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Toward Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Provocations To German Idealist Aesthetics, Amelia Hruby

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three imagined dialogues: one between Alexander Baumgarten and Sara Ahmed about aesthetics and happiness, one between María Lugones and Immanuel Kant about play and common sense, and one between Audre Lorde and Friedrich Schiller about feeling, thinking, and the erotic. These dialogues are connected by the following thesis: the German idealist aesthetic tradition begins with an attempt to understand the incomprehensibility of certain objects and works its way to respect for them and their freedom, while the feminist tradition cited here begins with the necessity of respect for otherness and then cultivates new modes of …