She Who Imagines ─ Feminist Theological Aesthetics

The idea and ideal of beauty has been used to oppress women of different ages, body types, skin color, and physical ability. The theoretical discussion of aesthetics has also been conditioned by these same dynamics of power and oppression. In She Who Imagines, a diverse set of scholars challenges the exclusion and false definitions while constructing capacious ideas that discover beauty in unexpected places. In these essays, the authors draw on a variety of arts mediapainting, photography, portraiture, craftwork, poetry, and hip-hop musicthereby joining beauty to truth and, in a richly defining way, to the practice of justice. In a variety of ways all the essays link womens definitions of beauty with experiences of suffering and hence with the yearning for justice. All clearly prize resistance to degradation as an essential element of thought.