Feminist Aesthetics After #MeToo–My SPEP 2019 paper

SPEP is next week, so that means it’s time to post my talk.

Here’s the abstract: As #MeToo activism reveals lots of men to be serial sexual harassers and rapists, the question of whether we can or should enjoy artworks by artists whose behavior is reprehensible has received renewed interest and urgency. Using Adrian Piper’s observation about the zero-sum nature of white Western aesthetics & Christina Beltran’s claim that neoliberal diversity rhetorics substitute aesthetic judgments for political ones, I contrast two types of feminist response to this question. Zero-sum responses argue disgust at artists should replace pleasure in artworks; non-zero sum responses identify patriarchy in the structuring logic of artworks & remake those structures.