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Groundless beauty

feminism and the aesthetics of uncertainty

University of Manchester

The ‘return to beauty’ raises a number of questions for feminism. This paper begins by suggesting that there is no real reason for a feminist distrust either of beauty or of the discourses of beauty. The more difficult question is how to comprehend the bases of aesthetic judgement more generally, given feminist and other critiques of aesthetics and art criticism. The paper proposes looking at the cognate ‘value’ fields of ethics and political philosophy, in order to develop an approach to aesthetics that recognizes aesthetic criteria as grounded in community. It has been argued that uncertainty is the necessary basis for morality and for political judgement after the demise of ideologies of universalism. For the same reasons, an ‘aesthetics of uncertainty’ can be developed which refuses both the new universalism of the ‘return to beauty’ and the temptation to abandon principled criteria of judgement.

Key Words: aesthetics • art • beauty • ethics • feminism

Feminist Theory, Vol. 7, No. 2, 143-158 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1464700106064407


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