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Piecing Together Creativity: Feminist Aesthetics And The Crafting Of Quilts, Melanie Anne Pauls

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations

When traditionally feminized crafts such as quilting are embraced as fine art, the discourses surrounding their "elevation" often serve to bolster the power of art world establishments by referencing the tenets of modernism and employing mutually reinforcing aesthetic hierarchies. In this thesis, I aim to understand the gendered politics of the separation between art and craft, and to analyze how the forces shaping the definitions of "art" and "artist" are drawn along lines of gender, class, race, and nationality. I utilize feminist aesthetics, craft aesthetics, and feminist ethics of care to examine problems of artists' appropriation of quilting, traditional myths …