Feminist Aesthetics of Resistance

This chapter claims resistance as an aesthetic and affective category that is elementary to feminism. Inspired by Michael Taussig’s (2020) definition of the shamanic as “the skilled revelation of skilled concealment,” the chapter explores the role of the aesthetic concealment and revelation of affect in examples of heteronormativity from film and TV, writing, and performance art. This provides a new way to link feminist resistance to the institutions of intimacy through which sexuality organizes relations of gender and affect. Feminist cultural theory, media, and cultural studies, differently theorize the aesthetic, the embedding of aesthetics in social and cultural locations such as in discourses of power, and modes of discursive, technological and subjective socialization that situate aesthetics within the conjuncture of the everyday. This chapter’s analysis, or “skilled revelation,” theorizes feminist resistance as an affective relation to and aesthetic mediation of the still unfolding event of feminism.