Feminist epistemology and feminist art theory are characterized by an opposition to modernity's separation of art, politics, and knowledge into three autonomous spheres. However, this opposition is not enough to distinguish them from other philosophies. In this paper I examine parallels between the two fields of inquiry in order to discover what makes them distinctively feminist. Feminist epistemology sees interconnections between knowledge and politics, feminist art theory sees connections between art and politics. We need to explore as well connections between (...) art and knowledge. Compared to feminist epistemology, feminist art theory has had much less exposure, and in this paper I emphasize what the former can learn from the latter. In particular, I suggest that feminist art can answer a call made by feminist theories of knowledge for a kind of transformative knowledge. If we focus on the features of activist art explored by feminist art theories, we see that feminist art is particularly suited to engage emotions as well as the intellect. It is an example of nonpropositional knowledge, and is interactive rather than striving to pass down lessons from above. Feminist art celebrates the power of art to “make strange” and to unsettle fixed identities which can transform our understanding of the world. There is a tendency in some feminist art theory to separate the more concrete work (rediscovering women artists, recognizing women's crafts as art forms, and investigating sexist imagery in art), from the theoretical project of reenvisioning the relations of art to its sociopolitical context. I conclude by arguing that without an awareness of the dialectical relationship between the concrete and the theoretical, feminist art theories run the risk of losing their feminist specificity. They would then amount to little more than abstract pronouncements of the interconnections between art, politics, and knowledge. We need to maintain the feminist specificity of feminist politics in our theories of art and knowledge, and I use examples throughout the essay, drawn particularly from feminist activist art, with this goal in mind. (shrink)

By analyzing the feminist debates on Hans-Georg Gadamer, the author shows that feminist critics point to the need either to supplement or to replace Gadamer's philosophy with a greater sensitivity to the historical implications of women's experience. Thus, they are of the view either that Gadamer's philosophy has yet to come to terms with specific historical situations or that Gadamer's philosophy cannot come to terms with historical situatedness per se. The author contends that Gadamer's femi-nist critics do not locate the (...) source of his residual transcendentalism where it should be located: in the account of aesthetic judgment as a "pure feeling" that underpins his entire philosophy. This has the effect, of appearing to preserve aesthetic judgment as "pure feeling" as an apparently innocent remedy, to which some of his feminist critics actually appeal in opposition to his transcendentalism. The author argues, to the contrary, that aesthetic judgment, as a "pure feeling," is at once too com-plicit in the tradition that feminists seek to engage with, traditionally too insubstantial to make a rich resource for a feminist critique of that tradition, and ultimately too traditionally male-centered to be easily coopted by a feminist philosopher. (shrink)