Aesthetics

Abstract

Abstract As an aesthetically invested approach to texts and artifacts, attunement has deep roots in the negotiations of gender in Christianity. Women and other marginalized individuals have for centuries relied on aesthetic strategies—visions vividly described, for example, or experimentations with theological forms—to make themselves visible to Christian theology and claim their authority in contexts inhospitable to it. As these strategies are traced in works by and about early, medieval, and modern Christian women, they are shown to emerge again later in feminist theology, which was born in the insight that the battle for gender equality is fought in the symbolic imagination. As it did so, feminists also interrogated the literary and aesthetic terms on which theological authority was made. In narrating this history, this chapter sets up aesthetics as central to feminist theological work in a way that lays the ground for its role in the elaboration of attunement in the following chapters.