Summary:
This review essay considers the ways in which the body takes shape in three recent books in gender studies to examine how the relationship between subject and object is reworked toward varying ends. Feminist thought has distinguished subject and object positions in part to challenge biological determinism and sexual objectification. The positionality of the body with respect to the subject-object relation undergirds the theories of aesthetics and the critiques of beauty put forth by Uri McMillan’s Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (2015), Sherri Irvin along with the other authors featured in the edited collection Body Aesthetics (2016), and Meeta Rani Jha’s The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism, and the National Body (2016).
The College of Arts