The German feminist movement and the question of female aesthetics

Abstract

This article discusses a recurring concern of German academic feminists with female aesthetics in writings from 1976 to 1992. It argues that academic feminists chose this question to define feminist literary study as a discipline and to revise the predominant concept of aesthetics, which they characterize as prescriptive and normative. The article surveys three theoretical approaches to the question, initial idealist concepts, materialist contributions, and attempts to synthesize both approaches. Initial idealist models as advanced by Sylvia Bovenschen, Elisabeth Lenk, and Gisela Breitling suggest that women's aesthetics does not yet exist because it relies on women's future autonomy as its basis. A genuinely female aesthetic will be nonnormative and will come into existence once women have become authentic selves. On the other hand, materialist critics such as Renate Möhrmann and Brigitte Wartmann posit concepts of female aesthetics that are rooted in specifically female forms of production in the past. Finally, critics such as Sigrid Weigel define female aesthetics as multiple; they present an inductive formulation in which aesthetics is subject to changes in women's historical situation.