Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Beauty of Choice: On Women, Art, and Freedom

The Beauty of Choice: On Women, Art, and Freedom

Steiner, Wendy

Hardcover

PhilosophyArt Criticism & TheoryLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 0231215266
ISBN13: 9780231215268
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: Jul 9 2024
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.25
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

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.

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