Abstract

This essay explores the implications of Irigaray's discussion of the concept "beauty" . . . Her writings indicate moments of strategic or structural possibility from which women can create beauties appropriate to their subjectivities, and outline how becoming subjects, women, and mediating the resultant subjectivity is in itself to create beauty. Although in Western culture the Symbolic has a phallocentric syntax and what is read as beauty of body and beauty in art are products of phallocentric structures, nonetheless moments of resistance and disruption can be discerned in contemporary artworks by women. It is against the backdrop of Irigaray's reconfiguring of "beauty" that I discuss some of these works.