Differential Aesthetics Art Practices, Philosophy and Feminist Understandings

This title was first published in 2000. This is an interdisciplinary and international collection on aesthetics with contributions from artists and philosophers and the range of thinkers about art in between. It aims to provide a forum for the kinds of question that used to be addressed within traditional aesthetics, but which have until recently been sidelined in critical writing about art and indeed in many of the most important art practices. The collection as a whole is situated in relation to feminists' approaches, but the editors hope that it will not be read as limited to them.

Contents: Part 1: Introduction: Philosophy and Feminism, Penny Florence and Nicola Foster; Part 2: Contemporary Practices: Introduction, Penny Florence and Nicola Foster; Artists’ Statements, Mary Anson, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, RyyA Bread ©, Vicki Feaver, Barbara Freeman, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Lubaina Himid, Jo Hsieh, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Valerie Reardon, Deborah Robinson, Lesley Sanderson, Nancy Spero, Yuen-yi Lo, Partou Zia; Part 3: In the (Western) Beginning: Introduction, Penny Florence and Nicola Foster; Love and writing - Phaedrus and the Symposium, Robyn Ferrell; Beautiful music - a fixed pitch? Plato, music and gender, Barbara Underwood; Part 4: And Then There Was (German) Enlightenment: Introduction, Penny Florence and Nicola Foster; Kant’s ghost, among others, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe; Aesthetics in the gaps - subverting the sublime for a female subject, Rachel Jones; Living dialectics, Aufhebung and performance art, Petra Kuppers; Nancy Spero and woman in performance, Judy Purdom; Part 5: And There Shall be (Polyvalent) Beyond: Introduction, Penny Florence and Nicola Foster; Transgressing with-in-to the feminine, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger; The gendering of allegory: Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document and Benjamin’s melancholy dialectics, Christine Conley; Feminism, postmodernism and the aesthetics of parody, Catherine Constable; Cybertime: towards an aesthetics of mutation and evolution, Sean Cubitt; The morphology of the mucous: irigarayan possibilities in the material practice of art, Hilary Robinson; A matter of paint: the carnal subject of aesthetics, Rosemary Betterton; From matter to materialisations: feminist politics and the aesthetics of radical difference, Marsha Meskimmon; Working hot: materialising practices, Barb Bolt; Bibliography; Index.