This chapter presents an overview of feminism and aesthetics in the 2007 Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy edited by Linda Martin Alcoff and Eva Feder Kittay. Sections cover the topics of distinguishing aesthetics and philosophy of art, bringing feminist theory into aesthetics, developing feminist challenges to aesthetics, the role of women artists in feminist aesthetics, feminist philosophers reflect on self-portraiture and women as objects of beauty, and future developments.

This paper defends two claims. First, we will argue for the existence of aesthetic demands in the realm of everyday aesthetics, and that these demands are not reducible to moral demands. Second, we will argue that we must recognise the limits of these demands in order to combat a widespread form of gendered oppression. The concept of aesthetic supererogation offers a new structural framework to understand both the pernicious nature of this oppression and what may be done to mitigate it.

We make choices about our own appearance and evaluate others' choices – every day. These choices are meaningful for us as individuals and as members of communities. But many features of personal appearance are due to luck, and many cultural beauty standards make some groups and individuals worse off (this is called “lookism”). So, how are we to square these two facets of personal appearance? And how are we to evaluate agency in the context of personal beauty? I identify three (...) ways of responding to these questions: beauty advo- cacy, beauty skepticism, and beauty revisionism. Advocates connect an honorific sense of beauty with personal charac- ter. Skeptics focus on beauty standards, and primarily offer a social critique of beauty standards. Some skeptics suggest embracing other aesthetic ideals – even ugliness. Revision- ists critique beauty standards, but retain an honorific sense of beauty. Each position offers tools to evaluate personal agency as aesthetic agency, whether first-personally or through our appreciation of others' appearance. (shrink)

The phenomenon of apparently greater emphasis on human female physical attractiveness has spawned an array of explanatory responses, but the great majority can be broadly categorized as either evolutionary or social constructivist in nature. Both perspectives generate distinct and testable predictions. If, as Naomi Wolf (The beauty myth: How images of female beauty are used against women. New York: William Morrow, [originally published in 1991], 2002) and others have argued, greater emphasis on female attractiveness is part of a predominantly Western (...) “beauty myth,” then an analysis of a culturally diverse sample should reveal marked fluctuation in gendered attractiveness emphasis: there should be significant numbers of cultures in which male and female attractiveness are equally emphasized, and cultures in which male attractiveness receives more emphasis. On the other hand, an evolutionary perspective suggests that disproportionate emphasis on female attractiveness will be a universal or near-universal phenomenon. To test these hypotheses, we tallied references to male versus female attractiveness in 90 collections of traditional folktales from 13 diverse cultural areas. The results are consistent with the evolutionary predictions and inconsistent with the constructivist predictions. Across culture areas information on physical attractiveness was much more likely to be conveyed for female characters. Together with other recent studies, these results suggest that the main elements of the beauty myth are not myths: there are large areas of overlap in the attractiveness judgments of diverse populations, and cross-cultural emphasis on physical attractiveness appears to fall principally upon women. (shrink)

Beauty is constantly lived and incorporated as a meaningful social category in Brazil and intersects with racialised and gendered ways of belonging to the Brazilian nation. In this article, I deploy ethnographic material to show how middle-class women self-identifying as black embody and experience beauty and how, through practices and discourses centred on physical appearance, they both reinforce and challenge broader social and racial inequalities in Brazil.

With a focus on appearance and racialised perceptions of skin colour, this paper discusses the differences between being and feeling acceptable, pretty or ugly and the possibility of such displacement (from being to feeling or vice versa), as a way to understand what beauty does in people’s lives. The paper explores the fragility of beauty in relation to the visibility of the body in specific racialised contexts. It investigates the claim that beauty can be considered a feeling that emphasises processes (...) (what beauty does) rather than contents (what beauty is). Drawing from life stories with Mexican women, I examine their concerns about visibility, temporality and appearance as expressions of racist practices and ideas, within a context where the racial project of mestizaje (racial mixture) is in operation. Beauty matters as it makes evident the pervasiveness of racism in the everyday. The lived experience of beauty, in its displacement and fragility, as a feeling and as resource, can also point to some of the strategies to resist, cope and get on. (shrink)

Feminists have always been concerned with how the clothes women wear can reinforce and reproduce gender hierarchy. However, they have strongly disagreed about what to do in response: some have suggested that the key to feminist liberation is to stop caring about how one dresses; others have replied that the solution is to give women increased choices. In this paper, we argue that neither of these dominant approaches is satisfactory and that, ultimately, they have led to an impasse that pervades (...) the contemporary feminist debate. The problem is that both sides of the debate understand women’s complicity in patriarchal subordination as a matter of what women wear and do. Instead, we propose a phenomenological analysis that understands complicity as based in our relations to our clothes. Starting from this phenomenological perspective, we sketch a new relational feminist ethics of dressing. This alternative ethical paradigm cannot yield a simple recipe for how to dress or tell us what garments are off-limits. But it can offer a way to make critical feminist judgements about clothes without veering into a stifling new prescriptivism. (shrink)

The body is relevant for aesthetics from two perspectives. We experience and assess bodies aesthetically from the outside; and we have aesthetic experiences of and through our bodies from the inside. In experiences of one’s own body, these perspectives often intersect in interesting ways. From both perspectives, the body is a site where aesthetic and ethical considerations are deeply intertwined. This article includes discussion of Beauty and the Body, Aesthetic Body Practices, Body Aesthetics and Gender Construction, Somatic Dimensions of Aesthetic (...) Experience, and The Body in Contemporary Art. (shrink)