Gender, race, and sexuality are not just identities; they are also systems of social organization – i.e., systems of privilege and oppression. This article addresses two main ways privilege and oppression (e.g., racism, misogyny, heteronormativity) are relevant topics in and for philosophical aesthetics: (i) the role of the aesthetic in privilege and oppression, and (ii) the role of philosophical aesthetics, as a discipline and a body of texts, in constructing and naturalizing relations of privilege and oppression (i.e., white heteropatriarchy). The (...) first part addresses how systems of privilege and oppression use the aesthetic. I will discuss various ways race, gender, and sexuality, as both embodied identities and broader social institutions, work with and through “the aesthetic”. The second part addresses racism and (hetero) sexism in the discipline of aesthetics. Both in its history and its present practice aesthetics’apparent neutrality on questions of privilege and oppression is actually evidence of its investment in systems of privilege and oppression. (shrink)

This article outlines the issues addressed by feminist philosophy of art, critically surveys major developments in the field, and concludes by considering directions in which the field is moving.

Whether in the growing awareness of the origins of supermarket meat or the emergence of meat art, carnality appears to be something increasingly under question. Yet, despite meat carrying connotations that offer provocative connection with feminist concerns regarding the body, consumption and the cultural representation of women, meat consciousness has been only sporadically explored in existing feminist theory. Struck, however, by the comparisons between the dissected Body Worlds corpse and the filleted flesh of meat that are levelled most particularly at (...) female bodies on display, I examine in my article the bodily relations constructed in the Body Worlds exhibition by positioning the Body Worlds cadaver as a grotesque ‘meaty’ body under the broader rubric of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. Within such webs of alimentary exchange, pleats of meaty matter may bring about localised eruptions of traditional and bodily engagements – including that of the gendered gaze – that entwine the possibility of pleasure, wonder and fascination into each act of inter-bodily engagement. Through this entrance into the very bowels of Body Worlds, my article ultimately asks what, as a feminist, it means to become meat conscious. (shrink)