Peg Brand

Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Philosophy, Indiana University

Peg Brand is an artist and philosopher who teaches Gender Studies and Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. She is co-editor of the 1995 collection of essays Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics (Penn State Press) and editor of Beauty Matters (IU Press, 2000). A co-edited special issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy entitled "Women, Art and Aesthetics" is forthcoming this winter (Vol. 18, No. 4). She is currently working on a book manuscript and accompanying artworks that will serve as illustrations for the book, which will be entitled Beauty Below the Surface: Feminist Visual Parodies.

Peg Brand's Homepage

Beauty Below the Surface: Artistic Intentions

It is a widespread belief that representations of human beings, for example, portraits, express the inner character of a person. But do gender differences on the part of the artist play a role in the way women and men are portrayed in visual art? I will argue that some female artists, particularly those who create feminist visual parodies, may have artistic intentions that seek to portray beauty "below the surface."