Instead of using complexity as a “shelter” 12 or a dodge, heartbreak and emulation appeal to a non-zero sum practice of accounting and accountability that allow us to work through the complexities that vex this question. And whereas both the “yes” and “no” responses to “should we separate the artist from the art?” assume pleasure and displeasure are mutually exclusive, heartbreak and emulation understand them as necessarily intertwined they are only separable on the (incorrect) assumption that artistic and aesthetic conventions regarding pleasure and beauty aren’t themselves structured by white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy. These aesthetic practices-variously called “heartbreak” or “emulation” 11-create new forms of relation that make different sorts of pleasures possible. Drawing on the work of Angela Davis, Katherine McKittrick, and Alexander Weheliye, I argue that Black women’s vocal performance traditions offer a different and more complicated model for dealing with white supremacist patriarchal harms from both artists and aesthetic conventions. There are better responses to this question, and analyzing them can help us understand what kinds of things a response to the question must do in order to adequately address both of those forms of structural domination and individual feelings of dis/pleasure. This logic, I argue, is a version of the “zero-sum” calculus Adrian Piper identifies in the epigraph because it assumes that feelings of pleasure and disgust are exclusive of one another and that righteous disgust at flawed individuals is sufficient to fix systemic sexism that persists in norms about aesthetic pleasure themselves. My point is that disgust isn’t enough, but popular feminisms act like it is, and they do so because it’s part of a broader neoliberal logic for managing white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchal domination. 9 To be clear: I am not arguing that we shouldn’t be disgusted by sexual assault and harassment. Treating individual feelings of disgust as evidence of one’s own commitments to gender justice while obscuring the ways that patriarchy and white supremacy function as structuring logics of artworks, 8 this approach evinces neoliberal feminism’s definitive logic, which uses superficial reform on the individual level to obscure intensified patriarchal and white supremacist domination at the systematic and institutional level. 7 It describes how the spectacular performance of (liberal, white, bourgeois) feminist ideas and values no longer resists but contributes to patriarchy, white supremacy, and other forms of systemic domination. Popular feminism is Sara Banet-Weiser’s name for the early twenty-first-century co-optation of white, liberal feminism by patriarchal racial capitalism. Using Cristina Beltrán’s observation that post-racial discourse substitutes aesthetic judgments about beautiful diversity for moral and political analyses of racial justice, I show how contemporary popular feminist responses to this question substitute individual judgments of disgust for analyses of gender and race politics. This paper analyzes contemporary discussions of this question both within and outside academia. I examine how Angela Davis’s revision of Marcuse’s concept of the aesthetic dimension, Katherine McKittrick’s and Alexander Weheliye’s concept of “emulation,” and Rihanna’s vocal performance choices on her 2016 single “Love On The Brain” are all instances of this latter type of response. The second kind of response begins from the premise that centuries of white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy have shaped our aesthetic principles and conventions such that sexism and misogyny are systemic problems baked into all works of art. The first kind of response modifies post-feminist and post-race approaches to diversity as a kind of beauty: replacing beauty with disgust, these approaches treat sexism and misogyny as individual-level flaws that can be eliminated through appropriate aesthetic judgments. I identify two different types of feminist responses to this question.
#Must be love on thebrain serial
As #MeToo activism has revealed cascades of famous and influential men to be serial sexual harassers and rapists, the question of what to do about aesthetically pleasing art made by morally and politically disgusting men has received renewed interest and urgency.
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