Queer Beauty

Queer Beauty
Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Total Pages : 367
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780231519557
ISBN-13 : 0231519559
Rating : 4/5 (57 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Queer Beauty by : Whitney Davis

Download or read book Queer Beauty written by Whitney Davis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-26 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pioneering work of Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) identified a homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, a fascination that had endured in Western art since the Greeks. Yet after Winckelmann, the value (even the possibility) of art's queer beauty was often denied. Several theorists, notably the philosopher Immanuel Kant, broke sexual attraction and aesthetic appreciation into separate or dueling domains. In turn, sexual desire and aesthetic pleasure had to be profoundly rethought by later writers. Whitney Davis follows how such innovative thinkers as John Addington Symonds, Michel Foucault, and Richard Wollheim rejoined these two domains, reclaiming earlier insights about the mutual implication of sexuality and aesthetics. Addressing texts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Sigmund Freud, among many others, Davis criticizes modern approaches, such as Kantian idealism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and analytic aesthetics, for either reducing aesthetics to a question of sexuality or for removing sexuality from the aesthetic field altogether. Despite these schematic reductions, sexuality always returns to aesthetics, and aesthetic considerations always recur in sexuality. Davis particularly emphasizes the way in which philosophies of art since the late eighteenth century have responded to nonstandard sexuality, especially homoeroticism, and how theories of nonstandard sexuality have drawn on aesthetics in significant ways. Many imaginative and penetrating critics have wrestled productively, though often inconclusively and "against themselves," with the aesthetic making of sexual life and new forms of art made from reconstituted sexualities. Through a critique that confronts history, philosophy, science, psychology, and dominant theories of art and sexuality, Davis challenges privileged types of sexual and aesthetic creation imagined in modern culture-and assumed today.


Queer Beauty Related Books

Queer Beauty
Language: en
Pages: 367
Authors: Whitney Davis
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-08-26 - Publisher: Columbia University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The pioneering work of Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) identified a homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, a fascination that had e
Queer Theory
Language: en
Pages: 159
Authors: Annamarie Jagose
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 1996 - Publisher: NYU Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Major Reference series brings together a wide range of key international articles in law and legal theory. Many of these essays are not readily accessible,
Queer Social Philosophy
Language: en
Pages: 250
Authors: Randall Halle
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-10-01 - Publisher: University of Illinois Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Queer Social Philosophy, Randall Halle analyzes key texts in the tradition of German critical theory from the perspective of contemporary queer theory, expos
A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory
Language: en
Pages: 244
Authors: Nikki Sullivan
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2003-10 - Publisher: NYU Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book begins by putting gay & lesbian sexuality and politics in historical context and demonstrates how and why queer theory emerged.
Queer Philosophy
Language: en
Pages: 436
Authors:
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-01-01 - Publisher: BRILL

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The book is a collection of the presentations of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy from 1998 to 2008. The essays are organized historically, starting i