Aesthetics: An Important Category of Feminist Philosophy

The title of this essay deliberately evokes Joan Wallach Scott’s influential 1986 article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” which was crucial in the formation of gender history.¹ Perhaps twenty-five years later it is time for making a similar claim about the importance of aesthetics for feminist philosophy. Since the early nineties I have found at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy a hospitable place in several overlapping communities: deconstruction, Levinas studies, aesthetics, feminist philosophy, political theory, and, much later, critical race theory. Yet even a cursory look at the history of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy shows that the relation between feminism and aesthetics, arguably both marginalized areas in Continental philosophy, remains paradoxical and fraught with tensions. On the one hand, art and aesthetics, implicitly or explicitly, have been a rich resource for feminist thinking about the nature of difference, gender, sexuality, and politics. On the other hand, however, the question of aesthetics has been, more often than not, subordinated to the more urgent issues of feminist politics.

Sometimes the fleeting or sustained recourse to aesthetics by feminist thinkers takes a form of appropriation of certain tropes, as, for example, in Butler’s use of irony and pastiche in her 1990 Gender Trouble. At other times the turn to aesthetics and artistic production affirms the possibility of “writing a different version of the story of sexual difference,” as is the case in another feminist classic, Drucilla Cornell’s 1991 Beyond Accommodation. In her parodic rewriting of Joyce’s “mamafesta” as a feminist manifesto of sexual difference, Cornell affirms that “mamafesta . . . is a fable for the elucidation of Her-story such that feminine ‘reality’ can be written.” Such a fable requires “appreciating the role of metaphor and the process of re-metaphorization in feminine writing.”² Yet this strategic deployment of parody, irony, performativity, writing, and metaphor does not necessary lead to an elaboration of feminist aesthetics; rather, as the title of the last chapter of Gender Trouble, “Conclusion: From Parody to Politics,” suggests, it opens new possibilities for gender politics and ethical feminism.³

Another important trend in the relation between feminism and aesthetics is the analysis of specific artists or artworks in order to push the boundaries of feminist philosophy and politics. Thus, for example, Dorothea Olkowski, in her 1999 Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, examines not only Deleuze’s and Irigaray’s philosophies of difference but also the work of contemporary artist Mary Kelly. Olkowski turns to Deleuze’s work in order to elaborate a new ontology of change, which could account for the creation of new modes of life and thought. In this context, feminist artworks, such as Kelly’s Interim or Post-partum Document, function as unique “guides who cannot lead us anywhere final but who . . . set time and space in motion so that stuttering differences can be created.”⁴ Mary Kelly’s artistic practice not only offers a feminist critique of normative representations of femininity, motherhood, or gender politics but creates new intensities, possibilities of resistance, “and affirmations of becoming.”⁵ More recently, writing from the Deleuzian ontological perspective, which embraces aesthetics as the inventiveness of life itself, Elizabeth Grosz, in her Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008), makes a powerful case that art is an enhancement of bodily sensations, intensities, and sexual attractions. As she puts it, “Art proper . . . emerges when sensation can detach itself and gain an autonomy from its creator and its perceiver, when something of the chaos from which it is drawn can breathe and have a life of its own.”⁶

If Olkowski offers a feminist reading of Mary Kelly, Tina Chanter, in her 2011 Whose Antigone? engages Sophocles’s Antigone in order to challenge the numerous philosophical, psychoanalytic, and feminist interpretations of this play, all of which ignore the import of slavery. The originality of Chanter’s approach is that her return to Antigone and its historical Greek context is inspired by contemporary African plays, which rework the Antigone motif: The Island, set in apartheid South Africa, and Tègònni...