Feminist Aesthetics and Feminist Philosophy of Art

by

Peg Brand Weiser, Ritwik Agrawal

• LAST MODIFIED: 23 September 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0443

Introduction

Feminist aesthetics is the evolving study of both the explicit and the implicit role of gender and sexuality in the activities of creativity, the aesthetic experience of art and nature, and resulting value judgments. The perception, interpretation, and evaluation of occasions of aesthetic appreciation are infused with cognitive preconceptions, implicit biases, emotions, skills, and knowledge based on past lived experiences. In practice, feminist aestheticians have paid close attention to the role of race, class, age, ability, and other social factors in the creation and evaluation of artworks. Whereas modern western European aesthetics deemed an artwork’s contextual factors peripheral to the essence of a viewer’s purely aesthetic, noncontextual, disinterested, or “distanced” experience, 20th-century feminists pioneered a radical break with norms of “good” art by invoking the familiar adage, “The personal is the political.” Attending to the situatedness of who creates and how one judges “art”—a contested concept like “craft,” “quality,” and “genius”—leads to recognition and care about the persons involved: the intersectionality of their personal, racial, sexual, and other identities; their perceived and real positions within the power strata of patriarchy; and the indisputable legitimacy of their voices. For example, artists who engaged in 1970s performance body art expressing female agency held that disinterested aesthetic experience was neither truly possible nor desirable. They rejected the model of the neutral, objective man of taste who claimed to value dispassionately only the formal properties of an artwork while ignoring content that expressed relationships of friendship, love, and, possibly, oppression. The social activity of art inspired by Linda Nochlin’s 1971 question, “Why have there been no great women artists?” (see Nochlin 2021, cited under Foundational Texts) led to the feminist critique: an activist agenda based on uncovering gender biases in notions of truth and rationality as well as excellence in art. Feminist aesthetics often anticipated and prefigured key ideas under discussion today, such as the ethical and political nature of art, embodiment in representation, gender identity, the role of emotions, and testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. “Feminisms” reflects a multiplicity of approaches—Indigenous, Black, Asian, African—that have led to the rediscovery and recognition of neglected artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and performers. Their insights on beauty, emotions, and “the male gaze” upend traditionally narrow aesthetic categories of taste, beauty, and excellence, and expand the study of art and its attending rewards into multidisciplinary scholarship that involves artmaking, art theory, history, and criticism, as well as corresponding practices within the disciplines of literature, music, theater, dance, film, and other performative arts. Transnational feminisms highlight common international insights into gendered arts while yet acknowledging differences in power, wealth, and opportunities, while avant-garde feminists challenge traditional concepts, definitions, and arguments. In so doing, they continue to rewrite the canon in aesthetics.

General Overviews

Korsmeyer and Brand Weiser 2021 offers an extensive overview of the field. Manresa 2019 and Eaton 2021 provide updates as well. Commenting on forty years of feminist theorizing in literary studies and art history that preceded the lag in philosophical aesthetics, which only began publishing on the topic in 1990, Korsmeyer 2013 notes a crucial insight about “feminism’s hidden impact” on aesthetics—and on philosophy in general. Feminist scholarship had brought attention to private (often feminine) worlds of domestic life such as childbirth and parenting, beauty and adornment, women’s creativity, the feminine sublime, the abject, disgust, the body and lived experiences in a patriarchal world, the role of emotions, pleasure, craft, the male gaze, the aesthetics of everyday life, the politics of aesthetics, and the activism inherent in feminist arts and appreciation. Korsmeyer points out that concerns in feminist aesthetics stood in stark contrast to public (masculine) peer-recognized accomplishments of high art, formalism, “pure” aesthetic experience, and disinterestedness. She argues that numerous feminist perspectives have been “widely absorbed and in the process have become labeled something else” (p. 10). In other words, the impact of feminism is sometimes not obvious. Contemporary feminists continue to unearth the gendered foundations of philosophical topics in a growing and inclusive field of aesthetics, advocating the merit of “multiple feminisms” to capture the breadth and vibrancy of their inquiries.

• Eaton, A. W. “Feminist Aesthetics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy. Edited by Ásta and Kim Q. Hall, 295–311. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

  Summarizes central issues and themes in feminist philosophical aesthetics in analytic and Continental traditions. Highlights an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and trans* inclusive approach; discusses situatedness, artistic canon formation, humanism vs. gynocentrism, rewriting the philosophical canon, overcoming artworld biases, the role of the aesthetic in systemic oppression, the male gaze, the female nude, the concept of artistic genius, women’s artistic production, the purported universality of correct aesthetic judgment, the sex/gender distinction as it pertains to aesthetics and the arts, and body aesthetic.

• Korsmeyer, Carolyn. “Feminism’s Hidden Impact.” APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 13.1 (Fall 2013): 8–11.

  Feminism in general has had an impact on philosophy at large that is seldom explicitly recognized as such, insofar as it has prompted the field to consider topics that previously were only scantily recognized for their philosophical interest.

• Korsmeyer, Carolyn, and Peg Brand Weiser. “Feminist Aesthetics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2021.

  Provides historical background on art and artists, then delves into topics such as creativity and genius, aesthetic categories and feminist critiques, feminist practice and the concept of art, the body in art and philosophy, aesthetics and everyday life.

• Manresa, Gemma Argüello. “Feminist Aesthetics.” International Lexicon of Aesthetics 2 (2019): 1–6.

  Makes the point that, like other feminist approaches to different philosophical domains, there is no unitary feminist perspective on aesthetics, and not only does it include contributions from analytic and Continental feminism, but also from other disciplines, theories, and the arts.