Beauty's body

the long version

Beauty's Body is about how Art comes to wear a feminine face in the painting, poetry, and prose of British aestheticism, and what it means that it wears that face - for art, for women, and for those who, a century later, construct theories about aesthetics and gender. The book argues that representations of femininity in aestheticist writing and works of art are not merely incidental or decorative, but play an integral part in the cultural work of aestheticism. Aestheticism's feminine figures help construct the category of "the aesthetic" and the concept of self-reflective, autonomous art that goes along with it. Visually appealing and yet inaccessible, feminine figures also provide for a new kind of relation to objects that makes possible advanced commodity culture. By looking at how femininity functions as a system of signification in Victorian aestheticism, moreover, we can see the ways in which much of our own theorizing about aesthetics unconsciously employs a similar system of signification to manage, through disavowal and evasion, its own internal contradictions.