Thoughts on Modernism and “Feminist Aesthetics of Potentiality” In Ziarek’s Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

This brief review essay focuses on the central question posed in Ewa Plonowska Ziarek’s Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism: if feminism is considered in social and biographical terms while aesthetics focuses on questions of form and abstraction, does a feminist aesthetics become inconceivable? This question is examined in light of the traditional divide in modernist studies between aesthetics and the political.