{"product_id":"the-beauty-of-choice","title":"The Beauty of Choice","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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 women's taste as the engine of liberal values. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSteiner reframes long-standing questions surrounding desire, art, sexual assault, and beauty in light of #MeToo. Beginning with an opera she wrote based on Chaucer's \"The Wife of Bath's Tale,\" she presents women's sexual choices as fundamentally aesthetic in nature-expressions of their taste-and 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Beauty of Choice pursues its claims through a striking diversity of examples: Sei Shōnagon's defense of pleasure in the Pillow Book; Picasso's and Balthus's 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 women's freedom.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wendy Steiner","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42839004348477,"sku":"9780231215268","price":52.16,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/7689\/2989\/files\/9780231215268_e7ebc94d-7e10-4036-a8ca-300855812809.jpg?v=1766952212","url":"https:\/\/www.palmleaf.com.au\/products\/the-beauty-of-choice","provider":"Palmleaf","version":"1.0","type":"link"}