Feminist analyses of the roles gender has played in art lead to an alternative theory that emphasizes art's complex interactions with culture(s) rather than the autonomy within culture claimed for it by formalism. Focusing on the visual arts, I extrapolate the new theory from feminist research and compare it with formalist precepts. Sharing Arthur Danto's concern that art has been disenfranchised in the twentieth century by its preoccupation with theory, I claim that feminist thought re-enfranchises art by revisioning its relationship (...) to its contexts. (shrink)

Feminism compels us to reconceptualize aesthetic inquiries, as it erases the boundaries between the traditional realm of aesthetics-value judgments and personal pleasures-and the historical and social contexts that generate those judgments and pleasures. In the visual arts section of our annotated bibliography, we try to suggest the breadth of feminist interventions in the field of aesthetics in the past twenty years.