Is Aesthetic Judgement Gendered? – A Critical Comparison of Feminist Aesthetic Theory and Kantian Formalism

Abstract

Kantian aesthetic formalism holds that aesthetic judgement is not a matter of knowledge or cognition, nor does it implicate the contexts of the artist or beholder. By contrast, feminist aesthetics maintains that the work of art and the ‘gaze’ of the beholder are gendered and, by extension, politicised: this obliges a contextualist approach to aesthetic philosophy. In this essay, I explore the conflicts between these two approaches, the failures of formalism and the necessity of feminist aesthetics to analyse art in the 21st century