This article takes up the work of Bottici, Cornell, and Perez in order to expand on Lugones's inchoate notion of a decolonial feminist imaginary. The claim is that decolonial feminism is also the elaboration of a decolonial feminist imaginary that challenges the colonial/modern imaginary of global capitalism. The article also takes up Lugones's critique of Mignolo's notion of “colonial difference,” which is found to be incoherent and even dangerous.

And what if we also learn to listen for silence?This article is one in a series of attempts on my part to think the inbetween of traditionally juxtaposed claims of voice versus silence. It takes seriously both claims that voice is lived as liberatory by many, on the one hand, and that words may be inadequate to bear witness to the humiliation, pain, and systematic degradation of trauma and violence, on the other. Thus situated, I turn to silence to locate (...) resources for the renewal of sense. Specifically, I propose that the mobilization of silences can be a powerful decolonizing praxis. Attending to Gloria Anzaldúa's iterations of the myth of la Llorona in "My Black Angelos" and Prietita and the Ghost Woman,1... (shrink)

Aesthetic evaluations of human bodies have important implications for moral recognition and for individuals’ access to social and material goods. Unfortunately, there is a widespread aesthetic disregard for non-white bodies. Aesthetic evaluations depend on the aesthetic properties we regard objects as having. And it is widely agreed that aesthetic properties are directly accessed in our experience of aesthetic objects. How, then, might we explain aesthetic evaluations that systematically favour features associated with white identity? Critical race philosophers, like Alia Al-Saji, Mariana (...) Ortega, Paul C. Taylor, and George Yancy, argue that this is because the perception of racialized bodies is affected by the social structures in which they are appreciated. The aim of this paper is to propose how social structures can affect aesthetic perception. I argue that mental imagery acquired through the interaction with aesthetic phenomena structures the perception of non-aesthetic properties of bodies, so that aesthetic properties consistent with racist stereotypes are attributed to individuals. (shrink)

Work in feminist and critical race aesthetics brings out a complex interaction between aesthetic, ethical, and political value. The interest in ethico-political considerations is also found in recent literature around art and ethics, such as debates about the work of immoral artists, cultural appropriation and heritage, and art in public spaces. These discussions are characterized by a social structural approach to the ethico-political value of art that focuses on relations between artworks, other artefacts, and individuals in specific sociohistorical contexts and (...) as they emerge from specific social organizations. In this paper I present the main features and assumptions behind these social structural approaches to the values of art. I examine accounts that take ethico-political value to depend on artworks’ contributions to public discourse and on their role in constituting social structures. (shrink)

Overview essay of the field of feminist aesthetics updated Winter, 2021.