The Beauty Dilemma: Gendered Bodies and Aesthetic Judgement

Author(s):  
Kerry Mallan
2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-86
Author(s):  
Brigitte Hilmer

Kunst kann dann als reflexiv interpretiert werden, wenn Reflexivität nicht auf propositionalen Gehalt oder sogar sprachliche Artikulation angewiesen ist. Reflexion tritt auf in den Modi der Selbstbeziehung des Lebendigen, des Überlegens und der Selbstreferenz im Symbolischen. Kunst ist ein Reflexionsmedium, das diese Modi beansprucht und miteinander verflicht. Eine spezifisch ästhetische Reflexivität ist von und nach Kant nach dem Vorbild der transzendentalen Reflexion und in Konkurrenz zu ihr etabliert worden. Sie läßt sich als Reflexivität des ästhetischen Urteils, als emphatisches Gemachtsein, als Rückwendung auf Wahrnehmungsvollzüge oder als Begriffsreflexion verstehen. Dabei wird die Unterscheidung von Anschauung und Verstand in deren Zusammenspiel oder Abspaltung vorausgesetzt. Von der Analogie zur transzendentalen Reflexion löst sich aber erst ein Verständnis von ästhetischer Reflexivität, das von den drei Modi und ihrer Verflechtung ausgeht.<br><br>Reflexivity does not presuppose linguistic articulation or even propositional content. If it did, art could not be called reflexive. Reflexivity can be found in the self-contact of the living, in mental reflection or in symbolic self-reference. Art is a medium which claims these different modes of reflexivity and intertwines them. Aesthetic reflexivity as such has been established by Kant and his epigones, following the model of transcendetal reflection. Thus it could be specified as the reflexive structure of aesthetic judgement, or as an emphasis on a work’s being created, or as a reference to perception itself in the process of perceiving, or as a way of reflecting concepts. Aesthetic reflexivity can only be detached from the model of transcendental reflection, if it is seen as oriented towards the interaction among the three modes of reflection mentioned above, leaving aside the difference, interplay or competition between perception and conceptual capacities.


Evaluation is ubiquitous. Indeed, it isn't an exaggeration to say that we assess actions, character, events, and objects as good, cruel, beautiful, etc., almost every day of our lives. Although evaluative judgement—for instance, judging that an institution is unjust—is usually regarded as the paradigm of evaluation, it has been thought by some philosophers that a distinctive and significant kind of evaluation is perceptual. For example, in aesthetics, some have claimed that adequate aesthetic judgement must be grounded in the appreciator's first-hand perceptual experience of the item judged. In ethics, reference to the existence and importance of something like ethical perception is found in a number of traditions, for example, in Virtue Ethics and Sentimentalism. This volume brings together philosophers in aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, and value theory, to contribute in novel ways to debates about what we call Evaluative Perception. Specifically, they engage with (1) Questions regarding the Existence and Nature of Evaluative Perception: Are there perceptual experiences of values? If so, what is their nature? Are perceptual experiences of values sui generis? Are values necessary for certain kinds of perceptual experience? (2) Questions about Epistemology: Can evaluative perceptual experiences ever justify evaluative judgements? Are perceptual experiences of values necessary for certain kinds of justified evaluative judgements? (3) Questions about Value Theory: Is the existence of evaluative perceptual experience supported or undermined by particular views in value theory? Are particular views in value theory supported or undermined by the existence of evaluative perceptual experience?


Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Sharrow

Between 2020 and 2021, one hundred and ten bills in state legislatures across the United States suggested banning the participation of transgender athletes on sports teams for girls and women. As of July 2021, ten such bills have become state law. This paper tracks the political shift towards targeting transgender athletes. Conservative political interests now seek laws that suture biological determinist arguments to civil rights of bodies. Although narrow binary definitions of sex have long operated in the background as a means for policy implementation under Title IX, Republican lawmakers now aim to reframe sex non-discrimination policies as means of gendered exclusion. The content of proposals reveal the centrality of ideas about bodily immutability, and body politics more generally, in shaping the future of American gender politics. My analysis of bills from 2021 argues that legislative proposals advance a logic of “cisgender supremacy” inhering in political claims about normatively gendered bodies. Political institutions are another site for advancing, enshrining, and normalizing cis-supremacist gender orders, explicitly joining cause with medical authorities as arbiters of gender normativity. Characteristics of bodies and their alleged role in evidencing sex itself have fueled the tactics of anti-transgender activists on the political Right. However, the target of their aims is not mere policy change but a state-sanctioned return to a narrowly cis- and heteropatriarchal gender order.


1979 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles J. Krause

Few procedures offer the surgeon a greater opportunity to exercise his surgical and aesthetic judgement than the design and implementation of local flaps about the head and neck. Considerations include skin color and texture match; adequacy of flap blood supply; size, location, and characteristics of the donor site defect; functional capability of the proposed flap; nature of skin tension lines created; and number of surgical procedures required. A systematic approach to local flap design and implementation is presented, and illustrations of the geometric principles involved are included.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-174
Author(s):  
Joe E. Hatfield

Despite having become more visible in popular and academic discourses over the last half decade, trans* selfies are not new. In this article, I examine an early set of trans* selfies featured in a sexploitation periodical published in the United States during the early 1960s. I show how numerous media, including bodies, clothing, cosmetics, photographs and magazines, produced a socio-technical environment through which trans* subjects composed alternative gender expressions and identities, formed intimate networks and created conditions of possibility for the eventual re-emergence of trans* selfies via digital social media platforms. Merging trans* theory with media ecology, I develop trans* media ecology as a conceptual frame from which to locate the always imbricated – but never complete – becoming of gendered bodies and media. Methodologically, trans* media ecology adopts three guiding principles: (1) genders are media, (2) genders depend on media and (3) genders and media change.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Briand

In Athenian classical theater (especially in Dionysian choruses; the tragic in Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides; the satyric in Euripides’ Cyclops; or the carnivalesque in Aristophanes), aesthetics, ethics, and politics intermingle in kinesthetic, musical, and textual pragmatics. This paper questions the reference to classical performativity (especially the gendered bodies it stages) in contemporary performances, from Olivier Dubois’ Tragédie (2012) (and the committed nudity it enacts) to Femen's sextremist protests and Trajal Harrell's Antigone Sr. / Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (L) (2012). These issues are central to the philosophy of performance, from F. Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872) to J. Butler's and A. Athanassiou's Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013).


1993 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Rees

Consideration of Tetrarchic portraiture has usually focused on the extant porphyry sculptures (plates 2, 6, 7, 9, and 10). This was perhaps inevitable, since the arresting eyes of the Cairo bust or the stubby legs of the Vatican groups are certainly curious. Few scholars have resisted the temptation to pronounce their aesthetic judgement (and why not?), but none has been as caustic as Bernard Berenson who saw in them ‘the meanest symptoms of decay’, an effect into which the sculptor had ‘simply blundered and stumbled’. Berenson's book and many of the other academic works which refer to the porphyry sculptures address the wider issue of style and, in particular, stylistic change in Late Antiquity. They cite the same art, but draw a range of conclusions: L'Orange proposes parallels between style and the structure of society; Kitzinger suggests a conscious approximation to a ‘sub-antique’ style; and Bandinelli sees the porphyry work as exceptional, specialized and short-lived. Without neglecting the porphyry sculpture, the present essay aims to consider the whole range of surviving portraits and to make sense of them within the relatively narrow field of Tetrarchic ideology. This necessarily involves the question of style and, therefore, has points of contact with the above ideas. However, the present study is primarily ‘internal’, drawing together images diverse in form and location. Patterns are soon apparent, but the Tetrarchy had to establish its ideological stability and credibility if the government were to endure. It collapsed quickly (A.D. 284–311), but in this respect, Tetrarchic portraiture offers a good example of the power of art to manipulate its audience by instilling belief.


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