Feminist Aesthetics Research Articles

A THOUSAND DISSONANCES

A THOUSAND DISSONANCES

When Did the Victorian Period End? Introduction

When Did the Victorian Period End?Introduction Helen Rogers In 11.1, JVC invited a number of scholars to debate Richard Price's British Society 1680-1880 in the context of a question posed by Price: 'Does the notion of Victorian Britain make sense?' In this roundtable, JVC extends the debate about periodization by inviting Barbara Caine, Stephen Kern and David Peters Corbett – respectively a social historian of feminism and gender, an intellectual historian, and an art historian – to discuss the question 'when did the Victorian period end?' Feminist history has questioned the relevance of traditional forms of periodization for women's history and Barbara Caine's contribution launches the discussion by continuing to interrogate Richard Price's argument about the 1880s as an endpoint from the perspective of continuities and changes in the women's movements and feminist aesthetics. Her piece also reminds us that period boundaries can be felt and perceived acutely by contemporaries and that in the Bloomsbury circles, the end of the Victorian was a moment of generational as well as intellectual release. Stephen Kern focuses on the profound degree of intellectual release and innovation that coincided with the end of the nineteenth-century to argue, boldly, that Victorians and Modernists thought in markedly different ways about science, sexuality and narrative art. From the perspective of art history, David Peters Corbett wonders whether we are asking the correct question about periodization; instead of positing an endpoint for historical closure, he suggests that we should look increasingly to 'a sort of micro-history, studies of moments and connections that are not dependent on the framing devices of periodization'. The pieces interrogate the end of the Victorian period from the point of view of intellectuals and artists, and while their writings and artefacts will continue to be important sources for answering this question, we may yet need to know much more about the meanings of the 'Victorian' in everyday life and consciousness among 'ordinary' people, among working, lower middle, and suburban classes – about when and why they stopped seeing themselves as Victorian – and think what such perceptions [End Page 316] might tell us about popular historical consciousness in the first half of the twentieth century. Copyright © 2006 Edinburgh University Press

Looking Strategically: Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Michael Field's Sight and Song

Looking Strategically: Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Michael Field's Sight and Song

From Children's Perspectives: A Model of Aesthetic Processing in Theatre

From Children's Perspectives:A Model of Aesthetic Processing in Theatre Jeanne Klein (bio) Since the children's theatre movement began, producers have sought to create artistic theatre experiences that best correspond to the adult-constructed aesthetic "needs" of young audiences by categorizing common differences according to age groups. For decades, directors simply chose plays on the basis of dramatic genres (e.g., fairy tales), as defined by children's presupposed interests or "tastes," by subscribing to Winifred Ward's broad descriptions of the "imaginative period" (ages six to nine), the "heroic period" (ages nine to twelve), and the "romantic period" (over age thirteen).1 Years later, Moses Goldberg elaborated upon these generalized divisions while cautioning that "no individual fits exactly into any set of categories."2 In his position paper on aesthetic development, he argued for individual access to aesthetic techniques, processes, and products for all ages, paralleled by four stages of cognitive capabilities, based on exposure to (1) arena-style participation theatre (for ages five to eight), which emphasizes story enactments; (2) a wide range of proscenium-style theatrical conventions; (3) relevant play content that directly relates characters' problems to spectators' lives and growing self-awareness; and (4) social issue plays that pose ethical dilemmas as cultural reflections.3 Meanwhile, Jed Davis compiled Age Group Profiles, organized by cognitive, spatial, emotional, and moral/ethical development, from his review of Piagetian literature; and Johnny Saldaña summarized stages of young interpretations of theatre from his seven-year longitudinal study.4 Suffice it to say, the field of developmental psychology has come a long way since Piaget formulated his four constructivist stages. Since the mid-1950s, the cognitive revolution has spurred more integrated theories of information processing and depth-of-processing models that explain and predict how people construct schematic frameworks of knowledge and [End Page 40] assimilate and accommodate new information as a function of perception, attention, emotion, comprehension, memory, and social and moral behaviors. Although masculinist metaphors of hierarchical "staircases" and linear networks of associative learning still dominate computational models, feminist perspectives, which engender social cognitive, co-relational negotiations of narratives in situated contexts, have gained more widespread acceptance—by including theatre as an apt metaphor for development.5 Over the past twenty years or more, cognitive psychologists have finally discovered what dramatic theorists have known about narrative structures since Aristotle's Poetics: Powerful stories contain universal themes about the human condition through characters' conflicting actions. The most successful dramas are those that allow spectators to enter into a protagonist's psychological consciousness or "inner" vision in order to empathize with her "outer" reality.6 While several developmental models of aesthetic understanding, experience, and appreciation exist in the realms of visual art and music education, few examples have been proposed in regard to theatre, particularly for child audiences.7 Instead, producers of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) tend to romanticize its social and moral "effects" upon youth by believing passionately that viewing one remarkable performance has the potential (the operative word) to "cause" positive, social changes in children's minds, hearts, and behaviors, given the presumed "power of human imagination."8 This obsession with progressive change foregrounds adults' desires to control human destiny by predicting "causes and effects" located in children's responses to live performances. However, this "folk theory" fails to explain how young imaginations actually function aesthetically from the contextual evidence of reception studies with child audiences. Just as feminists have argued for a distinctive "feminist aesthetics," based on women's alternative ways of knowing,9 I argue that children gaze upon theatre in differential ways by including age as a variable factor. "Children's aesthetics," their perceived interpretations of theatre, differ from that of adults' theorized postulations, based in part on their shorter life experiences with this medium. To this end, over the course of my career, I have sought to understand theatre from children's perspectives by focusing my research in the social cognitive theories and social science methods of child development, primarily through the vast literature of television and mass media studies conducted with young people over the past forty years. In particular, medium-specific studies that parse theatrical forms from dramatic content...

Female Gothic Motifs in Mona Caird's The Wing of Azrael

importance as one of the key New Woman figures of fin-de-siecle Britain. Most of her novels, with the notable exception of The Daughters of Danaus (1894), remain unpublished and unavailable to the modern reader. The few critics who choose to include Caird's work in their analyses typically emphasize the radical feminist, anti vivisection and anti-eugenic content of her writings rather than her novels' aesthetics or artistic achievement.1 Caird's fictional oeuvre, discussed in a wide socio-historical context, is habitually linked with her non-fictional writings (such as the accomplished and influential essays collected in The Morality of Marriage /1897]) and treated either as an expression of radical first wave feminism, or as a pr?figuration of the concerns of the second wave feminist movement of the 1970s. Content, then, remains the main focus of critical interest in Caird's writings, even though her aesthetic principles and narrative techniques may occasionally be evoked in discussions of feminist poetics and literary canon. If, in the words of Ann Heilmann, "\fjin-de-sikle fiction became the site of contestation between masculinist (decadent) and feminist (ethically grounded) aesthetics of art, between (high) 'art' and the world of mass culture and commerce" {New Woman Fiction 156), Caird's novels may be perceived as an excellent illustration of the latter, feminist, aesthetics in the making. This essay seeks to

Looking Strategically: Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Michael Field's Sight and Song

Looking Strategically: Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Michael Field's Sight and Song

"Personalized Writing" and Its Enthusiastic Critic: Women and Writing of the Chinese "Post-New Era"

This essay examines the 1990s in China, a time that saw an unprecedented wave of writing by women together with the arrival of feminist criticism in Chinese cultural institutions. According to these feminist critics, the works of women writers of the 1990s marked the emergence of a Chinese feminist/female creative tradition distinguished from earlier writers by the writers’ collective attempt to generate a feminist narrative separate from the dominant patriarchal tradition. This feminist narrative offers a radical representation centered on personalized writing and a stylistics of the body. The essay, however, moves beyond this critical categorization. The feminist aesthetics achieved through experimental narrative techniques, possibilities of point of view, and shifts in subject matter suggests that personalized writings, which began as self-willed marginalization and exile from the male cultural center, aimed at a revision of modem Chinese literary tradition. Radical personalized feminist writing thus forges an alternative aesthetics that is not only a feminist but also a historical post-socialist aesthetics.

The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Pattern of Identity (review)

Reviewed by: The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Pattern of Identity Andrea Tschemplik (bio) The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Pattern of Identity by Christine Battersby. London: Polity Press; New York: Routledge, 1998. Christine Battersby, author of Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (1990), undertakes the difficult task of arguing on behalf of metaphysics in the antimetaphysical environment of postmodern and reconstructive feminist theory. In The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Pattern of Identity (1998), Battersby engages ancient, continental, and analytic philosophy, constructing a metaphysics of self and identity, a metaphysical position that takes the female subject position as its norm. Her search for a metaphysics of becoming rather than being is motivated by her observation that much of contemporary feminist theory is ensnared in an epistemological web of strands traceable to Emmanuel Kant's transcendental idealism. According to Battersby, the problem with Kant's philosophy is its dependency on "the other" in construction of the self, the interdependence of the constitution of the transcendental subject and transcendental object. Kant is the "culprit" of modernity, whose metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics—transcendental subject, personhood, the sublime—marginalize, even exclude the female subject position. To rectify that omission, Battersby turns to Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, and Theodor Adorno, and finally to Søren Kierkegaard, to establish a "flowing" concept of self and identity that derives from the female subject position. In the first three chapters of The Phenomenal Woman, Battersby analyzes the features that make the female subject position a unique object of analysis, the [End Page 157] basis for a "new" concept of identity. Stressing natality, birthing, caring—as well as fleshiness and woman's exclusion from the (male) norm when denied personhood, autonomy, and freedom—Battersby has sufficient ammunition to shoot down the metaphysics of substance, which she finds inaugurated by Aristotle, transformed into nominalism by John Locke, and reconstructed by Saul Kripke into natural kinds. In Chapter Four, "Kantian Metaphysics and the Sexed Self," Battersby provides ample textual evidence that Kant's metaphysics leads to a hylomorphic sense of identity, where mind shapes inert matter into essences: a "top-down" way of doing identity. The central role of space leads Kant to differentiate between what is within him and what is outside, creating a chasm between active form and passive matter, shaped into identifiable things by the spontaneous activity of the understanding (67). Kantian metaphysics is consonant with Newtonian physics, but that raises the question of the demands and allowances of the new physics and mathematics for a metaphysics of identity. Battersby does not shy away from current investigations in topology and quantum physics to further her rejection of Kant and to fuel her search for a new metaphysics. As Battersby points out, Kant's philosophy explicitly excludes the female from the moral realm by locating woman halfway between personhood and animality, pointing to a somewhat monstrous status for the female. Kant's greatest shortcomings are his inability to reconcile his metaphysics with biology and his failure to come to terms with sexual difference. In the second section, Battersby gives sweeping critiques of deconstruction and postmodern feminism, showing how some thinkers remain boxed in the subject/object dualism and others treat the entire history of philosophy as homogeneous. Jacques Lacan, she says, still works within the Kantian subject/object antagonism, clearly seen in his treatment of woman as "the other": the unattainable and scary object of desire in need of being overcome and ruled by the law of the father. This, she illustrates through a critique of Lacanian analysis of infant development, where the mother provides the boundless "otherness" whose negation and exclusion ultimately give rise to the conception of the "I." Battersby reinforces her analysis of Lacan's reading of Antigone: "Woman is simply 'the otherness' against which the oedipalized/masculinized self constructs itself as itself" (111-12). Jacques Derrida fares no better: his position can either be construed as an undoing of Martin Heidegger's metaphysics of presence or, in a Lacanian framework, as another way of building identity on the "binary" ground of self/other, where the cut from the feminine constitutes the masculinized self. Battersby accuses Derrida of being afraid or...

Liberal Feminism, from Law to Art: The Impact of Feminist Jurisprudence on Feminist Aesthetics

This essay explores how early approaches in feminist aesthetics drew on concepts honed in the field of feminist legal theory, especially conceptions of oppression and equality. I argue that by importing these feminist legal concepts, many early feminist accounts of how art is political depended largely on a distinctly liberal version of politics. I offer a critique of liberal feminist aesthetics, indicating ways recent work in the field also turns toward critical feminist aesthetics as an alternative.

Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust

This essay examines an aesthetics of disgust through an analysis of the work of Scottish painter Jenny Saville. Saville's paintings suggest that there is something valuable in retaining and interrogating our immediate and seemingly unambivalent reactions of disgust. I contrast Saville's representations of disgust to the repudiation of disgust that characterizes contemporary corporeal politics. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elspeth Probyn and Julia Kristeva, I suggest that an aesthetics of disgust reveals the fundamental ambiguity of embodiment, allowing us to critically attend to the aesthetic and cultural objectification of the female body.

Liberal Feminism, from Law to Art: The Impact of Feminist Jurisprudence on Feminist Aesthetics

This essay explores how early approaches in feminist aesthetics drew on concepts honed in the field of feminist legal theory, especially conceptions of oppression and equality. I argue that by importing these feminist legal concepts, many early feminist accounts of how art is political depended largely on a distinctly liberal version of politics. I offer a critique of liberal feminist aesthetics, indicating ways recent work in the field also turns toward critical feminist aesthetics as an alternative.

Liberal Feminism, from Law to Art: The Impact of Feminist Jurisprudence on Feminist Aesthetics

Liberal Feminism, from Law to Art: The Impact of Feminist Jurisprudence on Feminist Aesthetics

Annotated Bibliography of Writings in Feminism and Aesthetics

This is a selective annotated bibliography of publications in the area of feminist aes-thetics from 1990 to 2003. It is intended to compliment the bibliography presented by Linda Krumholz and Estella Lauter in the Spring 1990 issue of Hypatia.

Annotated Bibliography of Writings in Feminism and Aesthetics

This is a selective annotated bibliography of publications in the area of feminist aes-thetics from 1990 to 2003. It is intended to compliment the bibliography presented by Linda Krumholz and Estella Lauter in the Spring 1990 issue of Hypatia.

Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust

This essay examines an aesthetics of disgust through an analysis of the work of Scottish painter Jenny Saville. Saville's paintings suggest that there is something valuable in retaining and interrogating our immediate and seemingly unambivalent reactions of disgust. I contrast Saville's representations of disgust to the repudiation of disgust that characterizes contemporary corporeal politics. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elspeth Probyn and Julia Kristeva, I suggest that an aesthetics of disgust reveals the fundamental ambiguity of embodiment, allowing us to critically attend to the aesthetic and cultural objectification of the female body.

Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust

Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust

Feminist aesthetics in music

Introduction: For Women's Eyes Only? Feminist Aesthetics in Music Music in Context and Practice The Power of Sound, The Power of Sex: Alma Mahler-Werfel's Ansturm Sexing the Subject of Musical Analysis: Rebecca Clarke and Elisabeth Lutyens Meditations on Feminist Aesthetics: Anne Boyd's Cycle of Love Framing the Case for a Feminist Reading of Elena Kats-Chernin's Postmodern Tast-en Sexual Signatures: Feminist Aesthetics in the Music of Moya Henderson after the Death of the Author This Music which is between Two Bibliography Discography Index

The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual. Jane Goldman

<i>The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual</i>. Jane Goldman

Would the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up? Encounters between Cindy Sherman and Feminist Art Theory

Taking her cue from the recent Cindy Sherman exhibition at Metro Pictures, New York, 'New Photographic Work 2000', Meagher considers the ways in which feminist art critics have analysed Sherman's work since it was first 'discovered' by Douglas Crimp in 1979. Her claim is that analyses of Sherman's work are involved in a debate about whether the images are useful or destructive to feminist politics. More importantly, what has come to be known as Sherman Studies places an emphasis not upon Sherman's art, but rather upon the identify of the artist. Instead of enquiring into the political status of the art works (are they feminist?), critics often end up asking after the political status of the artist herself (is she feminist?). Meagher's essay is in four sections: 'Encounters' traces the critical reaction to Sherman's work; 'In or Out of the Picture' considers the critical tendency to impose a narrative upon the work and the simultaneous insistence that this narrative is informed by the artist's feminist intent; 'New Photographic Work 2000' looks at the most recent reactions to Sherman'swork and prepares for the final section, 'Feminist Occasions', in which Meagher draws upon Nancy Miller and considers the relationship between feminist critics and their resistant celebrity.

A Holistically Deweyan Feminism

The argument that a holistic analysis of Dewey's work, drawing not only on the major portions subject to extensive commentary (such as Experience and Nature) but also on his aesthetics, provides fuel for feminist theorizing is sustained by advertence to the standard commentary and also to new work in aesthetic feminism itself. Sleeper, Rorty, Hickman and Russell are cited, and the recent resurgence of interest in developing the intersection between analytic aesthetics and feminist aesthetics is alluded to. It is concluded that the enterprising feminist theorist may suffer from an embarrassment of riches in attempting to approach Dewey but that such an approach is well worth the effort.