Feminist Aesthetics and Feminist Philosophy of Art

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.