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Full Description
In The Beauty of Choice, the renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women's taste as the engine of liberal values.
Steiner reframes long-standing questions surrounding desire, art, sexual assault, and beauty in light of #MeToo. Beginning with an opera she wrote based on Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale," she presents women's sexual choices as fundamentally aesthetic in nature—expressions of their taste—and artworks as stagings of choice in courtship, coquetry, consent, marriage, and liberation. A merger of art criticism, evolutionary theory, political history, and aesthetics, this book paints the struggle between female autonomy and patriarchal violence and extremism as the essence of art.
The Beauty of Choice pursues its claims through a striking diversity of examples: Sei Shōnagon's defense of pleasure in the Pillow Book; Picasso's and Balthus's sexualization of their models; the redefinition of "waste" in postmodern fiction; and interactivity and empathy in the works of contemporary artists such as Marlene Dumas, Barbara MacCallum, Kristin Beeler, and Hannah Gadsby. It offers the first critical study of Heroines, a memorial to the twenty thousand women raped in Kosovo during the Serbian genocide. This deeply original book gives taste, beauty, and pleasure central roles in a passionate defense of women's freedom.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Part I. I Like, Therefore We Are
Introduction: The Loathly Lady and #MeToo
1. That Pleasure Is Past Doubt: A Note on Method
2. The Women's Work of Evolution
3. "The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing!": The Art of Barbara MacCallum
Part II. The Testimony of Our Changeful Will
4. #MeToo and Artistic Freedom
5. Power Play: Picasso and His Models
6. The Ornament of Nudity
7. MD-light: The Art of Marlene Dumas
Part III. An Ecology of Beauty
8. Waste Not, Want Not: The Extravagance of Beauty
9. Pearls of Empathy: The Art of Kristin Beeler
Part IV. Refashioning the Social Contract
10. Art Against Rape: Kosovo's Heroines
11. The Love Tricks of Liberalism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
