The Beauty of Choice

In The Beauty of Choice, the renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts womens taste as the engine of liberal values. Steiner reframes long-standing questions surrounding desire, art, sexual assault, and beauty in light of #MeToo. Beginning with an opera she wrote based on Chaucers The Wife of Baths Tale, she presents womens sexual choices as fundamentally aesthetic in natureexpressions of their tasteand artworks as stagings of choice in courtship, coquetry, consent, marriage, and liberation. A merger of art criticism, evolutionary theory, political history, and aesthetics, this book paints the struggle between female autonomy and patriarchal violence and extremism as the essence of art. The Beauty of Choice pursues its claims through a striking diversity of examples: Sei Shnagons defense of pleasure in the Pillow Book; Picassos and Balthuss sexualization of their models; the redefinition of waste in postmodern fiction; and interactivity and empathy in the works of contemporary artists such as Marlene Dumas, Barbara MacCallum, Kristin Beeler, and Hannah Gadsby. It offers the first critical study of Heroines, a memorial to the twenty thousand women raped in Kosovo during the Serbian genocide. This deeply original book gives taste, beauty, and pleasure central roles in a passionate defense of womens freedom.