The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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Tina Chanter

This chapter is organized around two central questions. First, if art is political, in what ways is it political? Most theorists who identify themselves in some way with feminist aesthetics agree that art is political, but differ in how they think it is political. The second question is, if we assert that art is political in some way—although we need to clarify in exactly what ways it is political—is there anything to be learned from those philosophers such as Immanuel Kant who have argued for the universality of aesthetics?

Feminists have produced a variety of answers to this question. In order to appreciate why and how the question has been answered so variously, we will need to understand something about the arguments that Kant put forward for the universality of aesthetics, and the relation between his view of aesthetic judgment and the other two domains of his critical philosophy, i.e. the metaphysical and the practical. We will also need to understand how and why, despite the severely problematic sexist, classist, and racist claims that Kant makes, his philosophy—in particular his aesthetics—remains a source of inspiration for some feminists and social-political philosophers.

In the first section I expand on the sense in which art is political; in the second section I expand further on exactly how this is so; and in the remaining sections I play this out in relation to Kant. The third section explores the paradoxes that structure Kant’s philosophy of aesthetics, embedded in which are both progressive and regressive elements. The fourth section situates Kant’s aesthetics in his philosophy as a whole. Finally, in the fifth section I explore some ways in which feminists have responded to Kant’s aesthetics and reworked it.

Art as Political

The very architecture of aesthetics—its conceptual vocabulary—has unfolded and developed in ways that cannot be divorced from social and political assumptions, which are local and contingent rather than universal and necessary. What counts as art is itself a matter of judgment that is subject to political, cultural, and historical shifts. If the history of aesthetics shows itself open to challenge, and capable of reworking, this includes the history of feminist aesthetics.

Not only are aesthetic criteria open to challenge, and capable of undergoing redefinition, but so too what counts as political is open to challenge. Insofar as some versions of feminist aesthetics have been blind to the dynamic of race, for example, those versions of feminist aesthetics have tended to represent the traditions or conventions against which they define themselves, and which they attempt to reshape, as masculinist, but not as white. We might say then that to the extent that the politics of feminism has played out in ways that are not racially inclusive, the very shape of both feminist aesthetics and the masculinist aesthetic traditions that it has reflected have been infused with a political inability of their practitioners to think through their racial implications.

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This inability has much to do with the race of those who have taken it upon themselves to define the terms of feminism, and those to whom it has fallen—or who have arrogated to themselves—the prerogative to define the terms of aesthetics. If white, masculinist theories predominate in aesthetics as traditionally defined, this is in no small part due to the parameters that have defined the communities of practitioners who have set the terms of aesthetic enquiry. So too the communities of those who have come to represent feminist aesthetics, those whose voices have been defined as its credible representatives and spokespersons, have been constituted in terms of racial parameters. In turn, the very differentiation between ostensibly formal and universal features of both art works and aesthetics, and the ways in which these features organize, specify, and define the material content of works of art are laden with historical and socio-political assumptions. What counts as art is open to question, so that, for example, some might grant that a quilt has the status of a work of art, while others would discount it. The dividing line between art and non-art is unstable. This opens up questions about aesthetic judgment itself, as something that is applicable beyond any specific domain of aesthetic objects, establishing the relevance of aesthetic judgment to that which as a rule might be cordoned off from aesthetics: reason, morality, and concepts, for example.

How Is Art Political?

If there is general agreement in the field of feminist aesthetics that art is political, it remains to clarify exactly what this means. At issue is whether there is a complete collapse of the boundaries between aesthetics and politics, or whether some kind of boundary remains, even if it is fungible and fuzzy rather than rigid and static.

Rita Felski (1989) sets up two extremes that she argues must be avoided in aesthetics. On the one hand, she wants to avoid positing a rigid, dualistic dichotomy between art and politics, and on the other hand, she is wary of identifying art and politics so that they become indistinguishable. To endorse a rigidly dichotomous view of art and politics suggests that art can exist as a pure, transcendent realm, uncontaminated by the political sphere. To equate art and political ideology would be to reduce art to an unambiguous political content, where its use value prevails, such that it immediately and directly reflects a political message. Distancing herself from both these positions, Felski defends the “relative autonomy” of art, in order to avoid construing art as mere ideology, as if art were merely a reflection of politics, while also rejecting the other extreme, the idea that art is impervious to all political influence (Felski 1989: 176).

Felski identifies feminist aesthetics with the reduction of art to political ideology. Consequently she argues that the very attempt to formulate what might be regarded as feminist aesthetics is fundamentally misguided. While I think that Felski is right to avoid reducing art to politics or maintaining the purity of art, her identification of feminist aesthetics with the equation of art and political ideology needs to be rethought. At the same time, Felski’s understanding of politics needs to be complicated, insofar as she assumes that the politics of feminist aesthetics is unidimensional—it is a politics opposed to patriarchy. The demands of thinking through intersectionality mean that things are not so simple.

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To characterize the entire field of feminist aesthetics as rendering art equivalent to ideology is to misrepresent what is in fact a much more variegated set of views. I suggest not that we should abandon feminist aesthetics, but that we take its development, history, and differentiations seriously. My effort here is intended to contribute to that project. It is true that some feminists—although certainly not all—have claimed that feminist art is an instrument of feminist politics. Hilde Hein states, for example, “Feminist art is . . . a means to consciousness raising” (1995: 452). In defending such a position Hein makes the point that those who object that politics has “no place in art” fail to “grasp that ‘conventional’ art is equally political,” but its politics is “cast as ‘neutral’ or masculinist” in a way that “appears invisible” (1995: 451). The suggestion is that art in general has been inadvertently political: that is, even if it has presented itself and has been regarded as art that occupies an autonomous realm purified of politics, in fact it has been thoroughly imbued with political assumptions.

By contrast, feminist art has cast itself as self-consciously political, overtly advocating a particular ideological stance. In doing so, it uncovers and reworks masculinist procedures and assumptions embedded in the tradition of art. These include the fact that women have often been the objects of art, rather than its creators, and that the conventions of artistic representation have tended to confirm, rather than interrogate, women’s subservient socio-political roles—painterly representations of women performing tasks and duties typically coded as feminine in domestic interiors, for example (Gallop 1986). Feminist reworking of more conventional approaches to art also include the use of new materials, the introduction of new subject matter, and the interrogation and rethinking of the boundaries distinguishing women as objects of the male gaze from artists as creators. Feminist painters, photographers, and film directors, for example, have orchestrated the gaze in new ways that subvert, remake, and intervene in artistic conventions.

Two issues demand attention. The first is that the claim that “conventional” art is political, but is so in a way that disavows its political character, tends to play itself out by reducing art’s politics to white patriarchy. Although Hein nods toward the diversity of women, this diversity plays no substantial role in her analysis, in which the two major examples that she develops—Laura Mulvey (1988) and Susan Stanford Friedman (1987)—occupy mainstream positions that do not challenge the default whiteness and heteronormativity of feminist theory. Mulvey’s article on the male gaze, though making some important conceptual breakthroughs, has been rightly criticized for ignoring the question of race, and Friedman’s argument, which focuses upon birthing metaphors, tends to reinscribe the normative identification of women with maternity. The demands of an intersectional approach to feminist aesthetics require that we take into account and challenge the ways in which art and aesthetics have not merely perpetuated and recreated gender hierarchies, but have also participated in and confirmed racial and other disparities. The second issue is that in contesting artistic conventions that have previously passed as neutral, while in fact being implicated in classist, gendered, and racist assumptions, there is a need to confront how the history of aesthetics has condoned, produced, and articulated standards and values that are complicit with such assumptions.

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It becomes clear that the very terms in which art has been defined as art are infused with political assumptions and moral judgments about the relative worth of artworks based on their provenance. So, for example, the effort to specify art as pure has typically proceeded in ways that privilege certain types of art over others precisely by drawing upon pre-existing cultural and political stereotypes. These stereotypes are informed by prejudices, which have resulted in various hierarchies such that some art genres have been valued above others, and such that distinctions have been erected in the name of distinguishing high art from low or popular art, or art from craft. These very distinctions are informed by assumptions about the relative worth of the originators and creators of artworks, such that, for example, gendered and raced assumptions play into aesthetic decisions about which objects come to accrue value in certain contexts, and which do not. The articulation of the relationship between concepts such as form and matter, which has been central to aesthetics, is itself infused with assumptions that are not immune from cultural bias.

Aesthetic judgments occur within cultural contexts that accord to privileged voices the authority to define the boundaries of art, and those definitions will inevitably influence both consumers of art and creators of art. Consequently the communities that cohere around these judgments and definitions in the hope of legitimation will in turn shape and circumscribe aesthetic taste and the possibilities, aspirations and legitimacy of artists. Members of such communities, both artists and consumers of art, will be acculturated by the aesthetic standards and values that circulate between artists and aestheticians. The transformation of aesthetics then is bound up with challenging which voices are counted as definitively authoritative when it comes to defining what qualifies as art.

In the remainder of this chapter, I turn to Kant. I do so not only in order to play out the political imperative to contest the biases built into his aesthetic philosophy, which has accumulated such authority as to have become almost synonymous with the field of aesthetics, at least in some circles. I turn to Kant also because his aesthetic philosophy is rife with paradoxes that have proven to be productive for some feminist and political philosophers, even as they have alienated others. In the very same contexts in which he denigrates the humanity of women, certain races, and certain classes, Kant also offers insights as to how such judgments might be contested.

Kant’s Aesthetics: Regressive or Progressive?

Kant confronts us with a contradictory state of affairs on several levels. He makes universal communicability a requirement of aesthetic judgments in a way that is belied by his own raced and gendered denigrations of those whose inclusion in the community of rational and moral subjects Kant imagines is thereby put in doubt. On the one hand, Kant demonstrates by his own subjective judgments concerning race and gender, art and craft, the beautiful and the sublime, the partiality to which our judgments can incline. On the other hand, he acknowledges the importance of opening up the particularity of taste to the influence of others, appealing to a universal community in which everyone is enjoined to assent to subjective judgments of the beautiful, but in which assent cannot be mandated. For Kant, sociability is built into his account of aesthetic judgment such that to make an aesthetic judgment is both to demand that others see the beauty that I see, and to open myself up to the possibility of challenge. It is to invite the views of others, to open up a conversation, and in doing so to position oneself in such a way as potentially to revise one’s own aesthetic sensibility.

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Kant’s articulation of aesthetic judgment suggests a significant reworking of his earlier claims for the operative conditions for knowing the world and acting morally. Therefore, we might say that Kant’s aesthetics offers the resources for rendering his transcendental approach to philosophy as a whole more open-ended and provisional than his presentation of it in its earlier formulations. Given this, Kant’s insistence upon the purity not only of aesthetic judgment but also of cognition and morality is potentially undercut by the claims that he makes in articulating how judgment functions. Going beyond the letter of Kant, his work has been enlisted in philosophical projects that acknowledge the radical potential that art has to reconfigure that which previously passed as impervious to interrogation. There is something powerful and unsettling about aesthetic judgment, something that renders it capable of refiguring that which had established itself in the sedimented grooves of accumulated knowledge. That knowledge turns out to be capable of reconfiguration, so that concepts such as universality no longer seem tenable—or at least the parameters of what counts as universal are shown to be riven with contingency, such that what counts as universal itself undergoes constant rethinking. What seemed to be indispensable conditions of possibility, not only for aesthetics but also for knowledge in general, thereby present themselves for interrogation.

Situating Kant’s Aesthetics in the Context of His Philosophical Project

Kant articulates aesthetic judgment in such a way as to provide tools that bring into question his own earlier stipulations regarding transcendental philosophy. It can be argued that his discussion of aesthetics in The Critique of the Power of Judgment (2000 [1790])—which has come to be known as Kant’s third Critique—significantly revitalizes the parameters of his philosophical project. It does so to the point that even the meaning of terms that played a vital and decisively determining role in his earlier philosophy undergo significant transformation. How key terms such as “universality,” “necessity,” and “a priori” function, for example—and therefore the very meaning of a transcendental approach to philosophy as the search for the conditions of the possibility of experience—appear to be thought in a way that departs from how these terms operate in the first two Critiques. The very conditions that Kant stipulates as a priori, universal, and necessary for knowledge and morality are thus cast in a new light by Kant’s discussion of aesthetics, which has been seen by some readers as not merely bridging a divide between nature and freedom created by his two earlier Critiques, but as potentially renegotiating the terrain of knowledge and morality. To put the point more forcefully, some have claimed that Kant’s discussion of aesthetics effects a radical disruption of and reworking of Kant’s transcendental philosophy.

To explain: Kant wrote three Critiques, the first of which deals with the legislative function of the understanding for the domain of nature, and the second of which deals with the legislative function of reason for freedom. These two philosophical investigations concern respectively the necessary conditions for how we can have objective knowledge of the world and for the moral law that determines how we should act. In both cases, Kant articulates rules that he takes to be universally applicable for all subjects of cognition, or for all moral agents.

The first Critique asks about the universal, necessary, a priori conditions according to which we have knowledge of nature, the way in which we cognize objects. Kant describes the process of understanding in terms of subsumption of particulars under universals. The universals under which we subsume particulars are given to us. We do not have to seek after them. The understanding provides the general form according to which our experience must proceed in order for us to represent objects. The second Critique asks after the universal moral law, according to which all our actions should conform. In both the case of theoretical cognition of nature and that of practical reason that guides moral actions, Kant asserts the objective necessity of the law (Kant 2000 [1790]: 121). The form that this argument takes in the case of cognition is that objects conform to our understanding in such a way that we bring sensible intuitions of the empirical world under concepts of nature. These concepts constitute universal rules for understanding. With regard to morality, it is in accordance with the concept of a pure will that moral actions must be determined.

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A tension arises between the epistemological account that Kant provides in the Critique of Pure Reason, in which he articulates how the understanding provides rules that organize intuitions according to concepts of nature that hold universally, and the moral account he provides in the Critique of Practical Reason, where he argues that reason provides the concept of the pure will that holds universally. For, in the former, Kant treats humans as if they were subject to the mechanical laws of nature. In the latter, however, he considers humans from the perspective of our capacity to be moral agents, that is, to act in the world in such a way as to affect it with the purpose that consists of intervening in a morally meaningful way, based on our freedom to act in conformity with the moral law. The third Critique is then invested with a transitional or mediating role, which creates a bridge that can span the chasm between the mechanical causality of the natural world and the moral will of human agents capable of affecting change in the world on account of their freedom (Kant 2000 [1790]: 81).

Feminist Philosophers Rework Kant

In her essay “Crystallisation: Artful Matter and the Productive Imagination,” Rachel Jones (2000) takes up and exploits a tension that structures how Kant construes the reflective judgments of aesthetics. By taking seriously, and pushing to its limits, the analogical relationship that Kant posits between nature and art, Jones focuses on the instance of crystallization, which presents an anomaly to the rule-governed explanatory models on which Kant usually relies to account for natural processes. On the one hand Kant suggests that nature must be thought as if it were art, yet on the other hand he proposes to think art as nature.

Exploring the complex analogical relationship between nature and art that Kant sustains throughout his discussion of aesthetic judgment, Jones suggests that in the third Critique Kant revises the mechanical concept of nature operative in the first Critique. In the third Critique, says Jones, we can no longer construe nature as a “blind mechanism”; rather “we must see nature as if it were intentionally designed, as if it were art” (Jones 2000: 20–21). On the basis of this, she argues that Kant formulates a productive, rather than a legislative, role for imagination, emphasizing creativity and unpredictability rather than a rule-bound approach.

Jones shows that there are moments in which the distinction between form and matter can be seen to break down and is reworked within Kant’s philosophy, for example, in relation to his account of crystallization, which Jones takes up and invokes as a metaphor for the productive imagination of artistic genius. Jones suggests that the process of crystallization breaks with the governing model of active form as the organizing principle of passive matter. This parallels the sense in which the originality of the genius, in Kant’s philosophy, consists not in following pre-existing rules, but rather in inventing new rules. The natural process of crystallization, Jones argues, can be read as an image for the productive imagination, whereby unexpected formations occur, which do not follow any rule, but are accomplished, rather, by a leap. The notion of unpredictability embedded in the formation of crystals is disruptive of the model that otherwise governs Kant’s understanding of the relation of form to matter in the natural world, whereby form is endowed with an active power of organization over passive or inert matter. As Jones says, then, “Kant’s text itself can be made to leap and move in unpredictable ways, allowing new possibilities to emerge, new insights, and crystallisations” (2000: 33).

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Kant’s third Critique revises his previous accounts of understanding and reason in a variety of ways. As suggested by Jones, not only does the concept of nature undergo a shift, but Kant also reserves a more creative and pervasive role for imagination than previously, and suggests that the judgment operative in the aesthetic realm has implications for judgment in the realms of knowledge and morality too. Furthermore, the account of aesthetic judgment stipulates a decisive role for the feeling of pleasure in which aesthetic judgment is said to consist, thus highlighting the significance of feeling in a way that Kant had not done before. At the same time, by building into his account of aesthetic judgment a reference to the judgment of others, Kant can be said to bring to the fore the communal aspect of judging in a way that goes beyond his previous claims.

Unlike the realms of theoretical cognition and knowledge or that of practical reason and morality, whatever necessity might be attributed to aesthetic judgment cannot be conferred by the universality of rules. In cognition and morality there are rules that determine their object, which Kant asserts are objectively valid and universal— the concepts of nature and of pure will. In the case of aesthetic judgment there are no such rules. In the matter of taste, judgments are singular, indeterminate, and subjective. Yet Kant still maintains that aesthetic judgments have a priori validity. The question remains as to the sense in which aesthetic judgments can have a priori universality that is subjective.

As we have said, Kant’s aesthetics reworks his earlier philosophy by building into his account of the specific feeling of pleasure, in which he understands subjective aesthetic judgment to consist, a reference to community. In his analysis, the subjective judgment that something is beautiful is at the same time an appeal to the assent of the universal community of judging subjects. It is a call to humanity in general also to find the object in question beautiful. Even if, as a matter of empirical fact, others do not share the judgment that a given object is beautiful, Kant maintains that to pronounce something beautiful is at the same time to propose that others should agree. The trouble is that the claim that some subjects have on humanity, on Kant’s account, is distinctly tenuous, such that whether they qualify as part of the ostensibly universal community of judging subjects is dubious at best. This presents a problem for feminist and race theorists, namely how to respond to Kant’s prejudicial account of women and of subjects whom Kant regards as racially differentiated from white, European men. Before developing this point further, we need first to say more about the specific feeling of pleasure in which aesthetic pleasure consists.

Kant specifies the peculiarity of aesthetic judgment in terms of what he identifies, on the one hand, as conceptual indeterminacy and on the other hand as subjective universality (Rehberg 2015). Cognitive judgment, which produces knowledge, proceeds by subsuming particular instances under universal concepts, such that the concept is given, and the particular has to be recognized as conforming to it, and is thus subsumed under it. In aesthetic judgment, however, there is no determinate concept. The concept is not provided in advance but has to be discovered, or rather “generated” through imaginative reflection (Moen 1997: 237). Kant specifies the type of judgment that is peculiar to aesthetic judgment—as distinct from cognitive judgment—as “reflective” judgment. In reflective judgment, the form of a particular object is apprehended by the imagination. Whereas in cognitive judgment, knowledge is produced through the subsumption of particulars under universal concepts, in the case of aesthetic judgments, no such concept is available as pregiven. There is no subsumption of the particular under a concept; there is “no definite concept” and thus there is “no knowledge” as John Sallis says (1987: 90).

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In reflection, there is a comparison between how the imagination apprehends forms and how they would be taken up by the understanding through the referral of intuitions to concepts (Kant 2000 [1790]: 26). Yet there is no such referral, as Sallis emphasizes, since there are no determinate concepts in aesthetic judgment, and since aesthetic judgment is not a matter of knowledge, but rather a feeling of pleasure. If there is agreement between the imagination and understanding, this harmony produces a feeling of pleasure. It is the free play between imagination and understanding in which the feeling of pleasure of aesthetic judgment consists. There is an “interplay” between the understanding and imagination, one in which the understanding does not govern the imagination, but in which they are “mutually conducive” for one another (Sallis 1987: 94). As we have seen, Kant proposes an analogical relationship between nature and art, on the basis of which we presuppose nature’s purposiveness. In so far as the purposiveness is presupposed as an aim, it is provisional and indeterminate. As Jones puts it,

all human subjects must be able to see the world as harmonising with the potential of their own ordering faculties [and] this singular feeling of pleasure reflects a universal a priori principle, which is nothing other than the indeterminate principle of judgment itself.

(2000: 21)

The relation between the understanding and imagination becomes a site of free play, which Kant describes in terms of spontaneity. That which produces aesthetic pleasure cannot be anticipated in advance nor determined by intent. It arises unsolicited. Neither can it be subordinated to a higher end. It is not a mere means to an end. Aesthetic judgment, Kant argues, is disinterested. The argument that aesthetic judgment is disinterested suggests that there are strict boundaries between art and politics. Yet as we have begun to see, Kant’s own argument is freighted with difficulty in that the very texts in which he puts forward his arguments themselves betray consistent racist and sexist biases and prejudice, which suggest that the purity of aesthetic judgment is not easily achieved. So too we have seen that in specifying the role of reflective judgment, Kant admits unpredictability into his system of thought, in such a way as to undercut the purity of both the transcendental and the separation of his thought into hermetically sealed domains of cognition, morality, and aesthetics. While Kant captures something vital about aesthetic judgment when he insists that it arises spontaneously, rather than being something we intend or will, even this insight must be surrounded by qualifications if we are to take seriously other features of his account.

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In keeping with the earlier suggestion that the conceptual vocabulary of aesthetics is infused with normative assumptions, Christine Battersby suggests that Kant does not manage to sustain his attempt to treat “aesthetic philosophy in purely formal terms (in terms of the ‘universal’)” (2007: 46). And, Battersby says, his

very way of marking out the “truly universal” and distinguishing it from the “merely particular” and the “detailed” relies on racial and cultural norms that privilege the non-sensuous, the conceptual, the abstract and the logical as viewed from the perspective of “old Europe.”

(2007: 83)

If there is a normative framing of universal claims, then this suggests that Kant’s claims for a transcendental approach to philosophy need to be interrogated. This is not only from a standpoint interior to the lexicon of Kant’s own philosophy, with respect to the hermeneutical relationship between the three Critiques, but also from a critical standpoint that raises questions about and puts pressure on the integrity of the distinction between the empirical and the transcendental as it functions in his texts.

As we have seen, Kant’s aesthetics appeals to the notion of community as definitive of the dynamic at stake in aesthetic judgment. Feminist theorists have argued that the formal requirements that Kant builds into his account of aesthetic judgments, which includes their universal communicability, are undercut by his raced and gendered disparagement of some subjects. Both Kim Hall and Battersby focus on the fact that Kant specifies that aesthetic judgment must be universally communicable (Battersby 2007: 31; Hall 1997: 258). Yet at the same time he disqualifies “whole classes” of people from counting properly human or as enjoying full personhood, placing them “outside the imagined community of rational beings” (Battersby 2007: 46). In doing so, he differentiates between white or European women and ostensibly “primitive” or “uncivilized” women. As Hall puts it, “While European women occupy a secondary place in the community of judging subjects in the third Critique, Carib and Iroquois women have no place” (1997: 265). Thus “Kant’s ideal of universal communicability is encoded through cultural and sexual difference” (Battersby 2007: 42).

Respecting and attending to the singularity of the gestures by which various others are written out of full humanity in Kant, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak emphasizes the discontinuity between rhetorical gestures of exclusion. Spivak understands the occlusion of the native informant as constituting the “condition of possibility” of Kant’s investigation (1999: 9). She reminds us to bear in mind that the disciplining mechanisms of gendered subjects and “geo-politically differentiated” subjects are not figured in the same way (1999: 31). While the former are “argued into” dismissal, the latter are “foreclosed” (1999: 30). We need to resist efforts to reduce all difference to the same model, as if they all followed the same dynamic, as if all differences were equivalent to one another, as if it were merely a question of slotting in the relevant grounds of oppression, marginalization, discrimination, or domination into a preconceived mold, as if gender and race and class could somehow be thought according to the same logic.

At the same time as attending to the specificity of the rhetoric according to which certain subjects are barred from full access to subjectivity in Kant’s texts, I would argue that we also need to resist the impulse to structure feminist aesthetics by appealing to transcendental grounds, as if such grounds were themselves free of political imperatives. We should therefore avoid making any kind of oppression the ground of another, as if one were more foundational than another. For example, we should be wary of feminism that foregrounds whiteness as the condition of possibility of discourses of sexual difference or feminism.

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Concluding Remarks

In Kant’s aesthetics there is an appeal to the similarity of how judgment occurs in all those who, as Kant puts it, “lay claim to the name of a human being” (2000 [1790]: 173), and it is on the basis of our common potential to order our faculties that Kant claims that aesthetic judgments can have universal a priori status. Yet as we have seen there is a tension between the argument for the a priori status of aesthetic judgment and the disparaging remarks that Kant makes about women and certain racial groups. One way of responding to this is to argue that the barriers Kant erects between aesthetics on the one hand and ethics and politics on the other hand need to be broken down. As Battersby puts it, “feminist philosophers should refuse Kantian markers for the boundary between the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political” (2007: 46). In the preceding discussion I have suggested that Kant’s own aesthetic philosophy begins to dismantle the barriers that his earlier systematic philosophy erected. If, as I have also suggested, aesthetics is embedded in discourses that accord legitimacy to some voices over others, any transformation of aesthetics will at the same time intervene in the politics that accord some voices legitimacy over others. The development and transformation of aesthetics goes hand in hand with negotiations that determine whose claims to humanity are heard, and whose are discounted. If the relative autonomy of politics and aesthetics needs to be respected, it also needs to be appreciated that the very distinction between aesthetics and politics is one whose articulation is a matter of political negotiation. The politics of feminist aesthetics constitutes one such area of negotiation.