par excellence. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative and
"disinterested" (to use Kant's term from the
*Critique of Judgment*, 1790). It is disinterestedness that rids
the perceiver of the individual proclivities that divide people in
their judgments and that clears the mind for common, even universal
agreement about objects of beauty. Ideally, taste is potentially a
universal phenomenon, even though its "delicacy," as Hume
put it, requires exercise and training. To some degree, the
requirements of taste may be seen as bridging the differences among
people. But there is an element of leisure embedded in the values of
fine art, and critics have argued that taste also ensconces and
systematizes class divisions (Shusterman 1993; Mattick 1993).



Even as theorists extolled the possibilities for universal taste,
however, they often drew gender distinctions regarding its exercise.
Many theorists argued that women and men possess systematically
different tastes or capabilities for appreciating art and other
cultural products. The most noticeable gender distinctions occur with
the two central aesthetic categories of the eighteenth century, beauty
and sublimity. Objects of beauty were described as bounded, small, and
delicate--"feminized" traits. Objects that are
sublime, whose exemplars are drawn chiefly from uncontrolled nature,
are unbounded, rough and jagged,
terrifying--"masculinized" traits. These gender
labels are unstable, however, for the terrors of nature have an
equally strong history of description as "feminine" forces
of chaos (Battersby 1998). What is more, gendered meanings in the
sublime are intensified by surrounding discourse about the strange,
exotic, and foreign. Meg Armstrong argues that "exotic"
bodies become subjected to aesthetic discourse in theories of the
sublime, noting that Burke singles out the black female body as a
special object of terror (Armstrong 1996). In short, aesthetic
*objects* take on both gendered and racialized meanings with
the concepts of beauty and sublimity (Bindman 2002). Moreover, so do
aesthetic *appreciators*. As Kant put it in his earlier
*Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime*
(1763), a woman's mind is a "beautiful" mind. But a
woman is incapable of the tougher appreciation and insight that
sublimity discloses (Wiseman 1993, Kneller 1993). The preclusion of
women from the experience of the sublime limits their competence to
apprehend the moral and existential weight of the might and magnitude
of both nature and art. Women's supposed weaker constitutions
and moral limitations, as well as their social restrictions,
contributed to a concept of sublimity that marks it as masculine.
Debates over the nature and concept of sublimity gave rise to feminist
debates over whether one can discern in the history of literature an
alternate tradition of sublimity that counts as a "female
sublime" (Freeman 1995, 1998; Battersby 1998, 2007; Mann
2006).



The careful purging of sensual pleasure from aesthetic enjoyment
mingles with the paradoxical employment of female bodies as examples
of aesthetic objects. Among the things that are naturally agreeable to
human nature, Hume lists music, good cheer, and "the fair
sex." And Kant states, "The man develops his own taste
while the woman makes herself an object of everybody's
taste." (Kant 1798 [1978: 222]) Edmund Burke frankly eroticizes
beauty when he speculates that the grace and delicacy of line that
mark beautiful objects are reminiscent of the curves of the female
body (Burke 1757/1968). If women are the objects of aesthetic
pleasure, then the actual desire of the perceiver must be distanced
and overcome in order for enjoyment to be purely aesthetic. This
outcome is one implication of the notion of disinterested pleasure.
This requirement, it would seem, assumes a standard point of view that
is masculine and heterosexual. But of course women are also subjects
who exercise taste. This implies that women are unstably both
aesthetic subject and object at the same time. As a rule, the
connoisseur, the so-called man of taste, was indeed male, and female
bodies--in reality or represented in art--figured among the objects of
aesthetic pleasure. However, women were also participants in the
development of aesthetic ideals, and Terry Robinson argues that they
actively shaped the concept of the beautiful female body (T. Robinson
2018).



Disinterestedness has a long history; it characterizes the popular
aesthetic attitude theories of the twentieth century, which argued
that a prerequisite for any kind of full appreciation of art is a
distanced, relatively contemplative stance towards a work of art.
Similar assumptions about the most suitable way to view art lie behind
the formalist criticism that dominated visual art interpretation for
decades, and that also characterize interpretive norms in other art
forms such as literature and music (McClary 1991, 4; Devereaux 1998;
Brand 2000). The value of disinterested aesthetic enjoyment has come
under heavy critical scrutiny on the part of feminists. Some have
deconstructed this idea and argued that a supposedly disinterested
stance is at least sometimes actually a covert and controlling
voyeurism and as such ought to be abandoned as an aesthetic ideal.
Others caution against discarding standards of disinterested,
impartial judgment altogether, arguing that such a move relinquishes
the important normativity of aesthetic evaluations (Eaton 2008, 2012).
Nonetheless, even if disinterestedness and related standards of
objectivity are retained, feminists continue to draw attention to the
ways in which the mere act of looking can manifest relations of social
power. Anne Eaton proposes an alternative notion of
"situatedness," importing into aesthetics a version of
feminist standpoint theory to draw attention both to audience
positions of appreciation and to the perspectives evoked in works of
art (Eaton 2009).



Criticisms of theories that mandate disinterested or distanced
aesthetic enjoyment have given rise to influential feminist theories
of the perception and interpretation of art. The type of art that has
come in for particular scrutiny in terms of the implications of
disinterested enjoyment is visual art, and a good deal of argument
about what has become known as "the male gaze" has been
produced by film theorists and art historians, and subsequently
investigated by philosophers. The phrase "male gaze"
refers to the frequent framing of objects of visual art so that the
viewer is situated in a "masculine" position of
appreciation. By interpreting objects of art as diverse as paintings
of the nude and Hollywood films, these theorists have concluded that
women depicted in art are standardly placed as objects of attraction
(much as Burke had lined up women as the original aesthetic object);
and that the more active role of looking assumes a counterpart
masculine position. As Laura Mulvey puts it, women are assigned the
passive status of being looked-at, whereas men are the active subjects
who look (Mulvey 1989). Art works themselves prescribe ideal viewing
positions. While many women obviously also appreciate art, the stance
they assume in order to appreciate works in the ways disposed by
tradition requires the donning of a masculine perceptual attitude.



Theories of the male gaze come in several varieties: Psychoanalytic
theories dominate film interpretation, (Mulvey 1989, 2019; Doane 1991;
Chanter 2008); but their presumptions and methodology are contested by
philosophers more attuned to cognitive science and analytic philosophy
(Freeland 1998a; Carroll 1995; Cunliffe 2019). Versions of the male
gaze can be found in the existentialist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir
(Beauvoir 1949/2011); and there are empirically-minded observations
that confirm the dominance of male points of view in cultural
artifacts without adopting any particular philosophical scaffolding.
These theories differ in their diagnosis of what generates the
"maleness" of the ideal observer for art. For
psychoanalytic theorists, one must understand the operation of the
unconscious over visual imagination to account for the presence of
desire in objects of visual art. For others, historical and cultural
conditioning is sufficient to direct appreciation of art in ways that
privilege masculine points of view. Despite many significant
theoretical differences, analyses of the gaze converge in their
conclusion that much of the art produced in the Euro-American
traditions situates the ideal appreciator in a masculine
subject-position. There is debate over the dominance of the male
position in all art, for appreciative subjects cannot be understood
simply as "masculine" but require further attention to
sexuality, race, and nationality (Silverman 1992; hooks 1992, 1995;
Yancy 2016). Sometimes a facile reading of the gaze tempts one to
exaggerate the sharpness of gender distinctions into *the* male
viewer and *the* female object of the gaze, though most
feminists avoid such over-simplification. Despite their differences,
theories of the gaze reject the idea that perception is ever merely
passive reception. All of these approaches assume that vision
possesses power: power to objectify--to subject the object of
vision to scrutiny and possession. (For example, seeing oneself as the
exotic Other in orientalist paintings heightens the political aura of
art produced in dominant western cultures (Al-Saji 2019).) Since
social norms frame and amplify the operation of perception, there may
be inflections of gender in the very act of seeing (Tullman 2017).
Examinations of aesthetic perception have provided theoretical tools
of inestimable value in calling attention to the fact that looking is
rarely a neutral operation of the visual sense. As Naomi Scheman
states:



> 
> Vision is the sense best adapted to express this dehumanization: it
> works at a distance and need not be reciprocal, it provides a great
> deal of easily categorized information, it enables the perceiver
> accurately to locate (pin down) the object, and it provides the gaze,
> a way of making the visual object aware that she is a visual object.
> Vision is political, as is visual art, whatever (else) it may be about
> (Scheman 1993: 159).
> 



Not only what is seen but what is rendered invisible or shadowy
demands additional examination, as with M.G. Davidson's analysis of
the way that photographs of black women subtly train the white male
gaze and with Paul Taylor's study of the complexities of the phrase
"Black is beautiful" (Davidson 2016; Taylor
2016). Occluding persons from nondominant cultures and social groups
in visual production can exert powerful political force (Ortega 2019b;
Ortega, Pitts, and Medina 2019).



Theories of the gaze stress the activity of vision, its mastery and
control of the aesthetic object. These theories reject the separation
of desire from pleasure, reinstating into the core of beauty the sort
of erotic, covetous gaze that was eliminated from aesthetic
disinterestedness. While not all art invites understanding in terms of
the gaze, much does; perhaps nowhere is the ideology of extreme
disinterested contemplation more questionable than when applied to
paintings of female nudes, which one feminist scholar argues virtually
define the modern fine art of painting (Nead 1992). Aesthetic
ideologies that would remove art from its relations with the world
disguise its ability to inscribe and to reinforce power relations. The
erotic in art is one of those relations, and denying its presence
disguises both its persuasive sway and its aesthetic force (Eaton
2012). With visual art, those relations are manifest in vision itself:
the way it is depicted in a work and the way it is directed in the
observer outside the work. Becoming attuned to the prescribed
viewing-position of a work of visual art brings desire and suppressed
heteroeroticism into focus and illuminates other presumptions about
the ideal audience for art, such as sexual identity and race (Roelofs
2009, 2014). Depictions of the body in art are continuous with
pornographic and erotic representations, other areas of feminist
investigations (Maes and Levinson 2012; Eaton 2007, 2012, 2017, 2018;
Kania 2012; Shusterman 2021).



Many of these critical investigations can be ordered into a sustained
critique of aesthetic practices, in particular, of what is presented
in the name of *beauty*. Of all the concepts within aesthetics,
for feminist consideration there is none so central, so contested, so
rejected, and so embraced as beauty. Beauty is an enormous category of
value, for so many disparate things are beautiful that generalizing
about its nature is a formidable challenge. Beauty is among the oldest
of philosophical value concepts, with Plato numbering among its
formative theorists. Plato focused on beauty as an abstract form whose
essence is bestowed on the particular items that instantiate it, and
in keeping with this foundational model, philosophers have usually
treated beauty in the most general of terms. Combined with the modern
notion of disinterested attention, this approach to aesthetic value
seems to aim at the highest level of universality of appreciation. Yet
at the same time, as noted above, one of the central exemplars of
beauty has been the (young, pretty, pale-skinned) female body, which
exerts erotic attraction and promises satisfaction of physical desire.
Critiques of the gender-inflection in supposedly neutral theories, as
well as its racialized implications, numbered among the early feminist
revisions in aesthetics. These theoretical efforts merged with social
critiques of beauty norms that circulated in the late twentieth
century. What is more, for some time, beauty was rather sidelined in
the art world as well (Danto 2003). As a result, beauty fell out of
favor, and for quite a while one could find little original work
published on the subject.



All that began to change around 1990, and since the turn of the last
millennium there has been a veritable explosion of interest in beauty
among philosophers, artists, critics, and cultural
theorists--feminists among them (Brand 2000, 2013; Higgins, Maira, and
Sikka 2017). While some of this work continues to consider the general
traits of beauty in art and nature, quite a lot of it focuses on the
norms of appearance of the human body, and the "violation"
of "standard" norms according to race, disability, age,
history, and variant sexual morphologies. Such standards govern not
only artistic depictions, but also the way that real people shape and
reshape their own bodies to conform to reigning standards of
attractiveness (Devereaux 2013; Wegenstein 2012). Feminists and
critical race theorists have been especially mindful of diversity and
suspicious of general norms and the harms that they can occasion. Yet
at the same time feminists have recognized the pull of pleasure and
the importance of beauty in life as well as art. Seeking to avoid the
dogma of universalism, Janet Wolff proposes an aesthetics of
"uncertainty" that recognizes that norms of beauty are
grounded in communities and are thus ineluctably political, and yet
does not relinquish the value of beauty (Wolff 2006).



Similar recognition of the potentials for both danger and pleasure in
beauty is found in investigations that seek to decenter notions of
beauty with reference to race, indigenous people, and subaltern
cultures (e.g. Brand 2000, 2013, and Felski 2006). Nor is this a
theoretical effort alone; artists are major participants in the
reclamation of beauty that takes as many forms as humanity offers. The
upshot of this work is not to reinstate beauty back on its abstract
pedestal, but to retain its pleasures while being alert to its
dangers. As Monique Roelofs observes, "the menace and promise of
the beautiful as a bearer of aesthetic value, a dimension of
experience, and a category of cultural criticism turn on the ways in
which we may dislocate its relational functioning" (Roelofs
2013: 73). The functions of beauty include the seductions of
advertising, a pervasive social phenomenon that reinforces and
manipulates ideals of femininity and thus represents another important
target for feminist examinations (Michna 2016; Widdows 2019). In
addition, the growing field of somaesthetics has increasingly focused
on the body, the care of the self, and gendered ideals of beauty that
affect men as well as women (Hyvonen 2020), as well as the
performative body in dance (Banes 1998; Bresnahan, Katan-Schmid and
Houston 2020) and competitive sports (Morgan and Edgars 2021).


## 4. Feminist Practice and the Concept of Art



Feminist analyses of aesthetic practices of the past have influenced
the production of feminist art of our own times, and the latter in
turn has contributed to a dramatic alteration of the climate of the
art world. The changes that have beset the worlds of art in the
twentieth century, perhaps most dramatically in the fields of the
visual arts, are frequently the subject of philosophical discussions
in the analytic tradition regarding the possibility of defining art
(Danto 1981; Davies 1991; Carroll 2000). One challenge to defining art
stems from the fact that contemporary artists frequently create with
the intention of questioning, undermining, or rejecting values that
defined art of the past. The early and mid-twentieth century
extravagances of Dada and Pop Art are most often the target of
philosophical inquiries, which seek to discover commonalities among
artworks that have few to no perceptible defining similarities.



As we have seen, the category of fine art has been a focus of feminist
scholarly scrutiny because its attendant values screened out much of
women's creative efforts or actively dissuaded their attempts to
practice certain genres. However, the dissolution of the values of
fine art long preceded the art scene that feminists entered in the
1970s. In spite of sweeping changes in the concepts of art and its
purposes that characterize much art of the last century, the numbers
of women practitioners in arts such as painting, sculpture, and music
remained small. Therefore, while fine art may have historical
importance for women's artistic influence, it clearly was not
the perpetuating cause of their exclusion from the worlds of art. The
anti-art and avant garde movements so frequently discussed by
contemporary analytic philosophers were just as male-dominated as
classical music or Renaissance sculpture. Moreover, values surrounding
the artistic "genius" were just as vigorous as ever.
Therefore, feminist art practices began as activist movements (such as
the Guerrilla Girls of New York City) to secure women more visibility
and recognition in the artworld (Guerrilla Girls 2020). Feminist
artists not only demanded that their work be taken seriously, they
mounted a critique of the traditional thinking that lay behind their
exclusions from the powerful centers of culture.



For these reasons, feminist art itself also furnishes numerous
examples that subvert older models of fine art, but with added layers
of meaning that distinguish it from earlier iconoclastic movements.
Because of the gendered significance of the major concepts of the
aesthetic tradition, feminist challenges often systematically
deconstruct the concepts of art and aesthetic value reviewed above.
Feminist art has joined--and sometimes has led--movements
within the artworld that perplex, astound, offend, and exasperate,
reversing virtually all the aesthetic values of earlier times. As art
critic Lucy Lippard put it, "feminism questions all the percepts
of art as we know it" (Lippard 1995: 172). Feminist artists have
challenged the ideas that art's main value is aesthetic, that it
is for contemplation rather than use, that it is ideally the vision of
a single creator, that it should be interpreted as an object of
autonomous value (Devereaux 1998). Feminism itself came under internal
criticism for its original focus on white, western women's
social situations, a familiar critique in feminist circles that has a
presence in aesthetic debates. By the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, the energies of feminist and postfeminist
artists of diverse racial and national backgrounds have made the
presence of women in the contemporary artworld today powerful and
dramatic (Deepwell 2020). Self-referential explorations of identity
and agency--often through performance art--have been led by women of
color such as Adrian Piper, who is also a philosopher (Piper 1996), as
well as by lesbian and trans artists whose work gives rise to queer
feminist art histories (Jones and Silver 2015).



In many discussions of contemporary art, "feminist" is a
label for work produced during the active phase of second-wave
feminism from the later 1960s to about 1980. The term
"postfeminist" is now in use for a subsequent generation
of artists who pursue some of the ideas and interests of the earlier
period. These terms are far from precise, and there are many artists
practicing today who continue to identify themselves with the term
"feminist." Perhaps an even larger group does not attend
particularly to labels, but their work is so provocative about the
subjects of gender and sexuality that it has become a focus for
feminist interpretation. (The photographic art of Cindy Sherman is a
case in point.)



In brief, feminist artists share a political sense of the historic
social subordination of women and an awareness of how art practices
have perpetuated that subordination--which is why the history of
aesthetics illuminates their work. The more politically-minded
artists, especially those who participated in the feminist movement of
the 1970s, often turned their art to the goals of freeing women from
the oppressions of male-dominated culture. (Examples of such work
include the Los Angeles anti-rape performance project of Suzanne Lacy
and Leslie Leibowitz, *In Mourning and in Rage* (1977), and
*Womanhouse* (1972), a collaboration of twenty-four artists.)
Feminist artists opened up previously taboo subjects such as
menstruation and childbirth for artistic presentation, and they began
to employ female body images widely in their work. All of these moves
were controversial, including within the feminist community. For
example, when Judy Chicago made her large collaborative installation
"The Dinner Party" in the early 1970s, she was both
praised and criticized for the thematic use of vaginal imagery in the
table settings that represented each of thirty-nine famous women from
history and legend (Chicago and Lucie-Smith 1999). Critics objected
that she was both essentializing women and reducing them to their
reproductive parts; admirers praised her transgressive boldness. Since
that time, the increasing numbers of artistic portrayals of the female
body and its cycles has rendered these subjects less taboo and
transgressive, although they remain provocative and sometimes
disturbing. Early in his writing of feminist criticism for *The
Nation*, Arthur Danto characterized such work by feminist artists
as 'disturbatory' (Arguello 2017; Brand Weiser
2021).



Postfeminist artists, such as Kiki Smith and Jenny Saville, build upon
the efforts of their predecessors in exploring the body, gender, and
sexual identity. Postfeminist art, often highly theoretical and deeply
serious, also tends to be playful and parodic in style, such as the
work of Vanessa Beecroft. It tends to be less overtly political than
the art of earlier feminists. Influenced by postmodern speculations
that gender, sexuality, and the body itself are creations of culture
that are malleable and performative, postfeminist art confounds and
disrupts notions of stable identity (Grosz 1994; Butler 1990, 1993).
Such art can be seen as individualistic compared to the social agendas
of earlier feminism, but perhaps for this reason this sort of art is
also more attuned to differences among women. These presentations of
the female body tend to draw attention to the position it has in
culture: not only the sexed body, but also bodies marked by racial and
cultural differences (James 2010). In the 1970s and 80s,
Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta produced a series of works making
use of her own body to form silhouettes and shapes. All of this
activity is theoretically charged and often philosophically motivated
(Reckitt 2001, Heartney 2013). At the same time, it should be stressed
that the kinds of art that qualify to be labeled
"feminist" are hugely varied and heterogeneous. And as
time passes and political climates shift, the interventions of artists
and their visionary critiques alter accordingly. Twenty-first century
theorizing about feminist art now includes acknowledgement of the many
forms of global feminisms and increased frequency of feminist content
that deals with war and politics. Robinson and Buszek offer a
refreshed definition of "feminist art" that is not a simple
classification of a type of art, but rather indicates the space where
feminist politics and the domain of art-making intersect (Robinson and
Buszek 2019; also Armstrong and de Zegher 2006).


## 5. The Body in Art and Philosophy



Possibly there is no topic more discussed in feminist art and
philosophy today than "the body." This interest represents
continued explorations and critiques of traditional mind-body dualism,
the role of sexual morphology in the development of gender and the
self, and the venerable association of women with matter and
physicality. All these subjects link gender analysis to the history of
philosophical concepts, both in the west (which most of this entry has
emphasized) and in eastern traditions (Man 2000, 2015, 2016). Both the
artistic and the theoretical modes of exploration of the body can be
viewed as complementary elements of feminist aesthetics. This topic
covers very broad territory and includes the mutual involvement of
aesthetic norms with ethical judgments; aesthetic standards and
implications about bodies that appear deviant from standard concepts
of "normal"; and the participation of the bodily senses in
aesthetic appreciation (Irvin 2016).



To begin with the last topic mentioned above: Both artists and
philosophers have reevaluated the senses and the orthodox materials
that are fashioned into objects of art. As we saw when considering
philosophies of taste and the formation of the idea of the aesthetic,
the literal sense of taste has customarily never been considered a
truly "aesthetic" sense, its pleasures and mode of
apprehension being too bodily and sensuous to qualify. Vision and
hearing are the aesthetic senses proper, according to traditional
theory. This judgment is under question now, as the senses themselves
are under reevaluation (Howes 1991). Early speculation about the
possible gendering of sense experience was ventured by theorists such
as Irigaray and Cixous, and a number of artists indirectly probe the
issue by employing foodstuffs as the medium for their works (Korsmeyer
2004, chs. 4-5). The presence of actual food--as opposed to
the depictions of still life painting--in art installations
confounds traditional aesthetic ideals on a number of fronts. It
challenges the idea that art has lasting value, because it literally
decays. And while such art is to be viewed, it synaesthetically teases
the senses of taste and smell as well. But it often does so without
the benefits that actual eating provides, for art made from food is
not necessarily itself a meal. In fact, rather than pleasing to the
sense of taste, this art frequently trades on the arousal of disgust
in the sensuous imagination. (Janine Antoni, for example, has
fashioned large sculptures from lard and from chocolate, employing her
mouth, teeth, and tongue as the carving tools. Hardly appealing to the
gustatory sense, this work nonetheless arouses a somatic response at
the same time that it invites rumination on the venerable hierarchy of
the senses that puts the distance senses of sight and hearing above
the bodily senses of touch, smell, and taste.)



A number of artists today are using food that can be eaten, inviting
the public into a participatory relationship with their works (Smith
2013). The uses of food on the part of female artists are particularly
significant, given the traditional association of women with the body,
with feeding and nurturance, and with transience and mortality. Not
only these venerable concepts but also the versions they manifest in
the contemporary social order are present in today's art scene,
such as Kara Walker's 2014 work *A Subtlety*, a giant
sculpture of sugar and molasses that explores eroticism, race, and the
legacies of American slavery (Davidson 2016). The very presence of
such creations in the artworld today has contributed to consternation
on the part of professionals and public alike about just how art is to
be defined and conceived. There is no particular feminist
"definition" of art, but there are many uses to which
feminists and postfeminists turn their creative efforts: exploring
gender and sexuality as well as criticizing the traditions of art and
of beauty imposed by aesthetic standards of the past.



The sense of taste is but one zone where the aesthetic dimensions of
bodily sensation are recognized and explored, in dramatic contrast to
the traditional idea that aesthetic "distance" is required
for the true apprehension of art. Erotic desires, sexuality, and
bodily sensation in general are increasingly central elements both of
art and of aesthetic discourse, and feminist investigators have been
among the important contributors to this movement (Lintott 2003; Lorde
2007; Grosz 2008; Lintott and Irvin 2016).



Critical consideration of norms of female beauty and the artistic
depiction of women influences the ways that feminist artists employ
their own bodies in creating art (Brand 2000, 2013; Steiner 2001;
Banes 1998). The work of artists across the globe utilizes bodies in
different cultural and political contexts, dramatizing the recognition
prevalent in contemporary feminist theory that there is no such thing
as *the* female body, only bodies marked by the differences of
their historical situation, their geographical location, their social
position, their race (Hobson 2005; Tate 2009; Roelofs et al 2009;
Taylor 2016). A wide spectrum of identities and desires are explored
in text, image, and performance, including sexual
morphology--transgender, female, male, intersex. Revaluation of bodies
with abilities and disabilities represents yet another way in which
aesthetic investigations have political impact (Silvers 2000;
Millett-Gallant 2010; Siebers 2010). The most dramatic uses of
artists' bodies occur with the relatively new genre of
performance art, in which feminists have been pioneers.



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).



Feminist explorations of embodiment and the deliberate arousal of
disgust as an aesthetic response have at least two kinds of political
and philosophical import. First of all, they invert feminine ideals
that frame restrictive norms for personal appearance. This can be done
humorously, boldly, sadly, aggressively, casually; much depends on the
individual work. There are numerous ways to challenge the traditional
aesthetic values expected in the female body, with disturbing
emotional effects that make the audience question those values and
their comprehensiveness. In addition, the arousal of disgust often
occurs when artists move from consideration of the exterior of the
body to its warm, dark, sticky interior where unmentionable substances
are kept hidden away. The deliberate cultivation of that which is not
pretty but is grossly material is the occasion for presenting formerly
taboo aspects of bodies: menstrual blood, excrement, internal organs.
Female artists are not the only ones who explore interiority and
materiality in art, of course. However, because of the traditional
linkage of gross matter with the "feminine" (now the
terrible feminine, not the highly socialized feminine of Burke's
beauty principle), when female artists explore such themes they cannot
but allude to venerable conceptual frameworks. This is a complex and
delicate territory for feminist investigation: the ancient category of
the feminine that includes the element of untamed nature and the gross
matter of existence. Feminist uses of these types of objects play upon
myths of nature and culture, of horror and sublimity, and of death and
life. Rather than keeping these themes in the uncanny but clean realms
of myth, however, the presentation of entrails, blood,
and--sometimes literally--flesh confronts the audience with
a particular and disturbing presence of the artist herself. Indeed,
such theorizing extends beyond art into lived reality with
philosophical attention to such intrinsically female events as
childbirth, a transformative experience in which some theorists find
elements of the sublime (Lintott 2011).



The provocative ideas of French philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce
Irigaray have provided inspiration for a number of feminist artists
who seek to bring forth a "sexuate" perspective in their
work that does not borrow from the patriarchal tradition, for the
latter, according to Irigaray, has always eclipsed the expression of
the "feminine." The body and its morphology are central to
Irigaray's philosophical method, as she insists that sexuate
being pervades one's existence, and that the pretense of
shedding one's sex when writing or speaking in standard,
familiar idioms and syntax causes the feminine to disappear into the
masculine/neutral discourse that dominates the patriarchal order. As
she puts it in the title of one of her widely-read essays, "Any
theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the
masculine" (Irigaray 1974 [1985: 133]). One of Irigaray's
projects is to evoke feminine subjectivity that can be represented in
its own terms, not just as an absence in the symbolic order. While the
intricacies of her philosophy are opaque and sometimes difficult to
pin down, her suggestive ideas have furnished inspiration for many
feminist artists. The psychoanalytic work of Bracha Ettinger
concerning subjectivity and gendered consciousness is equally
developed in her writings and in her visual art and indeed can be
considered as much theory as aesthetic production (Ettinger 2006;
Pollock 2008).



Feminist interpretive theories include approaches that are both
competing and complementary, and they represent some of the same
rivalries that are present in contemporary philosophy, broadly
construed. Adaptations of psychoanalytic theory have an especially
large presence in the interpretation of performance, literature, film
and visual arts. Some feminists employ the discourse of Jacques Lacan,
whose concept of the symbolic order has been widely applied to
understand the power of patriarchy embedded in cultural forms of every
kind (Copjec 2002). Julia Kristeva, who analyzes the artistic
experience of "abjection" as a threat to self arising from
both the allure and the horror of self-disintegration and reabsorption
into the body of the mother, has been especially provocative for
understanding the aesthetic arousal of disgust and the strong sexual
and gendered elements of horror (Kristeva 1982; Creed 1993, Ortega
2019a). Far from a mere application of a theory to aesthetics, the
feminist uses of abjection have explored and enlarged the concept in
order to understand not only the psychological development of
individuals but also the construction of social and political
relations (Chanter 2008).



The uses of psychoanalytic theory in aesthetics mark an area of
controversy that is importantly discipline-based. Many philosophers,
especially those of the analytic and postanalytic traditions, reject
the assumptions required by these approaches as empirically baseless
and theoretically otiose. They argue that empirical, particularist
analyses of individual works have more explanatory power to illuminate
the positions that gender manifests in art (Freeland 1998a, 1998b;
Carroll 1995). Thus differences over interpretive theory represent
divisions both within philosophy itself and in transdisciplinary
scholarship. Debates over appropriate tools to understand the meaning
of art and the power of culture should lay to rest once and for all
any idea that "feminist aesthetics" describes a unitary
set of ideas.


## 6. Aesthetics and Everyday Life



As is evident from the foregoing discussion, one can find in feminist
philosophy avenues of thought that direct inquiry away from the worlds
of art and to the presence of aesthetic features in lived experience.
Art and aesthetic qualities are obviously not merely theoretical
objects; they are cultural products with considerable authority to
frame and to perpetuate social relations and values. Therefore
feminist aesthetics contains a component where theories of
interpretation are directed to particular works of culture. Such
perspectives are poised to illuminate the changes in social
institutions that are depicted in popular art forms such as literature
and film, revealing the large-scale influence that aspects of the
political feminist movement have had over marriage and family
relations (S.T. Ross 2016). Aesthetic norms are not limited to art but
extend into virtually all aspects of life, including dress, personal
adornment, and comportment. With dress, for example, perceived
aesthetic incongruity has political resonance, as with Muslim women
who choose to wear the hijab in countries where such garb has not been
a historical norm (Sheth 2009, 2019). Feminist perspectives extend to
the aesthetic frames of lived experience and the subtle forces they
exert (Archer and Ware 2018).



The turn of attention to the body and its appearance, as well as to
domestic environments, has contributed to an area of interest loosely
labeled "everyday aesthetics." Scholarship on everyday
aesthetics includes examination of craft practices, which are often
pursued in the home where many women continue to work, and to artistic
traditions that do not feature a distinction between "fine
art" and "craft," such as the cultural traditions of
Asia (Saito 2007, 2017; Mandoki 2007; Leddy 2012; Light and Smith
2004). Cooking, eating, arranging furniture and shelves,
gardening--all these quotidian activities have aesthetic features (for
gardening see S. Ross 1998; Miller 1993). Such activities are not
always uplifting or even pleasant, but attention to their sensuous
character, the rhythm they impose on the day, week, or year, and their
place in the patterns of life, disperses aesthetic attention to
regions that are relatively new to theory, if widely familiar in
experience.



Feminist analyses both contribute to the development of this field of
interest and occupy a place within it. For example, there is a growing
body of philosophy that explores issues about food and eating, which
are topics that hitherto had little to no position in the field at all
(Korsmeyer 1999). This new subject has several sources of development,
including feminism, for it can be considered an area of scholarship
that has been nurtured by the overall critical questioning of dominant
conceptual frameworks in philosophy, including those that overlooked
matters relevant to the practical and physical realities of
living.



Of special pertinence for topics concerning women and gender in
everyday aesthetics is the rise of attention to a subject absent in
previous philosophies: pregnancy and motherhood--topics also explored
in contemporary feminist and postfeminist art, as noted above (Lintott
and Sander-Staudt 2011). The aesthetics of the body here explores the
maternal body, its changes during pregnancy, birth, and nursing, and
the everyday demands of parenthood, within and among which feminists
have explored the beautiful, the sublime, the novel and unsettling,
the comforting and tranquil--as manifest in the events and activities
one encounters every day. The area of inquiry here is not the
depiction of these subjects in art or literature, or their
dramatization in theater or film, but the aesthetics of the lived
experience itself. Raising children has an inevitable sensuousness
that provides its own aesthetic dimensions, and sometimes what is
off-putting or disgusting to others becomes part of the relationship
of mother to child (Irvin 2011). Attending to the intimacy of
sensation and to the presentation of one's own body serves to
detach theorizing in aesthetics away from art worlds and to everyday
practice, and theory has expanded accordingly. In such ways are
traditional philosophical categories modified and adapted as feminist
perspectives continue to probe the dimensions of the aesthetic.


## 7. Conclusion



The topics included under the designation "feminist
aesthetics" extend through philosophy, history, critical
disciplines, and art practices. Theories of perception, appreciation,
and interpretation have been developed in all of these areas. While
much of this thinking began with examination of philosophical
tradition and the conceptual frameworks it affords, feminist
perspectives have also opened the field in many directions, such that
theorizing in the twenty-first century has taken different directions
from the critical perspectives that began to probe gender analysis in
the 1970s. Of special note is the diffusion of interests from overtly
political and strategic analyses of women in society and culture, to
exploration of the variant forms that gender can assume, a shift that
also distinguishes aspects of the transition from feminism to
postfeminism. A wider attention to issues of diverse identity,
particularly attentive to racially inflected differences,
characterizes both feminist theory in general and aesthetics today.
Thus feminist work is more and more likely not to focus on women as an
exclusive topic but to consider other modes of identity as well. And
feminists have employed philosophies of divergent stripes in their own
quests, elaborating and refining them, and--most
importantly--formulating ideas that are independent of any particular
theoretical allegiances. The changing emphases of feminist
perspectives in aesthetics and philosophy of art over the last five
decades are evident in philosophy, art theory, criticism and
commentary on the arts, and in the practice of artists themselves,
testimony to the degree to which philosophy and cultural production
travel hand in hand, which is an abiding characteristic of the field
of aesthetics itself.