43. Femme as Method: Reimagining Feminine Aesthetics in Contemporary Art

Over the past decade, femininity has re-emerged as a central concern within contemporary art and visual culture. Once positioned as either a patriarchal construction to be rejected or a superficial aesthetic, femininity has increasingly been rearticulated within feminist, queer and trans scholarship as a performative and politically productive mode of being (Dahl, 2012; Hoskin & Hirschfeld, 2018; McCann, 2018; Schwartz, 2020; Raha and van der Drift, 2024).
 
As hyperfeminine aesthetics proliferate across popular culture, advertising, social media and AI-generated imagery, their critical potential has become increasingly contested. Practices of glamour, excess, softness and decoration circulate simultaneously as strategies of resistance, modes of self-fashioning and commodities within platform capitalism. Rather than asking whether femme aesthetics are inherently subversive or complicit, this panel explores how contemporary artists mobilise femme as a critical aesthetic to expose, inhabit and reconfigure dominant regimes of gendered representation.
 
This panel asks: How do contemporary artists mobilise femme aesthetics as critical strategies to challenge dominant regimes of gender, taste and representation? How do gender, race, class, disability and sexuality shape the possibilities and limitations of femme legibility? What happens when femme aesthetics circulate between queer world-making, mainstream visibility and commercial appropriation? How might contemporary artistic practices reclaim forms of femininity historically dismissed as superficial, excessive or decorative and reframe their place within art histories?
 
We welcome interdisciplinary approaches that consider femme not simply as an identity category but as a critical aesthetic methodology, engaging with contemporary art, performance, moving image, digital and popular culture and curatorial practice. We also invite reflections on the limitations of femme aesthetics, including questions of commodification, exclusion and the social or institutional constraints that shape its expression.

Themes: Femme aesthetics; contemporary visual culture; gender representation.

Additional format comment: Session of 20-minute papers followed by a panel discussion/Q&A.

Lead Convenor: Elisabetta Garletti, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Amy Tobin, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.